Mihkel Aamer and Martin Sokk

EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year™ 2026 finalists, Estonia
Mihkel Aamer, Co-founder and CTO; and Martin Sokk, Co-founder and CEO; Lightyear

Mihkel Aamer and Martin Sokk are turning firsthand investing frustration into a new investing model.

Mihkel Aamer and Martin Sokk are united by a clear conviction: investing in Europe should be simpler, fairer and accessible across borders. Both came to that belief through experience. Martin joined Wise, the fintech platform that enables users to hold, send and spend money across currencies and borders, as its first product hire, helping to lead product, people and operations through a period of rapid global expansion. Mihkel began his career at UBS before joining Wise, where he led product development across payments, international growth and new products.

In the summer of 2020, a coffee catch up turned into a business plan. As investors themselves, they had encountered the same obstacles: fragmented platforms, high fees and hidden costs, and complexity that placed long term wealth building out of reach for many.

Their response was Lightyear, a European investment platform designed to be everything the incumbents were not. Built with deep infrastructure from day one, it supports multicurrency investing, local tax wrappers and market access across dozens of regulatory frameworks. Today, Lightyear serves customers in 25 countries in their local languages. It offers more than 6,000 stocks, ETFs, bonds and money market funds in a single app. The platform now manages over US$ 1 billion in client assets, has helped users generate more than US$200 million in returns, and has raised US$58 million from investors.