Charles Egly worked at a bank. When he needed a consumer loan, he went to his own employer, and the rate it offered him was above ten percent. He later told MoneyVox that everything started from a personal experience. A banker, shown the price of his own product, did not like what he saw.
He knew something the average borrower did not. Peer-to-peer lending, in which individuals lend directly to each other, was already established in the United States and Britain. In France it did not exist. Egly and his co-founder Geoffroy Guigou, a former McKinsey and Poweo man, founded the company in 2009. Thomas Beylot is also named as a co-founder in several articles.
Egly and Guigou renamed the company Younited Credit, opened it to institutional lenders and went to Italy.
The first years were slow and regulated. Money raised in 2010 and 2011, nine million euros in all, paid for the licence work. In 2011 the firm was approved as a credit institution, and it opened to the public that December as Prêt d'Union, the first French platform of its kind. By September 2015 it had around 27,000 clients, 210 million euros of loans and about 90 staff.
The turn came in 2016. Egly and Guigou renamed the company Younited Credit, opened it to institutional lenders and went to Italy. The reason was scale: matching individual lenders to borrowers was a charming idea but a small market. Spain followed in 2017, Portugal in 2018, Germany in 2020. By January 2019 it had financed one billion euros in credit, and in 2022 it had granted three billion.
The prize arrived in December 2022, when a sixty-million-euro round made it France's 28th unicorn. Revenue had been about 125 million euros in 2021. Then came the price of timing. When Younited listed on Euronext Paris on 20 January 2025, its valuation was far below the unicorn peak, at about 622 million euros. Egly was still the chief executive. In May 2025 the company said it would acquire the French neobank Helios through a share exchange.
Founders often hear that a company is a solution to a problem they personally had. Egly's version is more specific: he was the problem's insider, with a bank badge and an unfair rate. That is a good test for any idea. Does it come from an irritation you have felt yourself, in your own wallet?