Wise

Founded in 2018, Wise startup offers bank accounts to companies so that they can offer financial services to their customers. Thus, companies do not need to develop a banking service from scratch, instead they can redirect users to Wise. For example, the RemoteTeam service helps organize the work of remote teams using startup technologies to pay salaries.

History

2021: Holding IPO in London, founders Estonians became billionaires

Co-founders of the Wise international translation service Kristo Kaarman and Taavet Hinricus became dollar billionaires after the startup entered the London Stock Exchange on July 7, 2021.

Wise received an estimate of £7.95 billion ($11 billion). The price of one Wise stock as part of a direct listing was £8 ($11).

Kaarman and Hinricus became the first Estonians whose fortunes, according to Forbes estimates, exceeded $1 billion. Kaarman's share of 18.78% makes him the owner of the $2 billion fortune. Hinricus owns a stake of 10.85% worth $1.1 billion.

2020: Raising $12 million

At the end of October 2020, Wise announced the attraction of $12 million in investments. The Series A funding round was attended by the Grishin Robotic Foundation of Dmitry Grishin.

Happy announcement of our first sentence. FinTech Congratulations, wise team, "Grishin wrote on his Facebook page.

In addition to Grishin Robotics, e.ventures, Base10 Partners and Techstars have invested in Wise. Details of the financial transaction are not disclosed, so neither the shares of investors in the fintech startup nor the amount of funds invested by them are known.

D. Grishin Foundation invests in Wise fintech project

Earlier in 2020, Wise received $5.7 million from investors, including Base10 Partners, Abstract Ventures, Backend Capital, The Fund and Two Culture Capital. At that time, the startup had about 1 thousand client companies.

According to the publication TechCrunch, Wise is not a classic company offering banking services. The startup does not support non-banks and does not help them start work. Instead, Wise is aimed at other companies - those that are engaged in financial services, but cannot offer any services due to large investments. Customers integrate their product with Wise without doing much to develop and control regulation, nor creating a new banking system interface. Connected to the Wise service, companies receive services specific to a corporate account in a bank: money storage, bank transfers, the use of debit and virtual cards, etc.^[1][2]

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