He’s back. TransferWise co-founder and CEO Taavet Hinrikus was already on our radar at last year’s Disrupt London, but the startup has been growing nicely since then. After raising $58 million from Andreessen Horowitz and existing investors, the company officially launched in the U.S. That’s why we are excited to announce that Taavet Hinrikus will join us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt London on December 7-8, 2015.
Before TransferWise, Hinrikus was Skype’s first-ever employee. When he left the communication company in 2008, he was director of strategy. Given Skype’s success, he then made a few angel investments in Tweetdeck, Betaworks, Teleportd and more.
As a reminder TransferWise lets you cut on bank fees when it comes to international transfers between multiple bank accounts. The startup’s secret sauce is a peer-to-peer model. For instance, if you have USD and want to send EUR, TransferWise will automatically match you with people who want USD.
Everything is seamless and customers don’t have to find other people to match them. There are many advantages to this model, including speed and exchange rates. TransferWise is much cheaper than Western Union or wire transfers with your banks. With big transfers, you can save hundreds of dollars.
TransferWise competes with many European startups, including CurrencyFair, Azimo and WorldRemit. Even though global transfers are becoming an increasingly competitive market, it seems like TransferWise has managed to grow in no time.
Yet, over the past few months, the startup has been a bit quiet. So it’s going to be interesting to know what Hinrikus and his team have been working on. What’s the next step now that TransferWise covers many important markets? We’ll find out at our conference in London.
Other speakers include BlaBlaCar’s Nicolas Brusson, Eileen Burbidge, Thierry Henry, AOL’s Tim Armstrong, Klaus Hommels, Postmates’ Bastian Lehmann and more. Find out more in the agenda.
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