EUROPE

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Europe, only about 15 percent of people invest in stocks. In the US it is over 55 percent. That gap is our entire opportunity.

Wirecard will be the most important financial technology company in Europe. The banks are too slow and too old to compete with us.

I was Tesla's head of supply chain. I saw how dependent the world was on Asian battery factories. Europe needs its own. That's not nationalism — it's industrial survival.

Amsterdam is a great place to build a company. The talent is here and nobody expects you to move to San Francisco anymore.

Amsterdam is the perfect place to build a European bank. Central location. Multilingual talent. And the regulators actually understand innovation.

Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Poland. We're focusing on markets where we can win, not trying to be everywhere.

Insurance in Europe is stuck in the 1990s. Paper forms. Phone calls. Opaque pricing. We're changing all of it.

European insurance is a trillion-dollar market. Even a small share is a massive business.

Expanding to Spain and Belgium proved our model works beyond France. Next: all of Europe.

Europe has the engineering talent. What it lacked was the venture ecosystem. Atomico exists to fix that.

The Netherlands is a small market. But building there first taught me discipline that American startups never learn.

European startups have a massive advantage in building HR tech. We understand labor laws and employee rights at a level that most American companies have never had to think about.

Barcelona gave us three things Silicon Valley couldn't: multilingual talent, lower costs, and a reminder that business travel is a global problem, not an American one.

Fixed-mobile convergence is the name of the game in European telecoms. The companies that can offer both services will win.

Consolidation is inevitable. The question is whether you're the consolidator or the consolidated.