As we celebrate the release of our official business results for 2024 (more about that later), we have an excellent and logical opportunity to take a trip down memory lane.
From humble beginnings as a small Estonian start-up with big dreams in 2018, we really hit our stride in 2021, so that year makes a great, natural jumping-off point for this retrospective on the events, achievements and people who got us where we are today.
To put it all in perspective, at the start of 2021, we had one office with just a handful of staff members and served only customers in Estonia. Four years later, and…well, you’ll have to read on to find out.
2021 – When Ambition and Reality Start Aligning
2021 started with a truly momentous moment in our history, one that still reverberates to this day and has helped shape Wallester into what it is now – we launched Wallester White-Label during Q1. The groundwork for this launch had been laid in the previous three years, culminating in late 2020 when we officially secured our status as a Visa Principal Member. We now found ourselves being able to offer a broader range of services and be genuinely competitive across Europe, and we gladly seized the opportunity.
In Q2 of 2021, we launched our long-awaited and widely anticipated app. Looking back at it now, it seems very basic and limited in features, but for its time, it was truly a game changer and is still the basis for the feature-rich version our users enjoy today.
Q3 saw another foundational event in our history: the Estonian Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) approved Wallester’s application and granted us a cross-border license. We were now ready to take our company to the rest of the EU and the European Economic Area.
We ended the year having achieved € 790,267 in revenue–which looks tiny in hindsight. But the rocket had been fueled, the course charted, and everything was in place for some serious achievements.
2022 – Preparation, Products, and Ready to Scale
If Wallester White-Label was our Ying, 2022 saw us locating our Yang with the launch of Wallester Business. Now we had a truly balanced product offering, even if it didn’t have all the extended features and functionality that make it the sector leader it is today. The impact on our business was immediate, as the market showed us that we had two products whose time had come.
We followed this launch with the first significant step into broadening our horizons, as Wallester was incorporated as a business in the UK in Q4 of 2022.
We closed out the year on a high, celebrating the festive season by successfully creating a cloud payment infrastructure through our partnership with Amazon. The benefits of scalability, flexibility, and how fast we can adapt to changing client and market demands are being felt to this day and have proven to be central to our continued success.
Regarding finances, 2022 delivered exponential growth, as we more than quadrupled our recognised revenue to €4 million.
2023 – From the Baltics to the World
2023 was a heavily front-loaded year, as Q1 was jam-packed with significant milestones. To kick things off, we established our first office outside Estonia when we opened the doors of our brand-new location in Valbonne, France. Chosen because of its status as an economic powerhouse in Europe, the years since have seen the French team grow rapidly and become a key part of Wallester’s success.
Never ones to rest on our laurels, we quickly followed up with the launch of our Affiliate Program, which allows our network of dedicated affiliates to earn substantial amounts from referring clients to Wallester. Recognising the benefits of a well-structured affiliate program to all parties involved, including clients, affiliates, and the company itself, Wallester strategically launched its unique, innovative program, and it has been going from strength to strength ever since.
In Q2, we launched a key feature as we expanded the range of cards we offered by adding the Wallester Business Payroll Program to our features. Designed to streamline payments and provide an elevated experience for employers, freelancers or affiliates, this program has proved enduringly popular.
Once again, our end-of-year numbers maintained their upward trajectory, as we registered another more than doubling in revenue terms, closing out the year with €9.2 million in revenue (132% YoY growth) and a 67% increase in our team size.
2024 – Growth, Expansion, and Innovation
In retrospect, we will celebrate 2024 as the year when all the foundational work of the preceding years finally came together, and we really hit our stride.
In Q1, we received the fantastic news that the Estonian Financial Supervisory Authority had granted us a second cross-border activity license. We were the first Estonian company to receive this specific license since Brexit, and it means that we can issue payment instruments and facilitate payment transactions in the UK.
To take advantage of the opportunity presented by this license, we appointed Julian Brand as our UK CEO and Executive Board member. We expect great things from the UK team in the coming years.
Our tech and engineering teams are always busy, but 2024 saw them push their levels to superhuman as we further strengthened our partnership with Amazon Web Services, which wasfirst launched in 2022. This project phase included our ongoing build-out of a more robust data warehouse and AI integration to improve fraud monitoring. This strategy ensures we have a strong and scalable platform ready for expansion, no matter where the business takes us.
Q3 saw us return to geographical expansion as we opened our newest (at the time of writing) office in Riga, Latvia. This business development office provides Wallester with a solid foundation to further expand our sales and business development initiatives.
What better way to close out the year than with an award? And although we won several of them in 2024, the two that are closest to our hearts are being named Estonia’s top start-up at the Äripäev TOP100 Gala and securing 5th spot in the Sifted 30 Eastern Europe & Baltics Leaderboard.
2024 was a banner year financially, as we reached €17.2M in revenue, representing an 87% year-over-year increase*.The fact that this revenue was generated almost precisely on a 50/50 basis between Wallester Business and White-Label also reinforced our commitment to our dual-product approach.
Of course, a company needs good people to succeed, and our team also grew to match our finances as we added over 40 new Wallesterians to the fold.
*Unaudited numbers at time of publishing
Looking Ahead to 2025 and Beyond
The framework we have built across the last four years in terms of business development, product range and maturity, and the technological backbone underpinning everything will allow us to ramp up our expansion plans significantly.
As a licensed financial organisation, we are investing heavily in the growth of our Legal and AML and Compliance teams in preparation for the challenges and opportunities presented by new markets and geographical expansion.
As always, our tech stack is the framework on which we build our success, so this is another area where we will look to innovate to maintain our position as a European leader in our industry. Our customers and partners can expect many new features over the coming year.
But more than anything, we are simply excited about what this year will bring, determined to deliver our best work, and help businesses across Europe and the UK change how they manage their finances.
Wallester’s CEO and Co-Founder, Sergei Astafjev, says: “Looking back at the last four years fills me with immense pride—not just for what we have built, but for the relentless ambition, resilience, and innovation that have driven us forward. Every milestone we’ve achieved is a testament to the talent and dedication of our team. But this is just the beginning. The next four years will be defined by even greater breakthroughs, bolder ambitions, and an unwavering commitment to transforming the future of finance. With this team, I have no doubt that we will redefine what’s possible.”
If the next four years are anything like the last, we’re in for a thrilling ride.
