The Blink Edition No. 13

The European private markets briefing you can't afford to miss. Deals, signals, and moves, decoded every Monday by SeedBlink.
‍

In banking, the amount of capital a counterparty had raised was never a sufficient measure of its strength.

You looked at whether the business generated cash, whether the model made sense, whether the obligations could be serviced through a bad year. Capital raised told you what someone else believed at a particular moment. It told you very little about whether the company would still be there when you needed it.

I have been thinking about how thoroughly that logic gets inverted in technology. A well-funded vendor reads as a safe vendor. A large round signals stability, the way a strong balance sheet used to. Founders choose infrastructure partners this way, and investors think about portfolio risk this way.

But a funding round is a snapshot of conviction, not a measure of durability. The two are different, and they can point in opposite directions. A company spending ahead of its revenue may, depending on how far ahead and for how long, be more exposed to a bad year than a smaller one that covers its own costs.

None of this means avoiding young companies. We are one, and we work with many. It means separating what a company has been given from what it has built. Those are not the same thing, and only one of them compounds.

‍

‍

Plenty of well-funded companies are perfectly healthy. The trouble is that funding tells you almost nothing about which ones.

Start with what happens to European companies after a round. In an analysis of the widening gap between the market companies raised in and the one they now need to graduate into, Triple Point Ventures notes that the share of European seed companies raising a Series A within 12 months has fallen from roughly 10 to 13% in 2020-21 to around 6% by the second half of 2024. Being two years past seed without a Series A, as the author puts it, is no longer unusual in Europe. It is the median position. Bridge and extension rounds have become the standard response: in the US they now make up about 40% of seed-stage investment, up from 20% before 2022, and the UK looks directionally similar.

At the far end of that gap sits the shutdown data, which is most granular for the US market. The 431 venture-backed companies that closed since 2023 had raised $17.5 billion between them, with a median of $11 million each, according to CB Insights. The median time from a company's last fundraise to its shutdown was 22 months. More than half died within two years of the round announced as evidence they were doing well.

There is also a reason you are unlikely to see trouble coming. In research on how startups actually end, Elizabeth Pollman shows that venture-backed companies rarely use formal bankruptcy, because their capital structures are built to avoid it. Her work describes the American system, but the mechanism travels: companies exit through soft-landing acquisitions, acqui-hires and quiet wind-downs, which means a struggling vendor tends to look fine right up until the announcement.

The practical read is not to avoid working with funded companies. It is to stop treating the round as the diligence. A funding announcement tells you what a group of investors believed on a particular date, under competitive pressure, with incomplete information. It does not tell you whether the company covers its costs, what the burn looks like now, or what happens if the next round does not close.

‍

We've joined the EIC Partners network

SeedBlink is now an EIC Partner, joining the network of organisations that support the 6,000+ innovations backed by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency.

The network exists to bring infrastructure, expertise and services to the companies the EIC backs. It's a mission we're glad to be part of.

EIC beneficiaries can access the EIC Community to discover and apply for services offered by partners.

Read more about the programme.

‍

Spain 🇪🇸

Fever raises $250M
‍
Madrid-based Fever, which owns ticketing platform DICE, raised $250M led by EQT with Point72 and Baillie Gifford participating, the largest round ever for a live-entertainment tech company. It arrives after three years in which Fever more than tripled revenue while staying EBITDA-positive, and the company frames the raise as a bet on the one thing AI cannot reproduce: being in a room with other people.

Read more

‍

‍

Romania 🇷🇴

Veridion raises $20M Series A

The Romanian-founded company raised $20M led by Hoxton Ventures, with Underline, OTB, Gapminder, Day One and LAUNCHub following on, for a continuously updated graph of roughly 640 million businesses worldwide. Company data refreshed quarterly or annually stops being intelligence and becomes history, the company argues, which matters more when insolvencies are at their highest level in a decade.

Read more

‍

‍

Iceland 🇮🇸
‍
Treble raises $18M Series A-2
‍
Reykjavík-based Treble raised $18M led by Paladin Capital Group, with the European Innovation Council Fund among the existing investors, for software that simulates how sound behaves in real spaces. The pitch is that robots can see but cannot hear: they miss someone falling in another room or a crash around a corner, and Treble generates the acoustic data to train for it.

Read more

‍

‍

Developers using AI for half their code jumped from 12% to 42% in a year
‍‍

A BairesDev industry survey finds AI now saves developers 13 hours a week, nearly double last year. None of that time came back: two thirds report spending more hours reviewing AI output, half more hours debugging it, and CTOs are increasing budgets for review and validation rather than cutting them.

Read more

‍

‍

Revolut is considering a dual listing in London and New York
‍‍

Nik Storonsky told Les Echos the company is planning to list on both the LSE and Nasdaq, a notable softening from his 2024 position that London simply could not compete. At its recent $115bn valuation, a London listing would make Revolut one of the largest public companies in the UK.

Read more

‍

Is the AI safety debate about safety or control?
‍

After Dario Amodei's essay calling for coordinated deceleration, the major labs are reportedly building a private standards body between themselves. Cohere's Aidan Gomez puts the objection plainly: the dispute was never whether AI needs guardrails, but who writes them and whose interests they protect.

Read more

‍