EUROPE

We raised $113 million with no product, no revenue, and a four-week-old company. Just a PDF and three ex-DeepMind and ex-Meta AI researchers. Europe was desperate for its own AI champion. We volunteered.

Europe has the talent. We have some of the best AI researchers in the world. What we didn't have was a company willing to compete with OpenAI head-on. Now we do.

We went from founding to $2 billion valuation in six months. In France. People keep saying Europe can't do AI startups. I think we just did.

We launched in 17 European countries simultaneously. Not one at a time. Seventeen at once. People said it was reckless. Europe's single banking passport said it was legal. We used the regulation as a growth hack.

I'm Austrian. Max is Austrian. We built N26 in Berlin. An Austrian neobank, headquartered in Germany, with a European banking license. Europe is one market if you build it that way.

Europe has 25 million SMBs. Most of them bank with institutions that haven't updated their software since 2005. That's not a market gap — that's a canyon.

We acquired Penta in Germany. A French fintech buying a German fintech. Five years ago that would have been unthinkable. Europe's fintech ecosystem is finally acting like one market.

A $5 billion valuation for a business banking platform. In Europe. People keep saying European fintech can't compete with American fintech. We keep raising rounds that say otherwise.