How Top Fintechs Build Winning Teams

What’s the road to unicorn for European Fintech?

Inspired by recent posts of the great Marcel van Oost and Panagiotis Kriaris we have put together an analysis of 21 European Fintech unicorns.

In Europe’s booming FinTech scene, unicorn status seems the absolute dream.

By analysing 21 of Europe’s most prominent fintech unicorns, we look beyond their billion-dollar valuations to reveal how they built their teams, how they worked, and what allowed them to scale, or stumble, on the road to unicorn status.

We look into:
– Speed vs. scale, who wins big, and how?
– Team structures and talent strategies, what works best?
– Cultural practices, what helps teams thrive or burn out?

Our goal is to uncover patterns and insights that can help founders, investors, and operators understand what really builds a unicorn, beyond just code and funding. To support our analysis, we used data from Glassdoor, company pages, and LinkedIn data.