Edited by Leonard Schoenberger.
While the world is facing its biggest global crisis of modern times, a new generation of talent is setting out to shape the financial industry of the future. Brexit has overturned the European order as we had known it for decades. Despite this turning point in history, financial talent on the continent and across the channel in the UK is coming up with new business ideas to disrupt the finance industry.
Yolanda Schmidtke, 28, founded DLE Group AG in 2016 because she was dissatisfied with the traditional real estate industry. She saw a need for innovative investments products and financial solutions. Schmidtke took action and turned DLE Group into a fast-scaling asset management platform. Today the company serves institutional investors around the globe and currently has more than €2b of assets under management. Schmidtke is the company’s co-CEO and the only female board member.
26-year-old Paul Allan is a Partner within J.P.Morgan’s Technology Investment Banking department. His focus is on investing in tech startups in enterprise and consumer software, digital health and fintech. Before joining J.P.Morgan, Allan founded and sold a number of businesses in medtech, marketing and biotech. Most recently Allan was involved in the exit of PathoVi, a company that developed a chemical and technical system to identify pathogens that are the cause of healthcare acquired infections (HAIs).
A Vice President at Dawn Capital, Shamillah Bankiya, oversees the company’s coverage in the UK and Ireland and leads the firm’s investments in developer tools and broader data infrastructure. Born in Uganda, Bankiya studied Economics and African Studies at Yale University. Besides work, she is actively involved in community service and an original member of 10×10 VC, a pioneering group for the UK’s black and mixed-race VCs.
Jacob Claerhout is a financial multitalent. During the day he’s an early stage venture capitalist at Partech. His focus is on enterprise and deep-tech solutions. A member of the LGBTQI+ community himself, he also founded Merit, a venture capital platform where aspiring VCs can learn the craft and build their own track record. By now he has reached more than 1,000 participants through this vehicle that is aimed to make the VC industry more diverse.
David Nordhausen, Mike Mahlkow and Constantin Schreiber are the founders of Blair, a startup enabling schools to offer their programs to every student no matter their financial situation. They were part of the Y Combinator summer batch in ‘19, raised a 7-digit sum from angel investors and seed funds and recently secured a $100m debt fund to offer even more financing to their partner schools.
Dominic Falcao is the Founding Director of London-based Deep Science Ventures. Since its start in 2016, Falcao and his partners have supported the creation of more than 30 companies with an accumulated value of more than $120m. These companies focus on solving big challenges such as antibiotic resistance, cancer, energy storage or carbon capture. Since Deep Science Ventures generates revenue through partnerships with multinationals and governments the focus is less on quick exits and more on long term problem solving.
All candidates on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Finance list for Europe were carefully selected by a first-class panel of judges including Irina Haivas, Partner at Atomico, Emma Davies, co-CEO of Octopus Ventures and Sebastian Seifert, former 30 under 30 list member and Founder of viafintech.
