Guillaume Pousaz, European Tech’s Booster
His electronic-payments company, Checkout.com, raised $1 billion in January, giving it a $40 billion valuation on paper and making it Europe’s most valuable startup.
Photo illustration: 731; photo: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Web Summit/Getty Images
Raised in Geneva, Guillaume Pousaz studied mathematical engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne before finding his way to California. Checkout, which he started in 2012, works with the likes of Netflix, Pizza Hut and Sony. But its focus is on Europe and the Middle East and particularly on businesses with huge transactional volume. Checkout’s lofty valuation reflected investor appetite for a business that collects fees for purchases made through its services, and e-commerce is booming.
Checkout hasn’t been immune to the plunging tech markets, which have plagued other fintechs. The company cut its internal valuation to about $11 billion to help ensure the equity awards of staff keep their value. It was also expanding in crypto before collapsing prices and multiple institutional failures slammed the industry. (Checkout worked with porn and gambling sites in its early days but has “exited adult content entirely,” a spokesman said.) Still, Pousaz is now a major investor in fintech startups throughout Europe. —With Ivan Levingston