User:Eline Danny/sandbox

Gauthier Thomas Andre Van Malderen is a Belgian entrepreneur. He is the founder & CEO of Perlego.

Early life
Van Malderen was born in Brussels, Belgium. He was educated at Tower House School in London, followed by the European School of Brussels Uccle. His first business was building a website as a teenager called Teenage Tourist. He earned a degree in Economics, Management & Finance from Universita Bocconi and a Postgraduate from the University of Cambridge.

Career
While at Bocconi University, he started a student marketing company called Iconic Matter. Iconic Matter was a youth orientated marketing company that partnered with universities across Belgium, providing an online and on-campus advertising solution. It expanded to 80 universities and several countries including Belgium, Switzerland and Spain. Van Malderen ran the company from 2012 until 2014. The company was sold to a Belgian media group upon which it was consolidated with other student media brands.

In early 2017 he founded Perlego. Perlego was founded as a response to the rising inflation of textbook prices. Van Malderen sought to be able to provide an affordable alternative to the high cost of purchasing university textbooks, while helping publishers recover market share lost to piracy.

In 2021 he was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. In March 2023 Van Malderen joined Friends of Europe as a European Young Leader.