The Sifted Founder Rich List 2022

The recent years of easy access to VC cash have characterized dozens of billion-dollar companies in Europe. It has paid dividends for the founders behind these unicorns, with more joining the growing club of billionaire European entrepreneurs.

However, in 2022, VCs pulled back and some unicorns in need of capital saw their valuations plummet. A now widely cited example is the buy now, pay later scaleup Klarna, which saw its value decline from $46 billion to $6.7 billion after a funding round in July — and the paper richness of it the founders fall below a billion dollars (e.gthe company declined to comment for this piece).

So who are the billionaire startup founders (on paper) in Europe?

Sifted has updated its annual list of founders by calculating each founder’s stake in their company, multiplied by the startup’s valuation (either from the most recent funding round or, if known, a current internal valuation).

This is of course an imperfect and non-exhaustive list; information about the company’s ownership is not widely available in many European countries. We drew on the UK data platform Beauhurst, public records, our own sources and media lists to compile this research.

We’ve only included European-headquartered companies (sorry, Collison brothers) founded in or after 2005. We’ve also only highlighted founders of startups that haven’t yet exited, meaning their fortunes still largely exist on paper.

We used the most recently reported valuation in our calculation. This naturally raises the question of what will happen when some of these companies travel again in this significantly tougher market.

“Some holdings may be impossible to mark to market, so the method of using a known past valuation is fair. But this means that the hot tickets from, say, 18 months ago still look hot, even though they would be almost impossible to realize right now, says Beauhurst’s head of research and consultancy Henry Whorwood to Sifted.

The five best

Guillaume Pousaz – founder of Checkout.com

Swiss three-time founder Guillaume Pousaz founded payments company Checkout.com in 2009. Despite the FT reporting in December that its internal company valuation has fallen to 11 billion dollars from 40 billion dollars, Pousaz still comes out on top with a personal worth of over $7 billion.

Pousaz has said so publicly he doesn’t care about the company’s valuation, and Checkout declined to comment for this article.

By investing millions of euros of his own money in the company – it was frozen until 2019 – he has been able to retain a larger stake than most founders in his position. Exactly how much is hard to say, so we’ve gone with it an estimate from Forbes.

Trivia: Pousaz is a father of three, but still manages to put in 80-hour weeks by sacrificing his Sundays. He told Forbes in 2019: “My wife is very afraid that this will be a lifetime company and that it will take me to my grave like the late Steve Jobs.”

Nik Storonsky – founder of Revolut

Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko founded the UK-based fintech Revolut in 2015. At its latest fundraising of $800 million in July 2021, was valued at $33 billion. According to Beauhurst, Storonsky owns just under 20% of the company. The company declined to comment for this article.

Unlike most fintech companies in Europe, Revolut is actually profitable; Storonsky said in November that the digital bank had been profitable for two consecutive years. What the company has not been able to achieve yet is a banking license in the UK.

“I would like to have it as a Christmas present. A gift for me personally and for the company,” said Storonsky at Net meeting in November.

Trivia: Storonsky believes hard work is the key to success, and maybe he’s right. “I go on holiday sometimes, but very rarely. 99.5% of my life is work-related.” In the 0.5% of downtime, he goes kitesurfing to help him recalibrate before going straight back to work.

Nazim Salur – founder of Getir

Nazim Salur founded the Turkish food delivery company Getir in 2015. It was valued at 11.8 billion dollars when it raised a $768 million Series E round in March 2022. But this year has been tough on valuations, and when Getir bought its The German competitor Gorillas earlier this month, the combined value of both companies was put at $10 billion – with Getir’s share worth $8.8 billion.

However, the new valuation is still $1 billion more than the company was valued at a year ago, meaning Salur itself is still on the list (and ranked higher). A source with knowledge of Getir’s ownership told Sifted that he owned 37% of the company.

Trivia: This is not Salur’s only startup. He is also the founder of Turkish taxi app Bitaksi, founded in 2013. It was the first to offer credit card purchases for taxi rides and is backed by none other than Getir.

Adriaan Mol – founder of Mollie and co-founder of Messagebird

Mol has founded not one, but two unicorns – the communications start-up Messagebird and the payment company Mollie. In 2021, they raised $800 million each—the largest crowdfunding rounds in the Netherlands that year—and were valued at $3.8 billion and $6.5 billion, respectively.

Mol founded Mollie as an 18-year-old in 2004, and put some of the proceeds into his next venture, Messagebird, which he started in 2011. Last year’s rich list put Mol’s stake in Mollie at over 50% and despite us not knowing where much he owns of Messagebird, he is still worth over $1 billion on paper. A spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trivia: Mol does not only invest in its own startups. Earlier this year, he invested 8 million euros in the Dutch restaurant app Formitable, his fifth investment in 2022. He has also backed food marketplace Crisp, cybersecurity startup Hadrian and payment solution Monite.

Johnny Boufarhat – founder of Hopin

Johnny Boufarhat became famous in Europe when his online event startup Hopin became Europe’s fastest growing startup of all time, crossed the $5 billion valuation mark just one year and nine months after the company was founded.

He is known to have already locked up some of that wealth, sell at least £100 million of its shares. Beauhurst puts his stake in Hopin at 36.76%, which would still make him a multi-billionaire at the company’s latest external valuation. The company declined to comment for this article.

Trivia: Boufarhat started the company based on his own experience with an illness left him confined at home and does not feel that he got the most out of online events. He lives in Barcelona and has a dog named Ginger.

Notable omissions

Some companies do not publicly share their founders’ stakes, such as German unicorn Celonis (valued at $13 billion) and Blockchain.com (valued at $10 billion), so has not been included here.

Renewed entity marketplace Back Market declined to comment on ownership earlier this year. The company is valued at $5.7 billion. Another French unicorn, Qonto, declined to comment. The company is worth 4.4 billion euros.

Finnish unicorn RELEX Solutions also declined to comment specifically on founding ownership; its three co-founders and first employees launched one 100 million euro charitable foundation earlier this year.

UK-based payments unicorn SumUp is currently Europe’s ninth most valuable VC-backed private company, after raising $312 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion in June. This was significantly less than valuation of up to 20 billion euros it had reportedly been targeted, meaning the four co-founders – Petter Made, Jan Deepen, Marc-Alexander Christ and Stefan Jeschonnek – will be worth less on paper than they would have liked. But the company declined to comment on specific founding ownership, and we don’t have access to additional data.

Other unicorns that did not respond include Trade Republic, Wefox, Mambu, Pleo and Doctolib.

Shoutouts to those who haven’t crossed the $1 billion mark

Among Europe’s unicorns, there are many other very wealthy founders who have not crossed $1 billion with the value of the stake in their business.

That includes Peter Carlsson, founder of Northvolt. The company makes lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, and Swedish media have reported that the entrepreneur owns 7.2% of the $11.8 billion company, making him worth $846 million. Northvolt has said it cannot comment on the valuation or ownership of the business.

Another is Revolut co-founder Vladyslav Yatsenko who owns 2.77% of the business, according to Beauhurst, making his stake worth $914 million.

Unusually for a company of its size, the three co-founders of Austrian crypto trading platform Bitpanda – Eric Demuth, Paul Klanschek and Christian Trummer – still own around 50% of the business. Bitpanda reached a valuation of $4.1 billion in August 2021 after raising $263 million, bringing Demuth and Klancheck’s paper worth up to about $800 million each, and that of Trummer (who has fewer shares) to $400 million. A spokesperson for the company confirmed to Sifted that those stakes remain unchanged, but it’s worth bearing in mind that – like most of the unicorns on this list – the company will likely be valued lower in a new round of funding, reducing its paper value.

Two other well-known European founders who do not quite make the billionaire cut are Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal from the German neobank N26. Although the company declined to comment to Sifted about specific founding shares, the pair have reportedly owns 10% of the $9 billion company, making their paper worth about $900 million.

Finally, UK-based money transfer fintech Zepz (formerly known as WorldRemit) is currently one of Europe’s most valuable startups at a valuation of $5 billion. But according to Beauhurst’s analysis of company ownership data, founder and chairman Ismail Ibrahim Ahmed only owns an 8.36% stake in the company, bringing the paper’s value to about $400 million.

Mimi Billing is Sifted’s Nordic correspondent. She also covers healthtech, and tweets from @MimiBilling.

Amy O’Brien is a reporter for Sifted. She tweets from @Amy_EOBrien and writes our fintech newsletter — You can register here.

Eleanor Warnock is Sifted’s deputy chairperson and co-host of Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcastand writes Up round, a weekly newsletter about VC. She tweets from @misssaxbys