became the UK’s most highly-valued technology start-upSwiss-born Pousaz’s own net worth has been estimated at as much as half of that, although he declines to confirm that figure - let alone spend it.
And investors are falling over each other for a piece of the company he has grown in just 10 years. The US giant Tiger Global, the asset manager Franklin Templeton and the wealth funds of Qatar and Singapore are among those backing Checkout.com. Having dropped out of university in Lausanne after his father’s death to pursue a life of surfing up and down the California coast, he ran out of funds and picked up a job at payments firm IPC. He quickly chose a life of entrepreneurship.
Pousaz moved to Dubai to pursue business in the Middle East, although some of the company’s early customers were London’s fellow adolescent fintechs such as Revolut and Transferwise, who turned to the company rather than banks for payments. “[But] there are few industries that are bigger than payments. I’m not building an app for walking dogs in London. The total addressable market is nearly infinite and expanding. “Every single day, someone pays for coffee in cash. That’s an opportunity for me to turn it into a digital payment. And if you do research, most of the volume is sitting with the incumbents.