A teenager in Georgia once wrote to the president of the United States, and the president wrote back.
The reply, reported in a Tagesspiegel profile, came from George Bush Senior. The boy, Tamaz Georgadze, had written in the name of Eduard Shevardnadze, then Georgia's head of state. It is the kind of detail that reads like a joke until you notice what it shows: a young man who understood that doors open when you write to the person on the other side.
German savers kept money at home, at low rates, while banks across Europe paid more.
He went on to work, in 1994 and 1995, as an aide to the President of Georgia in the foreign relations department. He studied international economics at Tbilisi State University, then law and agricultural economics at the University of Giessen in Germany, where he earned a doctorate. Then he joined McKinsey. He stayed ten years and became a principal.
The idea that took him away from consulting was almost dull. German savers kept money at home, at low rates, while banks across Europe paid more. Georgadze, with Frank Freund and Michael Stephan, built a single website where a saver could open one account and place money with banks in other countries. The company, incorporated on 18 December 2012, began as Weltsparen and later became Raisin. In a podcast he described the early days in a Berlin basement.
What almost nobody tells you about boring ideas is how long they take. A company that moves money must be trusted before it is used, and it must sign banks before it has savers. By one profile, Raisin needed roughly a decade to turn a profit.
The prize at the end was scale. By June 2025 savers had put more than 75bn through the platform and a company profile counts more than 4bn in returns for savers. A Series E in 2023 reportedly valued the business at about US$1.1bn. In December 2024, a secondary sale of over €100m in shares put its value above €2bn. Raisin has never commented on its valuation.
The price was patience. Fintech valuations fell sharply after 2021, and some outlets reported that Raisin lost its unicorn tag before recovering. The company converted to a European company form, Raisin SE, in 2025.
Georgadze's life offers one repeatable lesson. The teenager who wrote letters to the powerful and the executive who set up a savings site are the same person. He asked for something that sounded unlikely, in writing, and kept asking until the other side answered.