Ali Niknam
Dutch entrepreneur
Ali Niknam (born December 12, 1981) is a Dutch entrepreneur, book author, founder of TransIP, CEO and founder of bunq.
In 2022, he gained public attention for leading bunq in a landmark legal battle against the Dutch Central Bank over the use of artificial intelligence in anti-money laundering compliance.
Biography
Ali Niknam was born in an Iranian family on December 12, 1981, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. When he was 7 years old, the family moved to Gouda, Netherlands. He graduated from secondary school at the Coornhert Gymnasium in Gouda and in 2007 received a bachelor's degree in technical informatics from the Delft University of Technology.
In 2003, during university years, Niknam founded TransIP, a company that specialized in domain name registration and web hosting. In 2014, he handed over the management of the company and in 2019, after the merging with the Belgian company Combell, TransIP was renamed team.blue where he remained a board member. In 2007, with his two partners, he founded a data center company The Datacenter Group. As of 2018 he remained a shareholder in the company at least.
In 2011, Niknam wrote a book called Ondernemers hebben nooit geluk (Entrepreneurs are never lucky) covering his entrepreneurship experience.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ali Niknam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.