Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, cofounders of TransferWise: peer-to-peering into the future of money. (Levon Biss for Forbes) TransferWise cofounder Kristo Käärmann is late for dinner. His Uber driver took the long route from his offices to Art Priori, a trendy restaurant set amid the winding medieval-era cobblestone streets of Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. The driver had recognized Käärmann and wanted time to pitch an idea he had for a new app. Waiting patiently for him at the restaurant, Taavet Hinrikus, his cofounder and CEO, responds to his tardy partner’s explanation with a knowing grin. “Estonia is a small country, so it’s natural that people know TransferWise,” he says. “There’s some downside, like Uber drivers lying in wait.” He, too, has been subject to long, pitch-filled rides from local taxi drivers.
So it goes when your tiny Baltic country of 1.3 million people has bet its national future on becoming a tech incubator and you’ve founded a unicorn startup. Käärmann and Hinrikus may as well be Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos here, and they have the A-list investors to back up the local hype. Peter Thiel invested early in TransferWise. So did Richard Branson . A $58 million infusion from Andreessen Horowitz last year has allowed Käärmann and Hinrikus to expand the staff to 600 people. In May 2016, TranferWise announced another $26 million investment led by asset management firm Baillie Gifford.
They’ll need all that manpower and all that money: In pushing a peer-to-peer platform for moving money–think Skype for currency–they’re taking on pretty much every global bank, along with entrenched giants like Western Union WU +0.73% .
“You have this conceptual argument that it shouldn’t cost that much to move money,” says Käärmann. “That it is really just electrons that you are moving around.”
It’s a billion-dollar theory, as measured by TransferWise’s […]
