Crypto CEO Charts Course From Cargo Ships to $820 Million Stake

Eric Demuth: The crypto side will always be one of our main businesses and there are more products coming for that space.

Eric Demuth wanted to become a ship captain before changing tack to set up cryptocurrency trading platform Bitpanda. He worked as a mechanic on a variety of container ships for two and a half years, dropping anchor in ports in China, Japan and across Southeast Asia. But the nomad life left Demuth “a bit bored,” and he eventually came back to Vienna to study finance. Back on dry land he met Bitpanda co-founder Paul Klanschek, an encounter that's proved spectacularly profitable. The pair along with fellow co-founder Christian Trummer, still hold around half the firm - even after closing a $263 million funding round this week led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures that valued the startup at $4.1 billion. Demuth and Klanschek each own about a fifth of the firm, a holding worth roughly $820 million on paper, according to calculations by Bloomberg.