Prosus has appointed WeTransfer co-founder Ronald Hans (widely known simply as Nalden) as chief product officer, the most prominent external hire yet in the Naspers-controlled group’s push to rebuild itself around artificial intelligence.
He joins two internal promotions announced on Tuesday. Euro Beinat, who has run AI at Prosus since 2018, becomes chief AI officer. Paul van der Boor, previously vice-president of AI, steps up to chief technology officer. All three will report into group CEO Fabricio Bloisi’s AI strategy.
The most substantial claim in Tuesday’s announcement is Beinat’s, who said his goal in the new role is “creating the leading AI lab in Europe”. Prosus gave no detail on where such a lab would sit, how many researchers it would employ or what it would cost.
The appointments extend a reorganisation Bloisi has pursued since taking over both Prosus and Naspers in July 2024. The group told shareholders in June that it had completed a shift from passive technology investor to “active operator of AI-driven lifestyle ecosystems”, and in March it unveiled a proprietary large commerce model trained on transaction data from iFood, OLX, PayU and its other platforms rather than on text.
Tuesday’s announcement describes that work as a “unified intelligence layer” built on the buying behaviour of a billion customers, which the new team is meant to turn into products for the companies and small businesses in the Prosus ecosystem.
“With this team, we plug the best product leadership in Europe into one of the biggest commerce data sets in the world,” Bloisi said in the statement. “I want Prosus to ship like a start-up and learn like a platform, 10 times faster.”
Founded WeTransfer
Nalden co-founded WeTransfer in 2009 and built it into a file-sharing service used by tens of millions on almost no outside investment. The company was sold to Italy’s Bending Spoons in 2024.
The urgency is not only technological. Two years into the four-year window that determines whether Bloisi collects a US$100-million share award, the combined Naspers and Prosus market value he must double has gone backwards, slipping to about $94-billion by March from $100-billion a year earlier. To trigger the award, it must reach $168-billion by June 2028. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
