Taavet Hinrikus & Kristo Käärmann
Wise
Low-cost, transparent cross-border money transfers · London, UK
Portrait: Wise PLC / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
The founder
Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee and later its director of strategy, and Kristo Käärmann, a management consultant, met at a party and bonded over the high cost of moving money between the UK and Estonia. They founded TransferWise in 2011 around a peer-to-peer matching model that avoided bank FX markups, rebranding to Wise in 2021. Käärmann became CEO in 2017; both became Estonia’s first tech billionaires at listing.
How it was taken public
Wise listed on the London Stock Exchange via a direct listing on July 7, 2021 — the first tech direct listing on the LSE — reaching a market cap of roughly £8 billion (~$11 billion). Because Wise had been profitable since 2017, it didn’t need to raise fresh capital, and chose the lower-cost, no-underwriter direct-listing route consistent with its transparency-focused brand.
Sourced & verified
In the news
Coverage of the Wise deal from independent outlets — read the original reporting, not just our summary.