Not every great startup story involves a flashy consumer app or a founder chasing a glamorous vision. Some of Europe’s most valuable companies were built on payment processing, used cars, HR paperwork, and time tracking spreadsheets — categories nobody puts on a mood board, but that quietly generate enormous, durable revenue.
Here are nine European founders who picked an unglamorous problem, executed relentlessly, and built businesses worth billions.
1. Adyen — Pieter van der Does & Arnout Schuijff (Netherlands)
Payment infrastructure is about as unglamorous as B2B software gets — invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn’t. After selling their first payments company, Bibit, to Royal Bank of Scotland, Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff saw how fragmented and outdated the plumbing behind global payments still was. In 2006 they founded Adyen — the name means “start over again” — to build a single, unified platform connecting merchants directly to card networks. Clients eventually included Spotify, Uber, and Netflix. Adyen went public in 2018 and now processes hundreds of billions of euros a year, with an operating margin most software companies would kill for.
2. AUTO1 Group — Christian Bertermann & Hakan Koç (Germany)
Few categories sound less exciting than “used car sales.” Christian Bertermann discovered exactly how broken it was when he tried to sell his grandmother’s old Mercedes and VW Golf, and found dealers offering lowball prices with poor service. Together with Hakan Koç, a former Rocket Internet executive, he built AUTO1 to digitize a fragmented, opaque, and trust-starved industry — buying cars directly from consumers and dealers, then reselling them across borders using data-driven pricing. AUTO1 went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021, making both founders billionaires and the company one of Germany’s most valuable tech businesses.
3. Celonis — Alexander Rinke, Bastian Nominacher & Martin Klenk (Germany)
“Process mining” might be the least sexy phrase in enterprise software — it means analyzing the digital exhaust that company IT systems leave behind to spot inefficiencies. Three students at the Technical University of Munich stumbled into the idea while doing a consulting project for a Bavarian broadcaster, trying to fix why internal approvals took up to five days. They noticed the broadcaster’s systems were quietly logging timestamps on every step of every process — a goldmine of untapped data. That observation became Celonis, bootstrapped for its first five years, now valued in the tens of billions and used by a third of Germany’s largest listed companies to find hidden waste in their own operations.
4. GoCardless — Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield & Matt Robinson (UK)
Direct debit is not a phrase that inspires anyone. Three Oxford graduates brainstorming business ideas in a pub in 2011 landed on it almost by elimination — nobody in the room knew anything about payments, which they decided made it worth exploring. One of the founders had personally felt the pain of chasing recurring payments from members of a local sports club, a small, mundane frustration familiar to anyone who’s run a subscription, membership, or group. That unglamorous insight became a company processing tens of billions of dollars annually in recurring payments for businesses across dozens of countries.
5. Personio — Hanno Renner, Ignaz Forstmeier, Roman Schumacher & Arseniy Vershinin (Germany)
HR administration — payroll runs, absence tracking, contract paperwork — is exactly the kind of “necessary but nobody’s excited about it” work most software founders avoid. Four university friends in Munich noticed that even growing companies were still managing employee data with spreadsheets and paper files, cobbling together half a dozen disconnected tools. Founded in 2015, Personio built what its CEO has described as covering all the unglamorous, unavoidable basics that every company still has to handle. It’s now valued at over $8 billion and one of Europe’s largest HR software companies.
6. iZettle — Jacob de Geer & Magnus Nilsson (Sweden)
A small chip-and-PIN card reader that plugs into a smartphone doesn’t sound like a billion-dollar idea. But Jacob de Geer and Magnus Nilsson, both serial entrepreneurs, saw that small businesses and market stall owners across Europe were locked out of card payments by expensive, clunky point-of-sale hardware designed for big retailers. Founded in Stockholm in 2010, iZettle built one of the world’s first mobile card readers for small merchants — unglamorous hardware plus unglamorous back-office software — and sold to PayPal in 2018 for $2.2 billion, PayPal’s largest acquisition at the time.
7. Toggl — Alari Aho & Krister Haav (Estonia)
Time tracking software is the definition of a “boring” B2B tool — nobody dreams of building it, but every freelancer, consultancy, and agency needs one to bill clients accurately. Alari Aho and Krister Haav built the first version in 2006 as an internal tool for their own small software consultancy in Tallinn, simply to track billable hours more easily than existing options allowed. It grew into Toggl Track, a company that has never taken a cent of venture capital, is fully self-funded from its own subscription revenue, and generates tens of millions of dollars a year with a small, remote team spread across more than 40 countries.
8. Deliveroo’s Logistics Engine — Will Shu (UK)
While Deliveroo is a consumer-facing brand, the actual hard problem the company solved was unglamorous logistics: predicting how long a restaurant takes to prepare a dish and routing riders efficiently across a city in real time. Will Shu, a former investment banker frustrated by London’s poor food delivery options, spent his first eight months as the company’s only rider, cycling every order himself to understand the operational reality before building the routing software (“Frank”) that became Deliveroo’s real competitive advantage. The unglamorous backend — logistics, not the app icon — is what took the company to a multi-billion-pound valuation.
9. Trustpilot — Peter Holten Mühlmann (Denmark)
Online reviews aren’t glamorous, but they solve one of e-commerce’s oldest, most persistent trust problems. While running a small e-commerce store as a student, Peter Mühlmann kept hitting the same wall: strangers had no reason to trust a website built by an unknown seller, and his own mother had the same hesitation as a shopper. Founded in Denmark in 2007, Trustpilot turned that unremarkable, everyday friction into a platform now hosting hundreds of millions of reviews and generating enough recurring subscription revenue from businesses to list on the London Stock Exchange.
Why “Boring” Often Wins
A few things these nine businesses have in common:
- Low glamour, high necessity. None of these solve a want — they solve a need every business or consumer eventually can’t avoid: getting paid, tracking time, hiring staff, moving money, buying a car.
- Recurring revenue, not one-off excitement. Payments, subscriptions, and infrastructure businesses tend to generate predictable, compounding revenue rather than viral, unpredictable spikes.
- Less competition for attention. Ambitious founders often chase the sexy category everyone’s talking about. Unglamorous markets get built by people willing to do the less exciting work — which means less competition once you’re in.
- Boring products don’t mean boring margins. Adyen, Celonis, and Personio all reached multi-billion-dollar valuations doing things most people would never think to pitch at a dinner party.
If you’re hunting for a startup idea and keep dismissing the “boring” ones, these nine founders are a reminder: unglamorous problems are often unglamorous precisely because nobody wants to solve them — which is exactly what makes them valuable.
