Heini Zachariassen

Who they are

Heini Zachariassen is CEO of Vivino — co-founded BullGuard (cybersecurity) in 2002 and Vivino (wine app and marketplace) in 2010, and runs Raw Startup, a YouTube series on entrepreneurship.

Person

Heini founded Vivino in 2010 with Theis Søndergaard when it was a bootstrapped, pre-seed mobile app with negligible revenue — he's been building it ever since, a tenure now spanning more than 15 years. Before Vivino, he co-founded BullGuard in 2002, a cybersecurity firm he ran as CEO until 2008 — a full founder-to-exit arc in a completely different domain. Earlier still, he founded Virus112 in 1999, an early technology or security venture that preceded BullGuard. He holds a Bachelor's in Economics and Business Administration from a Danish university, and the arc — from security software to wine marketplace — is less a pivot than a repeated pattern: find a consumer problem, build a company around it, run it. His public voice spans Entrepreneur.com pieces on startups, a SXSW 2018 speaking slot, a 2022 Tech.eu appearance sharing Vivino's Danish scale-up story, and Raw Startup, a YouTube series where he dispenses entrepreneurship advice. Possibly — the wine advocacy is as much personal as professional; he's described as an enthusiast who built Vivino partly to democratize wine knowledge.

Company

Vivino's most recent major financing was a Series D co-led by Kinnevik and Sprints Capital, which brought total funds raised to $221 million. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and employs between 251 and 500 people. It holds the position of the world's most downloaded mobile wine app and the largest online wine marketplace — a community-ratings model that doubles as an e-commerce channel. Vivino remains privately held and has not disclosed its current valuation. The Series D mandate was expansion and investment in smarter, more personalized AI recommendations.

Market

Vivino competes in the online wine discovery and purchasing space against Wine.com, wine-searcher.com, and enosearcher.it. The U.S. wine market — Vivino's primary revenue opportunity — faced disruption in 2025 from the Trump administration's 'Liberation Day' trade executive order, which reshuffled competitive dynamics for imported wine. Vivino's community-ratings flywheel and marketplace model give it a data advantage that pure retail competitors lack, but trade policy volatility adds pricing and supply uncertainty.

Network

Vivino was co-founded with Theis Søndergaard, who remains the other named founder from the 2010 launch. No other direct relationship edges are available from the current data.

Theis Søndergaard· Co-founder, Vivino

How they likely show up

Long tenure at Vivino (joined 2010, still CEO) → thinks in company-building decades, not product cycles.
Serial founder pattern (Virus112 1999 → BullGuard 2002 → Vivino 2010) → high tolerance for starting from zero, likely impatient with large-company inertia.
Runs Raw Startup YouTube series alongside CEO role → comfortable being publicly visible and teaching; probably enjoys explaining frameworks out loud.
Shifted from cybersecurity to wine marketplace → comfortable operating outside domain expertise; bets on market structure and community dynamics over technical moat.
Spoke at SXSW 2018 and Tech.eu 2022, writes for Entrepreneur.com → maintains an external-facing public profile deliberately, not incidentally.
Possibly — founder who stepped into Chief Evangelist/Board role mid-journey before returning to CEO seat → has experienced the tension between building and leading, and has thought carefully about when to hold the wheel.

Conversation tips

→ Reference the BullGuard-to-Vivino jump specifically — ask what carried over from running a cybersecurity firm into building a wine community. It signals you've done the work.
→ Raw Startup is a genuine side project worth mentioning — ask what prompted it. It's not PR; it's a founder teaching other founders.
→ He's been public about democratizing wine knowledge, so frame any product or market conversation around consumer access, not just premium positioning.
→ He's been building Vivino for more than 15 years — don't pitch short-term thinking. He'll engage more on structural, long-horizon questions.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the BullGuard-to-Vivino founder arc — he built a cybersecurity firm from 2002 to 2008, then pivoted entirely to wine technology in 2010. That's an unusual range and he'll have a story about what the two companies share.
Reference Raw Startup, his YouTube entrepreneurship series — it's a named side project he runs alongside the CEO role, which says something about how he thinks about founder education and giving back.
Mention the Series D co-led by Kinnevik and Sprints Capital, which brought total raised to $221 million — it's the defining financing moment for Vivino and sets up a natural question about what phase the company is in now.

Discovery questions

Vivino has been the most downloaded wine app for years — at what point does the community ratings flywheel stop being a growth driver and start being the moat you defend?
You stepped back from CEO to Chief Evangelist at one point and then returned — what did that transition teach you about the difference between building a product and running a company?
The 2025 U.S. trade policy disruptions hit the wine import market hard — how has Vivino's marketplace model had to adapt when the supply and pricing environment shifts that quickly?

Avoid

Don't treat wine as just a hobby angle — it's the core thesis of the company and he's spent 15 years arguing it deserves the same data-driven community infrastructure as any other consumer category.

Make it yours