Beginners and experienced founders have to check the experience of their successful colleagues. Of course, it’s better to compare yourself with yourself, but you can learn not only from mistakes but also from success stories. In this article, we want to talk about some of the most popular and successful European companies that have shown a steep increase in their reputation and profits.
We'll start with a startup whose bright pink branding cover hides a FinTech machine. The latest round for Swedish company Klarna has resulted in a .6 billion valuation, making it the most valuable FinTech company in Europe.
Klarna works in the field of e-commerce, acting as an intermediary between buyers and online stores. This is a start-up in the BNPL sphere. Buy Now, Pay Later represents a service that allows you to pay for online purchases in equal installments over a short period without concluding a loan agreement with the bank and without additional fees. It helps to buy goods and give money after having received the items. Today, Klarna has more than 90 million users on the global market, and more than two million transactions pass through the platform per day.
In 2020, Klarna's revenue exceeded one billion. According to Klarna’s CEO, the company has not been making a profit for the past two years, while it has been profitable over the previous 14 years of its existence. However, that all was initially planned, and large funds were invested in the growth and development of technologies in e-commerce.
The most expensive startup of the UK from the FinTech sphere is Revolut, which was founded in 2015 by Nikolai Storonsky from Russia and Vlad Yatsenko from Ukraine. In summer 2021, it raised its round by 0 million, achieving a valuation of billion, which grew 6 times in the past 18 months.
An innovative application developed by the company helps its customers save money on a currency conversion, make payments and send money to each other. It also allows you to trade stocks and cryptocurrencies. Today, Revolut has a user base of 15 million individuals and 500,000 companies. In 2020, Revolut broke even with 1 million in revenue and 0 million in total income.
According to Crunchbase analysts, both Klarna and Revolut may file for IPOs in 2022.
Another European start-up is a German online bank N26. Being an integrated Internet bank, it’s the most expensive project on the German market and is already operating globally. This status became possible after the 0 million E round at an estimated billion in the fall of 2021.
N26 provides all traditional banking services, but, unlike "regular" banks, it doesn’t have offline branches. Now it has 7 million customers in 25 countries. Plans for 2022 include Brazil and Eastern Europe coverage, as well as an IPO in the next 3-4 years.
Spanish Glovo was founded in 2015 in Barcelona and is an on-demand courier service via a mobile app. The most popular service of the company, for which it’s known, is food delivery. At the end of 2021, the company absorbed the Ukrainian service Zakaz.ua, and at the very beginning of 2022 Glovo itself was already absorbed by the Berlin public company Delivery Hero.
Thanks to the deal the service was valued at €2.3 billion. The platform claims that to date it has delivered more than 190 million orders across multiple categories worldwide. The Glovo app operates in more than 1,300 cities in 25 countries in Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. It has about 15 million active users annually, 70,000 monthly active couriers, and 130,000 monthly active partners.
Another delivery company, Estonian Bolt, made headlines in the news recently when it raised its F round by €628 million at a €7.4 billion valuation. It plans to use the funds to expand and improve its mobility and deliveries, which are currently used by more than 100 million customers in 45 countries and more than 400 cities in Europe and Africa.
Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, is a platform that provides taxi and micro-mobility services, including package delivery and the use of scooters. The company claims that all Bolt-assisted movements in Europe are 100% carbon neutral, as part of its Green Plan, a long-term strategy to reduce its environmental footprint.
Above, we have described the European giants of the industry. And what about newcomers – young projects that have already achieved success? And what happened to those who passed the milestone of 3 years?
One of the largest hubs in Europe gave birth to the London company, called Omnipresent. It automates the manual tasks of managing employees, helping them to be hired remotely from anywhere in the world, and for employees to access compensation payments and social contributions.
With the platform, managers can view transactions and data for all their remote employees in one place. Employees can use the platform's functionality to manage all aspects of their employment relationship, from hiring to termination, including benefits and compensation.
In January last year, the team closed Round A, increasing the total funding to .8 million. This year, Omnipresent is turning 4 years old, and it’s doing well with the trend towards the remoteness of all possible services and the reorientation of the labor market to remote. We advise you to take a closer look at it since it’ll make itself known.
The German Gorillas is younger, it was launched in 2020, but it has already managed to raise a C round, and its total funding has reached .3 billion. The application offers food delivery, and its key advantage is the timing: couriers complete their delivery in 10 minutes. It already has over 2,000 employees and unicorn status, making Gorillas one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe.
The niche of fast food delivery with its potential remained unoccupied in Europe for a long time, and the Gorillas application managed to be in the right place at the right time. However, the competition is growing every day, and it has to take measures to keep its position.
The youngest industry player on our list is Electra. It’s a French startup that was founded last year and it represents a network of ultra-fast charging stations for electric vehicles. A team of 15 employees received an impressive €15 million seed round (the largest seed round was in France in 2021) to develop their concept. The startup's goal is to accelerate the transition to electric mobility by solving the problem of recharging and deploying a recharging network of 1,000 ultra-fast stations by 2030.
Electra is taking part in the move towards greener electric vehicles, practically helping to reduce noise levels for city dwellers. Given the growing concern about environmental protection, as well as compliance with state support for such innovative projects, they should not have problems with scaling in the current economy.
Another London-based company on our list is from HealthTech and health protection. HealthHero helps users by providing remote access to experienced doctors for private patients and company employees. The functionality is available 24/7 by phone, video calls, and online chat.
HealthHero was founded in 2019, but has already raised €128 million in the total account, and also managed to absorb the Paris-based Qare to become one of the largest telemedicine companies in Europe. The service doesn’t plan to stop in its scaling after 3 years of development. The economy only favors that tendency, increasing its potential.
The German Vivid Money completes our list. The company has developed a comprehensive mobile banking application to help clients manage their finances and invest money in a flexible and transparent way.
Founded in 2019, the team has grown to over 250 employees and raised almost €75 million to enable users to save and invest in over 2,000 stocks through the app, and more recently offering cryptocurrencies as well. FinTech is now on the rise and some of the largest rounds are being made in this area, so the forecasts for the implementation of the Vivid Money strategy are the most positive.
Large corporations and beginners, experienced companies and those who just gain the first bumps, all startups are different. But each project from our list is made with the main ingredient, which is faith in your own idea, superimposed on knowledge of the market.