Since its founding in 2011, London-based GoCardless — which makes its money by facilitating direct debit payments for businesses in exchange for a fee — has raised more than £500m from investors including Passion Capital, Accel and Balderton and is currently valued at $2.1bn.
But its legacy is much bigger than that. Its three cofounders — Hiroki Takeuchi, Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson — have had a big impact on the UK’s startup scene. Blomfield went on to found UK neobank Monzo; Robinson started real estate platform Nested and is now a partner at VC firm Accel; and Takeuchi remains at GoCardless as CEO.
It’s also spawned a whole lot of other startups. Two GoCardless alum have already started — and exited — companies: Harry Marr, the former CTO at GoCardless and its first employee, bootstrapped his SaaS company Dependabot to a 2019 acquisition by Github; and in 2022, logistics company Wisetech Global also bought Shipamax, a startup founded by ex-global expansion lead Jenna Brown.
There are at least 10 more former GoCardless employees currently building businesses that Sifted has tracked down. These companies were founded in Europe and were either venture-backed or bootstrapped. If we’ve missed any alumni who are now founders from this list, please reach out.
Tamara Ciullo at Cariqa
Founded: 2023
HQ: Berlin, Germany
Tamara Ciullo spent a year and a half at GoCardless as a product marketing manager between April 2022 and September 2023 before founding EV charger marketplace Cariqa. Ciullo says to Sifted the experience helped give her the confidence to become an entrepreneur herself. Cariqa is in the process of closing a pre-seed round.
Daniel Gray at Lerno
Founded: 2023
HQ: London, UK
Daniel Gray was director of corporate sales for close to three years at GoCardless before leaving to start customer intelligence platform Lerno last year. Currently a team of five, Gray says the startup is raising an angel round.
Ilona Melnychuk at KeyBento
Founded: 2023
HQ: London, UK
After a year and a half as product manager where she helped build GoCardless’ machine learning platform, Ilona Melnychuk left last year to found home swapping platform KeyBento.
Currently a team of five, including her cofounder Hervé Ky, KeyBento aims to make it more affordable for families to go on holiday by curating a global community of families offering their homes to each other.
Amaury de Closset at Limio
Founded: 2017
HQ: London, UK
Founded in 2017, Limio is a commerce platform used by media publishers such as UK magazine The Economist and Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail to convert and retain subscriptions. Its founder Amaury De Closset helped launch GoCardless in France during his two-year tenure at the company.
Stephen Reidy at Synq
Founded: 2022
HQ: London, UK
Stephen Reidy is one of the cofounders of data reliability platform Synq, along with former Monzo head of data science Mikkel Dengsøe and Pleo founding CTO Petr Janda. The startup offers services to fintechs such as neobank Lunar and expenses platform Dext that ensure the accuracy of the data they use.
Pete Hamilton at Incident.io
Founded: 2020
HQ: London, UK
Pete Hamilton was an engineer at GoCardless for six years, later joining Monzo in an engineering role in 2019. He cofounded Incident.io, a platform that helps technology companies manage IT incidents, with former Monzo employees Chris Evans and Stephen Whitworth. The startup raised a $34m funding round in July 2022 from investors such as Index Ventures and Point Nine.
Michael Christofides at pgMustard
Founded: 2018
HQ: UK
As an early employee at GoCardless Michael Christofides built and led the customer success team between 2014 and 2016. Since then, he’s founded and bootstrapped pgMustard, a program that speeds up the query process on the open-source database system PostgreSQL.
Ben Morfoot at Effra
Founded: 2023
HQ: London, UK
Former director of product Ben Morfoot left GoCardless in 2023, after six years at the company. In October last year, he cofounded Effra, a fintech focusing on healthcare billing according to its LinkedIn.
Steve Domin at Duffel
Founded: 2017
HQ: London, UK
Steve Domin was head of platform engineering at GoCardless during his four-year stint at the company. He left in 2017 to start Duffel, a startup providing low-code software tools for the travel industry, and has raised $56.3m from investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures and Blossom Capital.
Kit Aspen at Thrust Carbon
Founded: 2019
HQ: London, UK
Founded in 2019, Thrust Carbon is a carbon intelligence platform founded by ex-GoCardless operations manager Kit Aspen. The London-based company calculates travel emissions to guide companies such as S&P Global and Novartis to reduce their carbon footprint.
