FW.MEDIA 20 CEOs: 20 CEOs shaping Europe’s next champions

Revolut is now worth more than $100 billion. Mistral AI crossed the €20 billion mark three years after its founding. Helsing, Nscale, Lovable and ElevenLabs have moved into a new league within a matter of months. Behind these valuations is a new generation of European leaders, and several very different models for creating value: software, frontier AI, fintech, defence, robotics, energy and compute infrastructure. FW.MEDIA has identified the 20 CEOs leading Europe’s highest-valued next-generation technology companies today.

The European technology hierarchy is being rewritten. Until a few years ago, companies capable of surpassing valuations of several billion euros largely belonged to three generations: B2B software, fintech and marketplaces. The names were Celonis, Checkout.com, Klarna, Revolut, Personio and Doctolib.

The cycle that began in 2022 is very different. Artificial intelligence has shortened the path to scale. Defence has once again become a major technology category; compute requires billions of dollars in capital; robotics and autonomy are bringing hardware back to the fore; and several European companies are now reaching in two or three years valuations that previously took a decade to achieve.

This is the new generation that the FW 20 CEOs seeks to capture.

Methodology

We selected technology companies founded in 2015 or later, whose decision-making centre remains primarily in Europe and whose latest reference valuation stems from a sufficiently recent transaction—generally one completed after 1 January 2025.

Valuation remains the principal ranking criterion. We deliberately chose not to build a composite score combining valuation, growth and capital raised: weighting these variables would create a false sense of precision across business models that are difficult to compare.

We have, however, added three dimensions.

TRACTION measures what sits behind a valuation: revenue, ARR, customers, assets under management, orders or deployments. Forecasts and order books are explicitly distinguished from recognised revenue.

SPEED looks at the time required to reach the company’s current level.

CAPITAL INTENSITY describes the economic nature of the model. Building a SaaS product, training frontier models, constructing data centres or industrialising drones clearly do not require the same amount of capital.

Finally, a private-market valuation is not realised value creation. It only reflects the price at which investors agree to transact at a given point in time.

The FW.MEDIA 20 CEOs 2026

For euro/dollar comparisons, the euro is currently trading at around $1.16. This places Trade Republic slightly ahead of Lovable, and Pennylane slightly ahead of Synthesia.

1. Nik Storonsky – Revolut

Revolut remains in a category of its own. The latest secondary process underway values the fintech at around $115 billion, after a transaction completed at the end of 2025 had already valued it at $75 billion. More importantly, the group has reached an economic scale that sets it apart from the rest of the ranking: around $6 billion in 2025 revenue and $2.3 billion in pre-tax profit. It now claims more than 80 million retail customers.

Revolut is no longer simply an exceptionally highly valued startup. It is gradually becoming a global banking group, with distinct licences and structures in the UK, France, Australia and other markets.

Why he ranks No. 1: Storonsky has combined scale, international expansion, diversification and profitability without losing the speed of execution that remains unusual for a financial institution.

2. Arthur Mensch – Mistral AI

Mistral is the company that best illustrates the acceleration of this new cycle.

Founded in 2023, the French company raised €3 billion in September 2026 at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion. The company is targeting around $1 billion in ARR by year-end.

Mistral requires far more capital than a traditional SaaS company: models, compute and infrastructure radically alter the sector’s economics.

The signal: reaching a valuation above €20 billion in three years would have been virtually inconceivable for a European startup in the previous cycle.

3. Gundbert Scherf and Torsten Reil – Helsing

Helsing reached an $18 billion valuation in its $1.8 billion Series E in July. The company remains majority-owned by European investors.

More importantly, Helsing is no longer solely a defence software company. It now develops drones, underwater systems, autonomous aircraft and manufacturing capabilities.

Its 2026 revenue is estimated at around €441 million, underlining that its valuation is at a far higher multiple than that of most defence industrials.

The signal: Europe is beginning to produce “neo-primes” capable of combining software, AI and defence manufacturing.

4. Josh Payne – Nscale

Nscale is probably the most striking case of value creation in infrastructure.

Founded in 2024, the British company raised $2 billion in a Series C in March 2026, at a $14.6 billion valuation.

But its model makes comparisons with Lovable or ElevenLabs misleading. Nscale finances data centres, networking, GPUs and energy. In May, for example, it secured $790 million in additional financing for its Norwegian infrastructure, following a $1.4 billion term loan.

Its six-year contract with Anthropic is worth around $45 billion.

The signal: the AI race is creating a new category of European champions whose funding needs look more like infrastructure than SaaS.

5. Christian Hecker – Trade Republic

Trade Republic represents almost the opposite model. In December 2025, a €1.2 billion secondary transaction valued the company at €12.5 billion. The company stressed that it did not need additional capital, having been profitable for three years.

More than ten million customers now entrust it with around €150 billion in assets.

The signal: Trade Republic is one of the few companies in the ranking that simultaneously demonstrates scale, growth and the ability to finance its development without relying on primary funding rounds.

6. Anton Osika – Lovable

Lovable is probably Europe’s current record-holder for speed in software.

The company raised $400 million in August at a valuation of $13.3 billion, after announcing annualised revenue of around $500 million in June. It now hosts some 60 million projects.

Only a few months earlier, Lovable employed just 146 people when it crossed $400 million in annual recurring revenue.

The signal: coding agents are producing revenue-per-employee ratios unimaginable in the previous SaaS generation.

7. Mati Staniszewski – ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs may offer the clearest example of the combination of speed + revenue + capital.

Founded in 2022, the company has raised $781 million in total and is now worth $11 billion. It ended 2025 with $350 million in ARR and exceeded $500 million during the first four months of 2026. The team then numbered 530 people.

The signal: ElevenLabs has turned a voice-synthesis breakthrough into an enterprise platform for voice agents and conversational AI.

8. Amir Orad – Kraken Technologies

Kraken is the ranking’s most intriguing outlier. The company was not founded as an independent startup: its technology was developed within Octopus Energy from 2016. Its separation was announced in 2025, alongside a transaction that valued Kraken at $8.65 billion.

The platform had already exceeded $500 million in contracted annual revenue, up fourfold in three years. It now serves more than 90 million accounts and employs more than 2,000 people.

Amir Orad is not its founder; he took over as CEO in 2024.

The signal: a technology asset built inside an industrial group can itself become a company worth almost $10 billion.

9. Alex Kendall – Wayve

Wayve has just raised $1.2 billion in a Series D that values it at $8.6 billion, with additional commitments tied to commercial deployment.

The company employs more than 1,000 people and has raised $2.8 billion in total. Its ambition is to commercialise an automaker-agnostic vehicle-autonomy platform, with robotaxis from 2026 and equipped consumer vehicles from 2027.

The signal: European AI is not confined to software interfaces; it is beginning to control physical systems.

10. Florian Seibel and Sven Kruck – Quantum Systems

Quantum Systems crossed the $8 billion mark in July after a $1.2 billion Series D. More importantly, it reports triple-digit growth and double-digit profitability.

It now employs more than 1,700 people across eight countries and is developing a family of interconnected autonomous systems.

The organisation itself is notable: founder Florian Seibel now shares the CEO role with Sven Kruck, strengthening execution without replacing the founder-CEO.

The signal: European defence is beginning to produce companies able to combine startup growth with industrial scale-up.

11. Hjalmar Nilsonne – Neko Health

Neko Health raised $700 million this summer at a valuation close to $7 billion.

The company had already carried out more than 100,000 scans in the UK and Sweden, while more than 350,000 people were registered or on its waiting list. It is now opening its first US clinics.

The signal: the model combines software, proprietary hardware, medical data and a physical clinic network. This is precisely what makes it harder to replicate—and more capital-intensive.

12. David Reger – NEURA Robotics

NEURA Robotics announced in June a Series C of up to $1.4 billion. Its valuation is estimated at around $7 billion.

The company says it has more than $1 billion in orders and aims to increase output from a few thousand to several tens of thousands of robots each year before scaling much further.

The signal: Europe is trying to turn its industrial heritage into an advantage in physical AI.

13. Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve – Alan

Alan is one of the ranking’s most operationally mature companies.

Its €480 million Series G raised its valuation to €5.5 billion. At the end of June, Alan reported around €840 million in contracted ARR and 1.14 million members, up 55% year on year.

The company employs more than 850 people and now operates across several European markets and in Canada.

The signal: Alan is approaching €1 billion in recurring revenue while seeking to turn health insurance into a platform combining coverage, prevention and care.

14. Max Junestrand — Legora

Legora is one of the most striking cases in vertical AI.

The company raised $550 million at a $5.55 billion valuation in March. A month later, it announced that it had surpassed $100 million in ARR less than eighteen months after the general availability of its product.

The startup now claims around 1,500 customers, 675 employees and $800 million in funding.

Legora now lists 2020 as its founding year, although its product launched much later. This date should therefore be distinguished from the company’s real commercial start.

The signal: vertical AI can now compress several years of SaaS development into a few quarters.

15. Jan Oberhauser — n8n

SAP’s strategic investment in May valued n8n at $5.2 billion.

The platform reports 1.7 million active builders each month and more than 1,400 enterprise customers.

Its trajectory is especially compelling as agents proliferate: the more companies deploy autonomous AI, the more they need layers able to connect agents, applications and data.

The signal: orchestration could become one of the core infrastructures of the agentic world.

16. Alan Chang — Fuse Energy

Fuse Energy reached a $5 billion valuation just three years after its founding.

The company was already supplying more than 200,000 UK households and was approaching $300 million in annualised revenue by the end of 2025.

But Fuse cannot be compared directly with Lovable: renewable development, generation, trading, supply and hardware require entirely different financing needs.

The signal: the methods of fintech and software—pricing, integration and speed of execution—are moving into physical industries such as energy.

17. Arthur Waller — Pennylane

Pennylane raised €175 million in January 2026 at a €3.5 billion valuation, taking total funding across six rounds to €359 million.

The company now claims an ecosystem of more than one million businesses and several thousand accountancy firms, with more than 1,000 employees.

The signal: Pennylane is turning an accounting tool into a financial operating system for SMEs and accountancy firms.

18. Victor Riparbelli — Synthesia

Synthesia raised $200 million in January at a $4 billion valuation.

Its billing infrastructure recently had to absorb a move from around $40 million to $140 million in ARR, while the number of contracts above $100,000 tripled year on year and net revenue retention exceeded 140%.

More than 65,000 companies use its products.

The signal: Synthesia is making the transition from a video-generation tool to an enterprise communications and training platform.

19. Uwe Horstmann — STARK

Founded only in 2024, STARK has just raised around €500 million, taking its valuation above €3.2 billion and total capital raised to around €640 million, according to Handelsblatt.

The company has already grown from 120 to around 400 employees in a year and is rapidly building up its industrial capacity.

It has notably secured a framework agreement with the Bundeswehr covering several thousand Virtus systems.

The signal: Europe’s new defence cycle is radically shortening the time between a company’s founding, a major military contract and industrial scale-up.

20. Robin Rombach — Black Forest Labs

Black Forest Labs rounds out the Top 20 with a $3.25 billion valuation, achieved in a $300 million Series B at the end of 2025.

Founded in 2024 by several researchers behind the techniques that led to Stable Diffusion, the company has raised $450 million in total. Its FLUX models have surpassed 75 million downloads and are integrated into or used by companies including Adobe, Canva, Meta and Microsoft.

The signal: part of Europe’s AI research base is finally beginning to translate directly into frontier-AI companies.

Nine companies that barely existed five years ago

This is probably the ranking’s first key finding. Helsing, Mistral AI, Nscale, Lovable, ElevenLabs, Legora, Fuse Energy, STARK and Black Forest Labs all belong to the cycle that began at the start of the decade. Together, they now represent several tens of billions of dollars in valuation.

Europe’s new generation is therefore not only made up of older unicorns that have become larger. A genuinely new layer has emerged.

AI compresses time

Lovable reached $13.3 billion less than three years after its founding.

Mistral exceeded €21 billion in three years.

Nscale reached $14.6 billion in two years.

ElevenLabs exceeded $10 billion in four years.

Black Forest Labs passed $3 billion almost immediately.

The previous generation generally had to move through successive stages: product-market fit, European expansion, a US foothold, building an enterprise sales organisation and then internationalisation.

AI-native companies can execute several of these stages almost simultaneously. The scarce resource is no longer necessarily distribution; it is increasingly access to the talent, compute and capital required to sustain speed.

But software no longer dominates on its own

The other lesson from the Top 20 is the return of the physical world: Helsing manufactures military systems; Quantum Systems manufactures drones; Wayve is building a vehicle-autonomy platform; NEURA develops robots; Neko designs scanners and operates clinics; STARK builds loitering munitions; Fuse owns and develops energy assets; Nscale builds compute infrastructure.

This new generation therefore looks less like the SaaS champions of 2015 and more like full-stack technology companies. They combine software, data, industrial capital, supply chains and, sometimes, physical facilities—fundamentally changing the metrics that need to be used.

The capital-efficiency trap

At first glance, it would be tempting simply to calculate: valuation ÷ capital raised.

This ratio does indeed produce striking results for some relatively asset-light companies. ElevenLabs is worth $11 billion after raising $781 million. Black Forest Labs is worth $3.25 billion after raising $450 million. Pennylane is worth €3.5 billion after raising €359 million. But applying the same metric to Nscale, Fuse or Wayve would be misleading. Nscale finances data centres and combines equity with debt. Fuse finances a vertically integrated energy chain. Wayve must fund a decade of research and automotive deployments. Helsing and Quantum Systems have to build production capacity.

The ranking therefore reveals not one single model of champion, but at least four value-creation architectures: asset-light software/AI, regulated financial services, frontier AI/compute, and industrial technology.

Founder-CEOs remain in charge

Another striking feature is that the Top 20 remains overwhelmingly led by founders. Storonsky, Mensch, Payne, Hecker, Osika, Staniszewski, Kendall, Nilsonne, Reger, Samuelian-Werve, Junestrand, Oberhauser, Chang, Waller, Riparbelli and Rombach still run the companies they helped create.

Even when organisations grow significantly, these companies often prefer to add leaders around the founder rather than replace them.

Quantum Systems takes this logic a step further: Florian Seibel now shares the CEO role with Sven Kruck, creating a clearer separation between product and technology on one side, and operational execution on the other.

Kraken is one of the few counter-examples. Amir Orad was hired as a professional CEO before the separation from Octopus.

This may become one of the most important questions to watch in the coming years: how many of these CEOs will still be in charge when their companies reach 5,000 or 10,000 employees?

A valuation is no longer enough

The ranking also highlights a growing divide between companies whose valuation already rests on a visible economic engine and those still valued largely on their future potential.

Revolut generates several billion in revenue and profit. Trade Republic is profitable. Alan is approaching €1 billion in ARR. Lovable and ElevenLabs report several hundred million dollars in annualised revenue. Legora has passed $100 million in ARR.

At the other end of the spectrum, Nscale is valued primarily on the infrastructure and future commitments it still has to deliver. Defence industrials have order books that will convert into revenue over several years.

Mistral occupies an intermediate position: its valuation rests both on commercial growth and on the strategic value attributed to the existence of a European frontier-AI company.

The next ranking will therefore need to track not only value, but above all the conversion of that value into revenue and cash flow.

Those just outside the ranking

The cut-off at around $3 billion already leaves several important companies outside. Parloa is worth around $3 billion and has surpassed $50 million in ARR. Isar Aerospace is worth around €2 billion, but has just reached a major industrial milestone with Spectrum. The Exploration Company could quickly join the list as its funding and contracts grow.

Other companies, such as Qonto and Personio, would naturally remain candidates, but their latest significant public valuations date back to 2022.

Fluidstack is a borderline case. Founded in London and now valued at around $18 billion, it has moved its global headquarters to New York. Its exclusion raises a question that will become increasingly important: what is a European technology company when its capital, customers and, progressively, its centre of gravity move to the United States?

Beyond unicorns: champions

For a decade, Europe has largely measured its technology ecosystem by its number of unicorns. That metric is losing relevance. The real issue is now the capacity to build companies that can sustainably exceed €5 billion, €10 billion and then €20 billion in value, while keeping a meaningful share of their teams, technology, governance and economic ownership in Europe.

The FW.MEDIA 20 CEOs 2026 shows that the continent is beginning to build this second generation. But it also reveals the next challenge.

Creating a multi-billion valuation is now possible in two or three years. Turning it into a lasting industrial or technology champion will take much longer.

FW 20 CEOs: an annual fixture and sector-specific gatherings

The 2027 edition of the FW 20 CEOs will be unveiled at the end of June 2027. Until then, FW.MEDIA will publish sector-specific editions to highlight the leaders building Europe’s next technology champions. These selections will be accompanied by events to celebrate their journeys, bring together entrepreneurs, investors and industrial players, and foster new collaborations. Beyond the ranking, our ambition is to create a regular meeting point for the people building, funding and supporting European innovation.

Companies, investment funds and institutions are invited to join this initiative through partnerships and event-sponsorship programmes that remain distinct from the editorial selection of CEOs. To become a partner for a future sector edition or the 2027 ranking, contact the FW.MEDIA team at partners@fw.media.