The Blink Edition No. 2

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

Founders love talking about unicorns. Investors love funding them. But most unicorns don't start as unicorns. They start as cockroaches.

Cockroaches are the companies that refuse to die. They survive bad markets, failed launches, difficult fundraises, stronger competitors, and their own mistakes. They fall behind, sometimes badly, and they claw their way back. The best comebacks in business, like the best in sport, aren't about dominating from the start. They're about refusing to lose.

There's a second lesson underneath the first: leadership. Talent gets you into the game. Experience, adjustments, and steadiness under pressure are what win it, especially when everything is going wrong. That's true on the court, and it's true in a boardroom at 2am before a round closes.

Six years and 200+ deals in, this is the pattern we keep seeing. The companies that make it aren't the ones that never struggled. They're the ones that were still standing when it mattered.

Unicorns are born from cockroaches. Keep that in mind this week.

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The exit window is opening again. Just not evenly, and not everywhere.

Q2 2026 brought the most billion-dollar startup exits since the 2021 peak, headlined by SpaceX's record-shattering debut and its $2.1 trillion first-day market cap. Cerebras and Quantinuum listed too. After three years of frozen IPO markets, liquidity is genuinely returning, and with Anthropic and OpenAI both filing confidentially, the momentum isn't slowing.

But look closer and the reopening is concentrated: overwhelmingly US, overwhelmingly large, overwhelmingly AI and deep tech. That's the gap that matters for Europe. Harvard's Josh Lerner, writing for CEPR, notes Europe deployed €66.2B in venture in 2025, still only 22% of the US total at a comparable economic scale. And the European Central Bank has flagged the structural problem underneath: limited exit options discourage late-stage investment in the first place, and push European companies to raise, and eventually relocate, abroad.

So the headline "exits are back" is true, but it's mostly someone else's headline. For European founders and investors, the reopening at the top end doesn't automatically reach the middle of the market, where most companies actually sit.

That's why liquidity infrastructure matters closer to home. Secondary markets, continuation vehicles, and structured partial exits are what let capital return to investors and recycle into the next generation of companies, without waiting for a once-in-a-decade IPO. A market that can't return capital eventually stops attracting it.

Resilience keeps a company alive. But survival isn't the same as liquidity. The founders who refuse to die still need somewhere to go when they've won.

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Dristor Kebap passes the €1M threshold

The Dristor Kebap round has surpassed the €1M threshold and remains open. CEO Cristian Nica is joining the round himself, with a €100,000 ticket.

It's a rare profile for a crowdfunding round: a well-known consumer brand with 25 years of operating history, 12 own restaurants, and profitability. In 2025, the company reported around €17M in revenue, double its 2023 figure.

The capital will fund expansion from 12 to 25 locations by 2030, targeting €43M in revenue, alongside investment in operational, digital, and brand infrastructure.

Access the round.

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Germany 🇩🇪

Quantum Systems raises $1.2bn Series D‍

Munich-based drone maker Quantum Systems raised $1.2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, the largest European defence tech round to date, as investors continue to back autonomous systems that could reshape European defence.

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Lithuania 🇱🇹

InSoil lands €120M credit facility‍

Vilnius-based InSoil secured a €120M facility from Pollen Street to lend to farmers going regenerative, one of Europe's largest private credit commitments for sustainable agriculture, in a segment banks have long avoided.

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Croatia 🇭🇷

Hypefy AI raises $7.2M Series A‍

Croatia-based Hypefy AI raised $7.2M to automate influencer marketing end to end, quadrupling last year's seed and showing that category-defining startups don't need to sit in the usual AI hubs.

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Forget FAANG. Europe needs to bet on BRIOCHE

‍The US has FAANG and MANGOS. Martin Coulter proposes Europe’s own: BRIOCHE, for Bolt, Revolut, Iceye, Oura, Celonis, Helsing, and ElevenLabs. A fun but pointed case that Europe's champions span more sectors and geographies than any single label usually captures.

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When AI costs more than the engineer

‍Anthropic spends 2.3x its payroll on compute. Top software firms spend 0.4x. Tunguz maps where the rest of the market lands by 2029, and what that does to how software gets valued.

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Startups become what they hunt‍

Startups chasing bigger "deer" deals grow 5x faster, yet 70% never change the customer they target. Kyle Poyar on why your first 100 customers set the ceiling for everything after.

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