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Revolut has told staff it is launching a sale of up to $500mn worth of existing shares at a $45bn valuation, in a move that would cement the fintech’s status as Europe’s most valuable start-up.
Employees were told on Friday that staff who have been at the fintech for at least a year and are not on gardening leave will be eligible to sell 20 per cent of their vested share options at a price of $865.42 a share, said people familiar with the matter. Unlike with previous sales, former employees are ineligible, the people said.
Revolut said it was “committed to enabling its employees to share in the company’s success by becoming shareholders while also providing them with regular opportunities to sell shares”.
The company, which has about 7,000 employees, said it was undertaking a secondary share sale to support this goal and could not provide further details while the process was ongoing. One person familiar with the deal said it was expected to close in the next month.
The internal announcement comes after Revolut last week was granted a banking licence in the UK, where it has 9mn customers. The regulatory decision ended a three-year long wait during which the fintech was rocked by setbacks including a qualified audit in its delayed 2021 accounts.
Revolut is one of the few fintechs to have increased its valuation since a slowdown in venture capital hit the sector in the past two years. The financial app was last valued at $33bn in a funding round led by Japanese investor SoftBank and US fund Tiger Global.
The new valuation would make it one of the UK’s most valuable banks, ahead of NatWest, Lloyds and Barclays.
The terms of the sale also value chief executive Nik Storonsky’s personal stake in the company at almost $8bn, based on a Financial Times analysis of public documents from last August.
Storonsky, a former Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse trader, founded the company in 2015 in London with chief technology officer Vlad Yatsenko.
Revolut is pursuing an aggressive expansion plan in the UK and beyond. The group, which has 45mn customers globally, is preparing to move its headquarters to a landmark building in London’s financial district of Canary Wharf.
The company last month said it had made a pre-tax profit of £438mn in 2023, up from a loss of £25mn the previous year while its revenues almost doubled to £1.8bn.
