Meet Adyen: The Little-Known Unicorn Collecting Cash For Netflix, Uber, Spotify and Facebook

Five of Uber's top 10 cities by ride count are now in China. Airbnb already books a majority of its nights (70%) outside the US. What these globalizing Web firms have in common is the headache of collecting money in local currency. Payments drop, systems crash. The mess of platforms and intermediaries makes launching into a new country and currency time-consuming and costly. That complexity is Pieter Van der Does' margin. The CEO of Adyen runs one of the fastest-growing firms in the $1.6 trillion e-commerce industry. Not many people have heard about Adyen, but it has carved out a powerful place by laying down smooth payment rails all over the world for the biggest names in tech: Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Uber. Adyen's roots go back 20 years to when Van der Does met his future cofounders at a Dutch payments startup called Bibit. The name "Adyen" is Surinamese for new beginning, and that mentality became its secret weapon.