How Qonto Built Europe's Largest Growth Team: 300 People, 500K+ Clients

From 5,000 to 500,000+ Clients

Qonto is the leading European business finance solution for SMBs and freelancers. Founded in 2017 in Paris, the company raised over €600M and reached unicorn status.

The growth trajectory tells the story:

• 2018: 5,000 clients (France only)
• 9 months later: 20,000 clients (400% growth)
• 9 months after that: 40,000 clients (100% growth again)
• 2026: 500,000+ clients across France, Germany, Italy, and Spain

What makes Qonto unusual isn't just the numbers — it's the size of the growth organization they built to get there.

Meet the Growth Leadership

Heidrun Luyt — Chief Growth Officer

Heidrun joined Qonto as CGO to lead nearly 300 people spanning local and global Sales, Acquisition, Client Development, Brand & Communications, and Growth Projects & Operations.

Before Qonto, she was Global CMO at Pipedrive and spent seven years as CMO at IG Group (FTSE250 fintech), where she delivered record $1.15 billion in revenue (+33% YoY) and improved marketing ROI by 33 points.

Her mandate: accelerate European expansion while making Qonto's growth engine more scalable, data-driven, and customer-centric across all four markets.

Anh-Tho Chuong — Founding VP Growth

Anh-Tho was Qonto's founding growth leader, building the entire growth function from day one. Over three years, she took go-to-market from zero to several million euros in monthly recurring revenue.

She appeared on GrowthMakers multiple times, becoming one of the most-cited growth practitioners in the French startup ecosystem. Her episodes on scaling from 5K to 20K clients and achieving 400% growth in 9 months are essential listening for anyone building growth in European fintech.

Anh-Tho has since left Qonto to co-found Lago, an open-source billing platform for product-led companies — directly inspired by the billing and pricing challenges she faced while scaling Qonto's growth.

Julien Collet — Lead Growth Engineer

Julien appeared on GrowthMakers to discuss the engineering side of growth at Qonto — how they scaled from 20,000 to 40,000 clients while building what the podcast called "France's largest growth team."

His role highlights something important: at Qonto, growth engineering isn't a support function. It's a core discipline with dedicated leadership.

300 People: How a Growth Org at This Scale Works

Qonto's growth team of ~300 is structured across five pillars:

1. Local & Global Sales — country-specific sales teams plus cross-market coordination
2. Acquisition — performance marketing, SEO, content, partnerships
3. Client Development — onboarding, activation, expansion, retention
4. Brand & Communications — global marketing director Marion de Robillard leads this
5. Growth Projects & Operations — cross-functional initiatives, tooling, process optimization

This structure reflects a key insight: in European B2B fintech, you can't just run ads. You need local teams who understand local regulations, banking habits, and SMB cultures in each market. A French freelancer's relationship with their bank is fundamentally different from a German Mittelstand company's.

The Referral Engine

Anh-Tho's team launched a referral program in just one week that generated hundreds of free signups. Referral became one of Qonto's highest-performing acquisition channels.

Why referral works especially well for neobanks:

• High trust required. People don't switch banks based on ads. They switch when a friend they trust says "I use Qonto and it's better."
• Network effects in SMB communities. Freelancers talk to freelancers. Accountants recommend tools to all their clients. One referral can unlock an entire network.
• Low marginal cost. The reward for referring is cheap compared to the LTV of a business banking customer.

ARPU Optimization: Pricing as Growth

One of Anh-Tho's three core KPIs was Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). The growth team didn't just focus on getting more clients — they worked on making each client more valuable.

Tactics included:

• Pricing tier optimization — adjusting plan structures to encourage upgrades
• Feature upsell — introducing premium features (multi-user access, expense management, invoicing) that justify higher plans
• Usage-based expansion — as clients grow their business, their Qonto usage grows with it

This is a pattern that separates great fintech growth teams from average ones. Acquisition is necessary but not sufficient. Revenue per user is where the real leverage is.

Four Markets, One Playbook?

Qonto operates in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Each market has different:

• Banking regulations and licensing requirements
• SMB cultures and pain points
• Competitive landscapes (N26 in Germany, Revolut everywhere, local incumbents)
• Marketing channels that work

The growth team balances global playbooks (product-led onboarding, referral mechanics, pricing frameworks) with local execution (market-specific campaigns, local partnerships, language-specific content).

Heidrun's experience scaling Pipedrive across global markets is directly applicable here. The challenge is maintaining growth velocity while operating in four regulatory environments simultaneously.

Growth Engineering as a Discipline

Julien Collet's role as Lead Growth Engineer reflects Qonto's investment in the technical side of growth. The growth engineering team builds:

• Experimentation infrastructure — A/B testing across the sign-up flow, onboarding, and activation
• Data pipelines — connecting product usage data to growth team decision-making
• Referral mechanics — building and optimizing the referral system technically
• Attribution — understanding which channels drive which type of customer

This is increasingly common at top European startups. Data and analytics are no longer optional — they're the foundation of every growth decision.

What Growth Teams Can Learn from Qonto

1. Referral wins in high-trust categories. If switching costs are high (like banking), referral beats paid acquisition. Launch fast, iterate often.
2. ARPU matters as much as acquisition. Growing revenue per user is often easier and cheaper than acquiring new users.
3. Multi-market growth needs local teams. You can't scale a Paris playbook to Berlin without local expertise in regulations, culture, and competitive dynamics.
4. Growth engineering is a must. Dedicated engineers for growth aren't a luxury. They're what separates good from great.
5. Build the largest team if that's what the market requires. Qonto didn't build a 300-person team for vanity. European B2B fintech requires sales + marketing + ops in each market. Scale matches the complexity.
6. Hire operators who've done multi-market before. Heidrun's Pipedrive/IG Group experience is exactly right for Qonto's stage.

If you're interested in growth roles at European fintechs, browse open positions in France or check our salary guide.

Based on Anh-Tho Chuong's GrowthMakers episodes, Qonto's CGO announcement, and Julien Collet on GrowthMakers.