Markus Villig was twenty years old in August 2013 when he borrowed about 6.000 dollars from his parents, money set aside for his university education, and used it to start a ride hailing company instead. Thirteen years later that company is Bolt, Europe's closest thing to a direct answer to Uber, and Villig, still only in his early thirties, is a billionaire running it from the same city where he started, Tallinn.
The early growth came fast by the standards of European startups. Bolt crossed a 1 billion dollar valuation in 2019, making Villig the youngest unicorn founder in Europe at 25, and a funding round in 2021 pushed that figure to 8,4 billion dollars, the point at which his stake made him a billionaire on paper. What has kept him one is that the business behind the valuation actually works, Bolt generated 3 billion dollars in revenue in 2025 and posted positive cash flow for the second year running, a rarer achievement among ride hailing companies than the funding headlines usually suggest.
Villig built that position by avoiding a direct fight with Uber in the markets Uber already dominated. Instead Bolt pushed into Eastern Europe and Africa, regions the larger American company had left underserved, while keeping costs down by running the company out of Tallinn rather than a Silicon Valley office and charging drivers lower commissions than competitors did. The formula now spans more than 50 countries and 600 cities, covering ride hailing, food delivery through Bolt Food, e-bikes, scooters and car sharing for roughly 200 million customers, with total transaction volume across the platform reaching 14 billion dollars.