Adyen

In 2006, Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff were working out of an Amsterdam apartment, building what would become one of Europe's most valuable fintech companies. The name they chose, Adyen, means "start again" in Sranan Tongo, a language from Suriname, which fit perfectly: this was their second payments venture after selling Bibit Global Payments to Worldpay for $100 million in 2004. They had seen firsthand how legacy systems forced merchants to stitch together multiple vendors for authorization, settlement, and reporting. Their solution was a single-stack platform that handles everything in-house, from payment gateway to acquiring to fraud management.

Today, Adyen processes payments for some of the world's biggest brands, including Netflix, Uber, Spotify, Booking.com, Airbnb, McDonald's, Nike, and LVMH. The company went public on Euronext Amsterdam in 2018 and quickly became an AEX index component. Unlike many fintechs that rely on acquisitions to expand, Adyen has grown almost entirely organically, building its own technology and hiring engineers rather than buying them. That discipline shows in the numbers: zero debt, €8.3 billion in cash, and a 2024 revenue of €1.996 billion.

Adyen's platform supports over 100 payment methods across 60 countries, covering everything from credit cards to local schemes like iDEAL and Alipay. Its unified commerce offering lets retailers manage online and in-store transactions through one system, providing real-time data that helps merchants optimize conversion and reduce fraud. The company employs 4,345 people across 23 offices, with major hubs in San Francisco, London, Singapore, and São Paulo. Co-CEOs Pieter van der Does and Ingo Uytdehaage lead the company, with van der Does holding about 3% of shares. [edit]