Meet the 2026 Beelievers Award Winners: Europe Edition

At Beelieve ’26 London, one theme showed up everywhere: the companies scaling fastest are treating monetization, finance, and operations as strategic capabilities, not back-office functions.

The Beelievers Awards recognize the leaders and teams turning that belief into reality. From pioneering AI monetization models to rebuilding enterprise systems at enormous scale, this year’s winners are setting the standard for what modern growth looks like.

Selected from across the Chargebee customer and partner ecosystem, this year’s winners represent some of the most ambitious growth, transformation, and monetization initiatives in Europe.

Meet the 2026 London Beelievers Award winners.

Modern CFO Award: Anna Walsh, CFO, Bitrise

At Bitrise, finance operates as a growth function, not a reporting one. That shift only happens with a leader who understands both the numbers and the business they serve.

Anna Walsh has completely reimagined what the CFO role looks like inside a fast-moving engineering platform. Beyond reporting outcomes, at Bitrise, finance now plays an active role in shaping pricing models, product investment, longer term bets, and growth strategy.

AI Monetization Pioneer Award: Sesame HR

Sesame HR is a Spain-based HR platform for SMBs, expanding quickly across Europe and Latin America. Its product has grown from core HR into payroll, time tracking, performance management, and increasingly AI-assisted workflows, and its pricing model has needed to keep pace.

Rather than treating AI as a premium add-on, Sesame HR built the operational foundation required to monetize AI sustainably at scale. As it rolled out AI-powered features, the Sesame team deliberately shifted to a hybrid usage-based model built on feature entitlements. What makes its story worth celebrating is the discipline of its phased approach, which started with a catalog rebuild and then shifted to a pilot, a new business cutover, and a wave-based migration of the existing base at renewal. 

Structured usage-based billing at this level of customer-first execution is rare. Sesame HR delivered it.

Learn more about Sesame HR’s story here.

Global Growth Leader Award: Proton

Proton serves more than 100 million users across its Mail, VPN, Drive, Pass, Calendar, and Wallet products. Headquartered in Geneva and built on Swiss privacy principles and end-to-end encryption, Proton has scaled from a single secure email product into a full ecosystem trusted by journalists, activists, businesses, and consumers in almost every country in the world.

What makes Proton’s growth story remarkable is that it happened without compromise. While most consumer SaaS businesses treat user data as a monetization asset, Proton built a subscription model grounded in privacy and proved it could compete at global scale. That meant navigating multi-currency billing, regional payment methods including cryptocurrency, tax compliance across jurisdictions, and complex pricing across a multi-product suite, all while keeping the user experience seamless.

Proton proved that global growth and strong business economics do not require compromising customer trust. Its transition to a non-profit foundation structure in 2024 only reinforced that long-term commitment.

Growth Architecture Champion Award: Cafeyn

Cafeyn is Europe’s leading digital newsstand, operating the Readly and Cafeyn app, with over 2.5 million subscribers across 15 countries. That footprint didn’t come from organic growth alone. It came from acquisitions, each one bringing its own billing systems, payment methods, and subscriber base into the fold.

Turning that complexity into a scalable operating model fell to a three-person team. Under the product leadership of Bram Steijns, Cafeyn’s billing team led the migration from Product Catalog 1.0 to 2.0, championed Multi-Business Entity adoption, and introduced ramps, family plans, and new payment integrations across markets including SEPA Direct Debit, Klarna, and iDEAL.

Following Cafeyn’s acquisition of Readly, the team undertook one of its most significant integration projects: migrating approximately 260,000 Readly subscriptions spanning Adyen, PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay, and Google Pay into Chargebee’s Multi-Business Entity framework in under two months. Around 95% of payment tokens migrated successfully. The entire process was executed largely self-serve.

Great growth is about acquiring customers and building the infrastructure to support them at scale. Cafeyn built both.

Read more: How Cafeyn reduced involuntary cancellations by 90% and is leading the digital press revolution

Modern Enterprise Transformation Award: McQueens Dairies

McQueens Dairies undertook one of the most ambitious transformation programs we’ve ever seen at Chargebee. The challenge: replace a decades-old legacy dairy management system called Roundsman and migrate 500,000 customers onto an entirely new tech stack, all while managing two million perishable goods deliveries every week without a single disruption.

In eight months, the McQueens team nailed it. They brought in Chargebee for billing, revenue recognition, and retention, Microsoft Dynamics for CRM, Azure Data Lake for unified data storage, and Power BI to replace critical Excel reporting. Every manual billing workflow, including customer creation, direct debit onboarding, ramp creation, and invoice consolidation was automated end-to-end.

Few transformation programs combine this level of operational risk, technical complexity, and execution speed. For a business delivering perishable goods at this scale, there is zero margin for error. McQueens Dairies milked it for all it’s worth. 

Bee-yond Innovation Award: PayPal

The Bee-yond Innovation Award honors a partner that has pioneered new capabilities, approaches, or technologies — expanding the value of the Chargebee platform through forward-thinking execution backed by real results.

PayPal continues to innovate by combining flexible payment experiences with scalable recurring revenue solutions that help businesses simplify operations, expand globally, and drive sustainable growth.

Through continued investment in recurring payments, subscription commerce, and global payment experiences, PayPal has helped businesses expand internationally while reducing the operational complexity of managing payments at scale. PayPal’s ongoing partnership with Chargebee has enabled customers to bring together billing, payments, and revenue operations in a more unified way.

Here’s to the 2026 European Beelievers Award Winners

This year’s winners come from different industries, regions, and business models. What connects them is a willingness to rethink how growth works in an era defined by AI, changing customer expectations, and increasing operational complexity.

Congratulations to all the 2026 European Beelievers Award winners. See the 2025 European winners here, and catch this year’s North America winners here.