PwC alumnus Melissa Nussbaum joins WeTransfer as CFO
Capital markets and technology specialist Melissa Nussbaum has joined file-sharing platform WeTransfer as the firm’s new Chief Financial Officer. Nussbaum previously spent over a decade with Big Four consultancy PwC, where she was latterly a Senior Manager.
Digital service WeTransfer was founded in 2009 by Bas Beerens, Rinke Visser and Ronald Hans. In 2015, Highland Europe joined as a minority shareholder in exchange for a capital injection of $25 million, funding which helped the firm expand beyond its Amsterdam headquarters. The company has nearly 200 employees, and while the vast majority of those work in the Dutch capital, the firm also has a Los Angeles office, where it focuses on the music and film industry. According to WeTransfer, it has more than 70 million users worldwide, sending between a billion and 1.5 billion files every month.
In August 2019, WeTransfer raised a further €35 million in a new investment round, with money coming from private equity company HPE Growth – which became a minority shareholder – and previous investor Highland Europe. As the firm gears up for further expansion armed with that capital, WeTransfer has appointed Melissa Nussbaum as its new Chief Financial Officer.
Nussbaum has a great deal of experience with IPOs, having previously worked for professional services giant PwC for 11 years. Having initially joined in the company’s audit wing, Nussbaum went on to spend the last five years of her stay with the firm’s capital markets team in France, Canada and the UK – latterly holding the role of Senior Manager. In 2013, she joined game builder King, helping the company to prepare for an IPO and later overseeing a $5.9 billion acquisition by game studio Activision Blizzard. She spent the last three years as the company’s Head of Finance.
Speaking to Dutch paper Het Financieele Dagblad, WeTransfer Chief Executive Officer Gordon Willoughby said of the appointment, "Melissa is a commercial expert, and has vast experience in making subscription models internationally successful."
In addition to the appointment of Nussbaum, Alexandar Vassilev has been made responsible for WeTransfer’s growing product offering as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Vassilev was previously CEO at Joyn, a German streaming service which has 7 million monthly users. He will now help WeTransfer integrate its new apps, including Collect (an app to organise ideas) and Paper (an app to make drawings) into a single, holistic offering.
