Europe is blessed with some of the world’s richest tech founders. The reason is not far-fetched. Europe has some of the best tech companies out there. So, it is not out of place that some of these founders have immense fortune and can be placed side by side with some of the wealthiest men in the world.
Some European founders are the brains behind unique technology like online casino platforms — an industry where NetBet is doing very well — and others. In this article, we will be looking at some of the wealthiest European tech founders.
EK
When Ek was a teenager, he applied to Google but was rejected since he needed a degree. But since he was 14, he had started and sold online businesses, amassing a fortune at a young age. Following Napster’s demise in 2006, Ek and his friend Martin Lorentzen—the creator of Tradedoubler, a Swedish internet marketing company—started kicking around concepts for a music streaming service.
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Both passionate about music, the two invented a universal jukebox that lets anyone, anywhere, listen to any song via the internet. Before receiving permission to enter the US, the largest music market in the world, in July 2011, Ek and Lorentzon had invested their fortunes in the company to keep it from failing.
Currently ranked as the top music streaming service globally, Spotify boasts 60 million users and over $500 million in funding from prominent technology investors. Because of Spotify’s influence, Ek has become a tech industry superstar and a leading voice in the global conversation about the future of the music business. Still, he stays near his home city of Stockholm, where Spotify has established a massive five-story headquarters, and he keeps supporting the rapidly growing Swedish tech start-up scene.
Arkady Volozh
One of Volozh’s first projects before founding Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia and the country’s response to Google, was creating an advanced algorithm to search a database of Russian literature. As a successful telecoms executive and company founder, he took advantage of the deregulation of the industry following the fall of communism. He was a founding member of one of the first computer cooperatives in Moscow in the late 1980s.
Founded by Arkady in 2000, Yandex has a market valuation of approximately $6 billion and is traded on the Moscow and New York stock exchanges. With a significant presence in Kazakhstan and Ukraine and roughly 60% of the Russian search market, it faces growing pressure due to President Vladimir Putin’s restrictions on media freedom. After new laws requiring tech companies to store more data in Russia were passed, Google recently withdrew its engineering operations.
Ljung and Wahlforss
While attending university in Sweden, the founders of Soundcloud conceived of the idea for a social audio platform, drawing inspiration from the inventiveness displayed on blogging platforms like WordPress and the photo-sharing website Flickr. Users can upload and share audio files on Soundcloud, including podcasts and brand-new songs from up-and-coming artists.
In 2007, Ljung and Wahlforss founded the company, choosing Berlin as their home due to the city’s thriving music and cultural scenes and easy access to a large pool of talented programmers. Ljung contributed his sound design skills, and Wahlforss’s experience as a DJ helped them understand the demands of independent musicians and artists. The rise of SoundCloud in the last couple of years grants them a slot in this list.
However, this is a concise list. It’s one of the shortest lists you will find out there. There are many Rich European Tech founders out there.
