The first customers were not banks. They were microfinance lenders in Mozambique, visited by a group of graduate students who did not yet know they were starting a company.
Eugene Danilkis, Frederik Pfisterer, Sofia Nunes, Josh Coe and Joydeep Sengupta were five students in Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Human-Computer Interaction programme. Their capstone was a one-year project. The assignment was about microlending. They did field research with microfinance institutions in Mozambique, watching how small lenders tracked loans in notebooks and clumsy software.
The first customers were microfinance providers in Latin America and Africa.
They saw a design problem. The lenders served poor customers, but the tools they used were built for large banks, and were slow and expensive to change. A product with a better interface and a more flexible core could change that.
When the year ended, most people go to jobs. Three of them kept going. Danilkis managed the project, Pfisterer led the technology and Nunes brought the psychology, and their thesis work became the foundation of a platform. In 2011 they set up Mambu in Berlin. The first customers were microfinance providers in Latin America and Africa. Early backers included Commerzbank and the Berlin fund Point Nine.
The turn came when the same flexible core turned out to suit banks and fintechs in rich countries, who wanted to launch loans and accounts without rebuilding their systems. A 2019 round of about €30m led by Bessemer marked the shift. In January 2021 a €110m round valued the company at $1.7bn, and in December 2021 EQT led a roughly €235m round at about €4.9bn. By 2022 it reported $165m of contracted annual recurring revenue.
The cost showed up in June 2023, when Danilkis stepped down as CEO. He stayed as a shareholder and board member, and the CTO, Fernando Zandona, took over, becoming permanent CEO in August. Founder transitions are rarely clean, and companies valued at that level are rarely allowed to stay small.
Mambu today is headquartered in Amsterdam, a long way from a Mozambican lender's notebook.
The lesson is in the sequence. The founders did not start with a market size. They started with an observation made in person, in the places where the pain was sharpest, and they were willing to stay with the problem after the course ended.