The Blink Edition No. 19

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

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Most of my entrepreneurial life has been spent around software companies, where the question was always whether customers would buy.

The fastest-growing parts of European venture this year are not software companies. They are satellites, factory technology, drones and the power needed to run them. Robotics and drones took more money in the first nine months of this year than in all of last year.

What interests me is not the sectors. It is who the customer is. A consumer software company learns within weeks whether anyone wants it. A company selling sovereign capability learns when a procurement cycle closes, which may be two years later, and the answer rests on a budget decision made by people who will never use the product.

Both can be excellent businesses. They are not the same business, and they do not carry the same risk. Revenue that arrives through a public contract is usually larger, slower and more durable than commercial revenue, and it is exposed to something commercial revenue is not, which is politics.

I am not warning anyone off. Europe building its own defence, energy and industrial technology is overdue, and the capital following it is rational. But a great deal of money is moving into a model that much of our industry has never underwritten, and the instincts we built in the software cycle do not transfer cleanly.

The question I would ask of any company in this wave is a simple one. If the contract does not come, what is left?

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The fastest-growing parts of European venture this year are not software businesses.

Space tech is pacing 273.8% above its 2025 total at €3.5 billion, advanced manufacturing is on track to beat last year by 188.7% at €9.1 billion, and robotics and drones drew €8.7 billion in the first nine months against €5 billion for the whole of 2025, per PitchBook’s Q3 figures. On providional Q3 figures, Crunchbase puts physical technology, meaning defence, data centres, energy, aerospace and robotics, at roughly half of all European funding in the quarter.

KPMG states the reason plainly: procurement commitments and public investment initiatives improved the outlook for companies supporting regional security and industrial capacity, and this encouraged investors to make larger commitments, particularly to companies that could secure long-term contracts. Companies outside the favoured themes, it adds, often found fundraising harder.

Procurement is not the whole story. The robotics and drones figure covers commercial and industrial uses alongside defence, and like most vertical totals this year it is lifted by a handful of very large rounds, such as Quantum Systems’ $1.2 billion Series D. The direction of travel is clear. The attribution is not.

It is also worth being precise about what the rankings do and do not show. Fintech has slid down Europe’s vertical table this year, which has been widely read as a retreat. European fintech raised $2.4 billion in the third quarter, 20% more than in the same quarter last year, though well down on an unusually strong second quarter. Measured against last year, it did not shrink. It was outrun.

Which makes this a story about relative speed, and about what the fast lane is made of. A company whose buyer is a ministry carries a different risk profile from one whose buyer is a business. The sales cycle is measured in budget years rather than quarters. The contract is often larger and longer-lived when it lands. And the decision turns on political priorities that no amount of product work can influence.

None of that makes it a worse investment, in our view. It makes it a different one, underwritten by an industry whose instincts were formed in a cycle where demand was discovered quickly and cheaply.

The question worth putting to any company riding this wave is what remains if the contract does not arrive. Those with a commercial market underneath the public one have an answer. Those built entirely around a procurement decision have a thesis, which is not the same thing.
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Five lenses for evaluating a startup at any stage - live webinar this Thursday

A more mature company is not automatically a better investment. This Thursday, 5 November at 17:00 EET, Maria Koletsou, Founder of Blossom Ventures, and Bogdan Stoian, our Head of Investment Syndication, spend an hour on what actually changes between pre-seed and pre-IPO, and what does not.

They work through five questions: what you really know about the company, whether the price fits the stage, what has to happen for the next round to arrive, how you might eventually get your money out, and whether the opportunity belongs in your portfolio at all. Bring your questions and ask them directly in the live session.

Reserve your spot.

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Netherlands 🇳🇱

Braid raises $38M Series A

Braid raised $38 million led by Octopus Ventures, with KPN Ventures joining, for a single API that lets any app add SIM and eSIM connectivity across more than 600 carriers, a business the company says is already profitable and cash-flow positive.

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Germany 🇩🇪

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StrollMe raises €22M in equity and debt

Frankfurt-based StrollMe raised €22 million, equity from Hanse Ventures, HGDF and JOSS alongside new investor BMH and a credit facility from London’s Growth Credit Partners, to grow a subscription service for bikes, strollers and car seats that refurbishes and re-rents each item after it comes back.

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Belgium 🇧🇪

Ravical raises $17M seed

Ghent-based Ravical raised $17 million led by MMC Ventures, with Lakestar and Pitchdrive returning, to sell accounting and tax firms a platform that turns the methods of their most experienced staff into standardised processes an AI then runs across every client.

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Lovable opens its first London hub

The Swedish app builder has opened its second engineering and product hub after Stockholm, with around 70 people already there and a target of 100 by the end of the year. The reasons it gives are talent and proximity to the people building on it, the UK being its third-largest market by paying users.

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New founder archetypes in the AI age

Andrew Chen on which assumptions about founders were fundamental and which were artefacts of their era, running through five profiles that cheaper building has made newly plausible, and the reason each one might still not work. A useful corrective to the idea that the old rules have simply flipped.

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The two fears behind Anthropic’s IPO

John Thornhill on whether fund managers’ fear of missing out will beat their fear of overpaying for a five-year-old company that grew revenue more than twelvefold to $16.3 billion in the first half while losing $81 billion. The figure that lingers sits elsewhere: by one analyst’s count, $2.1 trillion of disclosed debt and non-cancellable compute commitments across big tech, the frontier labs and the neoclouds, against $1.3 trillion of subprime mortgages outstanding in March 2007.

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