Most startups begin with an empty page. Thunes began with a split.
In 2005 a company called TransferTo started moving mobile airtime across borders. By 2016 it had grown into two different businesses. One kept selling mobile top-ups and became DT One. The other, with Peter De Caluwe among its co-founders, took the name Thunes and went after a bigger, harder market: moving money between businesses in different countries.
The partners were payment companies, banks and wallet providers, not consumers.
There is little public record of De Caluwe's early life, and this account does not guess at it. What is documented is the problem he said he set out to solve in 2016, the inefficiency of cross-border payments between businesses. A payment from one country to another passes through banks, wallets and local schemes, each with its own rules, each with its own licence.
Thunes' answer was to build one network and connect to the rest. The partners were payment companies, banks and wallet providers, not consumers. The company raised its Series B in 2020, led by Helios Investment Partners with Checkout.com and GGV Capital. It bought Limonetik, a Paris-based online payments platform, in 2021, and took a majority stake in the compliance-technology firm Tookitaki in April 2022.
The turn was investor appetite in a harder market. In July 2023 Thunes raised US$72 million from Marshall Wace at a valuation reported above US$900 million. In April 2025 it raised US$150 million more, led by Apis Partners and Vitruvian Partners, the largest round in its history. The company has not disclosed that valuation. In June 2025 it said it would acquire Tilia, and it now holds money transmitter licences in all 50 US states.
The leadership moved too. Floris de Kort ran the company as CEO until the end of October 2025. De Caluwe, who had spent about 18 months as Deputy Chairman, came back to the job, saying his focus would be continuity and global expansion.
The quiet part of this story is the one a founder should notice. Thunes is not famous. Few people have used it directly. It makes money by being the plumbing under other people's apps, which means every new country is another licence, another bank and another year of patience.
Sometimes the business worth building is the one the end customer never sees.