Wise plc
Cross-Border Payments and Financial TechnologyFounded 2011- Updated July 2025
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: July 2025
CorpDigest
Wise plc
Company History
Founded 2011 in London, United Kingdom
Last reviewed: 2025-07-15 · By Swet Parvadiya
Kristo Käärmann was losing money every month to hidden bank exchange rate fees on transfers between his UK sterling salary and his Estonian euro mortgage. His friend Taavet Hinrikus had the opposite problem — paid in euros by Skype, needing sterling. They solved it by matching each other's needs directly: Taavet topped up Kristo's sterling account at the real exchange rate; Kristo topped up Taavet's euro account. No bank fees. No margin on the exchange rate. The product they built in 2011 scaled that personal arrangement.
TransferWise closed its Series A in 2013 with a product that showed customers the hidden fee embedded in the exchange rate — displaying both the mid-market rate and the rate being charged simultaneously. The transparency was provocative by design. Banks that earned hundreds of millions annually on foreign exchange spreads found a company explicitly advertising their margin against them.
The U.S. Market entry in 2014 required money transmitter licenses in all 50 states — a regulatory process that takes years and significant legal investment. Andreessen Horowitz led the Series C in 2015. The company reached profitability in 2017, a milestone that was unusual for a fintech company of its stage and signaled that the unit economics of low-cost payment processing were working at scale.
The rebrand from TransferWise to Wise in 2021 preceded the London Stock Exchange direct listing — an unusual structure that avoided the discount common to traditional IPOs. The listing raised no new capital; it simply created liquidity for existing shareholders, reflecting confidence in the existing capital position and a deliberate signal about how the company intended to manage its relationship with public markets.
Kristo Käärmann is the co-founder and CEO of Wise plc. Born in Estonia, he moved to London where he worked as a management consultant specializing in financial services modernization. His personal experience of losing approximately $635 in exchange rate markups on a $12,700 transfer to Estonia motivated him to build a transparent alternative to traditional banking. Käärmann's operational philosophy emphasizes doing unscalable things first—manually recording transfers in spreadsheets at launch—to validate demand before building automation. Under his leadership, Wise has grown from a six-person team processing $1 million in monthly volume to an 8,000-person organization moving $184.4 billion annually. He was selected as one of the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers in 2015. In June 2022, the UK Financial Conduct Authority included Käärmann on its list of individuals receiving penalties for a deliberate tax default regarding $914,400 for the 2017-2018 tax year; he remained on the list for 12 months starting September 2021. Despite this controversy, he has retained the CEO position and led the company's 2025 announcement of a planned primary listing move to the United States.
Taavet Hinrikus is the co-founder of Wise plc and was its first CEO. An Estonian entrepreneur, he joined Skype as its first employee in 2003 and later served as director of strategy, giving him firsthand experience in building peer-to-peer infrastructure that undercuts incumbents. After leaving Skype, Hinrikus worked as an angel investor and advisor to multiple startups before co-founding TransferWise with Kristo Käärmann in January 2011. His personal need to convert euros to pounds for London living expenses—and Käärmann's opposite need—created the peer-to-peer matching concept that became Wise's core innovation. Hinrikus was widely cited as the initial draw for investors, with his Skype pedigree providing credibility in a market where European fintech disruption was unprecedented. He served as CEO until 2017, when he handed the role to Käärmann to focus on investing. He remained chair until July 2022. In 2023, Hinrikus was ranked 197th on The Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of $1,093 million, making him one of Estonia's first billionaires alongside Käärmann.
Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus founded TransferWise on January 26, 2011, with a $31,750 personal investment and a pre-seed round from Seedcamp, after experiencing personal frustration with bank fees on cross-border transfers between the UK and Estonia.
In February 2011, TransferWise raised a $1.3 million seed round led by IA Ventures and Index Ventures, with PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, former Betfair CEO David Yu, Wonga.com co-founder Errol Damelin, and Sir Richard Branson participating, giving the company runway to build its peer-to-peer matching platform.
By May 2013, TransferWise had processed over $318 million in transfers, saving customers approximately $13 million in hidden fees, and closed a $6 million Series A led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures to fund US and Australia expansion.
TransferWise launched in the United States in 2014, establishing regulatory compliance across state-level money transmitter licenses and beginning the multi-year process of building US payment infrastructure.
In January 2015, Wise raised a $58 million Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors, bringing total funding to $117 million and enabling expansion into Asia and deeper European penetration.
In 2016, TransferWise became the first technology company to gain access to the UK's Faster Payments Scheme through a partnership with Raphaels Bank, enabling instant domestic transfers and reducing reliance on correspondent banking.
TransferWise launched the Borderless account in 2017, allowing customers to hold balances in 40+ currencies with local account details, transforming the company from a remittance service into a multi-currency banking alternative.
The company launched its debit card in 2018 and reported its first full year of profitability, a rare achievement for a high-growth fintech, with four consecutive profitable years by 2020.
In May 2019, Wise raised a $292 million secondary investment round, reaching a valuation of $3.5 billion, more than double the $1.6 billion valuation achieved in its 2017 $280 million Series E round.
In July 2020, Wise disclosed a $319 million secondary investment round led by D1 Capital Partners and Lone Pine Capital, reaching a $5 billion valuation with new investor Vulcan Capital and additions from Baillie Gifford and Fidelity.
On February 22, 2021, TransferWise rebranded to Wise to reflect expanded services beyond transfers; on July 7, 2021, Wise went public via direct listing on the London Stock Exchange at an $11 billion valuation, the largest tech direct listing on the LSE.
In March 2024, Wise secured a Type 1 Funds Transfer Service Provider license in Japan, removing the $0.0067 million transaction limit; by FY2025, the company had established direct connections to 8 domestic payment systems globally.
In FY2025, Wise served 15.6 million customers, moved $184.4 billion in volume, generated $1.54 billion in revenue and $717.3 million in reported profit; in June 2025, the company announced plans to move its primary listing to the US and applied for a US national trust bank license.
Wise has grown primarily through organic expansion rather than acquisitions. The company's strategy focuses on building proprietary infrastructure and direct regulatory licenses rather than buying market share.
Wise was founded in January 2011 as TransferWise by two Estonians living in London, Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, who had grown frustrated with the cost of moving money between their British pounds and euros for personal transactions. Hinrikus, then 28, had been the first employee at Skype in Tallinn from 2003 and received his salary in euros while living in London, where he needed pounds for rent and expenses. Käärmann, then 30, was working at Deloitte in London as a management consultant earning pounds while needing euros to pay a mortgage in Estonia. The two had met in Tallinn years earlier and discovered their mismatched currency needs were essentially symmetrical. They began informally matching their flows by depositing their respective home-currency salaries into each other's bank accounts at the European Central Bank mid-market exchange rate, bypassing the foreign exchange margins that banks were charging on retail conversions. Realizing the model could be productized for thousands of expatriates with similar mismatched flows, the founders incorporated TransferWise in the United Kingdom and built the peer-to-peer matching engine that would underpin the early product. The launch took place in January 2011 with funding from Index Ventures partner Robin Klein and angel investors including PayPal founder Max Levchin. The peer-matching mechanism became the defining technical and marketing story of the early TransferWise narrative.
TransferWise expanded from its January 2011 launch through four distinct growth phases over the following 13 years to reach £1.21 billion in revenue by fiscal year 2024. The 2011 to 2014 founding phase focused on the United Kingdom euro and pound corridor between expatriate users, building the peer-matching engine and validating product-market fit with a small but rapidly growing user base. The 2014 to 2017 expansion phase added corridors across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific, opened US operations from a Tampa, Florida hub, and grew transaction volume from hundreds of millions to billions of pounds annually, supported by Series B and Series C rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sir Richard Branson among other backers. The 2017 to 2021 product diversification phase launched the Borderless Account in 2017, rebranded as the Wise Account in the 2021 corporate rebrand, alongside the Wise debit card, Wise Business for small and medium enterprises, and the Wise Platform application programming interface for banks and fintech partners. The 2021 to 2024 public-company phase began with the July 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange, the largest direct listing in UK history at the time. By fiscal year 2024 ending March 2024 Wise had more than 16 million customers, processed more than £125 billion in annual cross-border transaction volume, and reached £1.21 billion in revenue from the underlying transfer fees and account services.
TransferWise rebranded to Wise in February 2021 to reflect the company's expansion beyond pure money transfer into a broader suite of cross-border financial services including the multi-currency Wise Account, the Wise debit card, Wise Business for small and medium enterprises and the Wise Platform application programming interface for banking partners. The original TransferWise name had been intentionally descriptive at the 2011 launch when the only product was peer-matched currency transfer, but by 2021 transfer accounted for a declining share of customer activity as the multi-currency account and debit card use cases expanded. Chief executive Kristo Käärmann announced the rebrand in a London press event emphasizing that the company had outgrown the singular transfer descriptor and that Wise more accurately captured the breadth of cross-border financial functionality. The rebrand preserved the green color palette and minimalist design language that had defined TransferWise visual identity, with only the name and logo updated, allowing existing customers to recognize continuity. The rebrand was timed approximately five months before the July 2021 London direct listing, positioning the company as a multi-product fintech rather than a single-product money transfer business when it entered public markets. Marketing materials post-rebrand emphasized the Wise account as the entry product for international consumers and businesses rather than transfer-only positioning. The rebrand cost was modest relative to the overall marketing budget but the strategic signaling effect on investors was significant.
Wise listed publicly on the London Stock Exchange on July 7, 2021 through a direct listing rather than a traditional initial public offering, making it the largest direct listing in UK history at the time at an implied opening valuation of approximately £8 billion and a closing first-day value of roughly £8.75 billion. The direct listing structure meant that no new shares were issued and no underwriting syndicate was hired to allocate shares to institutional investors, with existing shareholders simply registering their stakes for public trading at a reference price determined by recent private market secondary transactions. The reference price was set at 800 pence per share but trading opened above this level. The direct listing approach was unusual for a UK fintech of Wise's scale and reflected three considerations. First, Wise did not need primary capital because the company had been profitable since 2017 and held substantial cash from operations and prior funding rounds. Second, the founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus and early investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Lead Edge Capital wanted liquidity without the underwriting fees of a traditional IPO. Third, the direct listing avoided the price suppression effect of underwriter allocation discounts that have characterized many recent technology IPOs. The dual-class share structure gave Käärmann and Hinrikus enhanced voting rights for nine years post-listing, a UK first that required Financial Conduct Authority approval.
TransferWise raised approximately $1.3 billion across multiple private funding rounds between 2011 and 2020 before the July 2021 London direct listing, attracting a notable roster of venture capital investors and high-profile angels. The 2011 seed round was led by Index Ventures partner Robin Klein with participation from PayPal founder Max Levchin and other angels, providing the initial capital that funded the peer-matching engine build. The 2013 Series A raised $6 million led by IA Ventures and Index Ventures. The 2014 Series B raised $25 million led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures and Sir Richard Branson personally, an investment that generated significant UK press attention. The 2015 Series C raised $58 million led by Andreessen Horowitz alongside Baillie Gifford, valuing the company at approximately $1 billion and granting unicorn status. The 2016 Series D raised $26 million led by Baillie Gifford. The 2017 Series E raised $280 million led by Old Mutual Global Investors at a valuation of $1.6 billion. The 2019 secondary share sale led by Lone Pine Capital, Lead Edge Capital and Vitruvian Partners allowed early employees and angels to monetize at a $3.5 billion valuation. The 2020 secondary at $5 billion valuation preceded the public listing. The cumulative investor base concentrated among Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Valar Ventures, Baillie Gifford and Lead Edge Capital.