Nikolay Storonsky

A ski trip to Switzerland in 2013 cost Storonsky more than 500 pounds in foreign exchange fees, and after seven years on the trading side of a bank he knew exactly how the charge had been built and hidden from him. He left Credit Suisse that year and put 300,000 pounds of his own savings into the alternative.¹

Nikolay Storonsky is the co-founder and CEO of Revolut, a UK-based financial technology company that started as a prepaid card offering fee-free foreign currency exchange and has grown into a broad digital banking app covering payments, currency exchange, savings, trading, and business accounts. He founded the company in 2013 after leaving a career as a bank trader, funding its earliest development entirely out of his own pocket.

Background

Storonsky was born on July 21, 1984, in Dolgoprudny, a town near Moscow known for its concentration of scientists and engineers. His father was a physicist who worked as Deputy General Director of Science at Gazprom Promgaz, a subsidiary of the Russian state gas company. Storonsky showed early aptitude in quantitative subjects, winning the International Economics Olympiad twice in high school without formal tutoring. He went on to complete two master's degrees simultaneously: one in physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (known as Phystech), and one in economics and finance at the New Economic School, graduating in 2007.¹

Getting started

Storonsky moved to London to work as an equity derivatives trader, joining Lehman Brothers in 2006. He says he lost a significant portion of his personal savings when Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008, an experience he has said taught him to back decisions with data and logic rather than intuition. He continued trading after the collapse, moving to Credit Suisse, where he stayed until 2013. By his own account he found the work increasingly unfulfilling, later saying that as a banker he had already reached the maximum and it had become boring.¹

The 300,000 pounds of savings went into a multi-currency card that would let people spend and exchange money abroad at close to the real market rate, and Storonsky was the company's only investor at founding. Vlad Yatsenko, a software engineer who had worked at Deutsche Bank, joined as co-founder months later to build the underlying banking technology.

What he built

Revolut launched publicly on July 1, 2015, after raising a seed round of about 1.5 million pounds from Seedcamp and Balderton Capital. Early customer acquisition was largely manual: Storonsky and early staff stood at London tourist locations handing out flyers to the effect of stop paying bank fees.¹ The company pursued a faster e-money license before later pursuing full banking licenses in the markets where it operates, including the UK, where it received a banking license with restrictions in 2024 and a full, unrestricted license in 2026.

From the original multi-currency card, Revolut expanded into a full financial app offering current accounts, stock and cryptocurrency trading, budgeting tools, travel insurance, and a business banking product. Revenue and profitability scaled alongside the customer base: by 2023 group revenue had passed 2 billion dollars with several hundred million dollars in pre-tax profit, and by 2024 revenue reached roughly 4 billion dollars with pre-tax profit near 1.4 billion dollars. The company's global retail customer base passed 65 million by 2025. Revolut's valuation rose through primary and secondary funding events, reaching 45 billion dollars in 2024 and 75 billion dollars in a secondary share sale in November 2025, backed by investors including Coatue, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Nvidia's venture arm. Storonsky has said an initial public offering is unlikely before 2028.¹

How he operates

Storonsky has described his central philosophy as building rather than buying: Revolut constructs most of its own technology and financial infrastructure internally rather than integrating third-party vendor software, a policy he has summarized as the belief that owning everything lets a company do everything well. Deel co-founder and CEO Alex Bouaziz has credited this build-everything mantra as a direct influence on Deel's own decision to build its payroll engine, internal tooling, and knowledge base in-house, and has said Storonsky is the founder he looks up to most. Bouaziz has also credited a conversation with Storonsky for converting him to the value of brand marketing as Deel scaled.²

Storonsky's hiring philosophy follows a similar logic of ownership and intensity. Revolut, together with its affiliated venture firm QuantumLight Capital, has publicly described an internal hiring system built around the principle that exceptional, dense teams outperform larger average ones. The company says it favors ambitious, relatively junior problem-solvers over long-tenured specialists, in some cases replacing senior executives who had years of experience but, in the company's telling, lacked the drive to solve unfamiliar problems.³ Storonsky has said he does not believe conventional work-life balance is compatible with building a startup, framing founding as an all-in commitment. He has also been openly critical of the banking industry he came from, describing it as bureaucratic and arguing that most of its staff could be eliminated without changing outcomes.

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Storonsky remains CEO of Revolut, which he continues to run as a private company with no near-term IPO plans. Revolut has grown from two desks in Canary Wharf, the same London financial district where Storonsky once worked as a bank trader, into one of Europe's most valuable private technology companies, with tens of millions of customers across more than 100 countries and a valuation in the tens of billions of dollars. The company has also begun publishing more of its internal operating systems, including its hiring playbook and, separately, technical work on machine learning models trained on its own customer transaction data, reflecting Storonsky's continued emphasis on owning infrastructure rather than relying on outside vendors.³

Key facts

• Born July 21, 1984, in Dolgoprudny, Russia; completed simultaneous master's degrees in physics and in economics and finance in 2007.
• Traded equity derivatives at Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse from 2006 to 2013, losing a significant portion of his personal savings in the 2008 Lehman collapse.
• Founded Revolut in 2013 after noticing more than 500 pounds in hidden foreign exchange fees on a ski trip, funding it initially with 300,000 pounds of his own savings and no outside investors.
• Revolut launched publicly on July 1, 2015, following a roughly 1.5 million pound seed round from Seedcamp and Balderton Capital.
• Revolut's valuation reached 45 billion dollars in 2024 and 75 billion dollars in a November 2025 secondary sale, with global customers surpassing 65 million by 2025.
• Revolut received a full UK banking license in 2026, after years operating under a restricted license following its 2024 approval.