Flywire: how the new technological unicorn with ‘Spanish blood’ came into being

Iker Marcaide was a young engineer starting out at the prestigious MIT in the United States. It was 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. To attend the MBA, he had to make the first of his tuition payments. The transfer was a headache and ended up in the wrong account. Unfortunately, it was not an exceptional thing in American universities. Why not devise a platform to try to solve these problems? That was the germ of Peertransfer. This startup, today called Flywire, which was born between Boston (USA) and Valencia, has just made its debut in the select club of technological unicorns after the irruption of Goldman Sachs as a partner in a shareholding with other giants of Silicon Valley and the Spanish fund Kibo Ventures.

At the head of Marcaide, an industrial engineer from the Polytechnic of Valencia, he was already hovering around this project in the summer of 2009, when he completed an internship in a Silicon Valley technology company. He set up the first company there and created a small team of technicians who came from banking and technology companies. «I was burned out right away because they needed a salary,» he explains. While finishing his MBA, he decided to look back at Valencia, where he found several developers to help him with a first product sketch.

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