Issue #3 | Wednesday, February 11, 2026 | Antwerp
Belgian startup intel, minus the corporate perfume

January was busy.

Five European startups crossed the $1B valuation mark in a single month.

Defense tech. AI. Cybersecurity. ESG. Edtech.

Aikido Security — out of Ghent, population 270,000 — raised $60M at a $1B valuation, becoming the fastest cybersecurity unicorn in European history.

Three years old.

Founded by developers who were tired of security tools that created noise instead of clarity.

Customers include Revolut, SoundCloud, and the Premier League.

DST Global led the round. The same DST that backed Meta, Spotify, and Alibaba.

And the Belgian press gave it roughly the same energy as a weather update.

That’s not a failure.

That’s Belgium.

The other four: Harmattan AI (French defense tech, $1.4B — founded in 2024, already worth more than most Belgian scale-ups ever will be), Cast AI (Lithuania, cloud optimization), Osapiens (Germany, ESG), and Preply (Ukraine, edtech, $1.2B — with 150 employees still working from Kyiv).

Translation: valuation without relevance is noise.

But Aikido isn’t noise. It’s revenue growing 5× year-over-year, with half of it coming from the US.

For founders, the lesson is uncomfortable but useful:

Reaching $1B is cool.

Making money is cooler.

Building something durable from a village in Flanders is coolest.

KU Leuven spinout.

Movement AI.

€1M led by Smarter Ventures (Netherlands), with Freshmen Fund, Gemma Frisius Fund, and Silicon Valley angel Sean Gourley.

50,000+ running analyses completed.

40+ countries.

The US is already their biggest market.

Runeasi solved a narrow problem deeply, instead of a broad problem shallowly.

“Running analysis” sounds niche.

But physiotherapists, coaches, and specialty running stores pay for measurement precision.

Not once. Monthly.

That’s recurring revenue.

That’s sustainability.

That’s significantly less drama than “we’re disrupting fitness with AI.”

Runeasi’s moat isn’t branding or buzz.

It’s 70+ years of combined biomechanics and AI expertise from their founders’ PhDs.

Not “we’re like Strava, but better.”

Just: “We measure running more accurately than anyone else, without a lab.”

That’s pitch mastery.

And worth noting: they were added to Belgium’s fastest-growing AI scale-ups list at the end of 2025.

€1M isn’t a headline. It’s a signal.

Tunify was acquired by Soundtrack Technologies (Stockholm).

So was London-based Ambie. Same week. Same buyer.

This wasn’t a one-off. This was a consolidation play.

Soundtrack — co-founded with Spotify in 2013, now serving 100,000+ subscribers across 75 countries with 125 million licensed tracks — is eating the European background music market. Their CEO told Bloomberg the goal is 140,000 subscribers by end of year.

Tunify? A KU Leuven spinout (2017) serving Belgian and Dutch retail and hospitality. Good product. Real customers.

But no moat against a platform with Spotify DNA, Walmart contracts, and an AI playlist generator.

Translation: this wasn’t a failure. This was gravity.

Founder choice:

→ Burn another €500K trying to outcompete a platform that already has Uniqlo, Four Seasons, and Dr. Martens

→ Or sell, take cash, and let your team join the winning side

They chose the second.

Both teams stay. Both brands rebrand to Soundtrack. Tunify’s customers get access to a bigger catalog and better tech.

The ecosystem celebrates unicorns.

It rarely celebrates founders who knew when to leave the casino.

Not every startup needs to be a unicorn.

Some need to be smart exits at the right moment.

Most founders only admit this around month 36 — when the runway is already gone and the acquirer’s offer is half what it was a year ago.

I sat in on a pitch meeting last week.

The founder broke every Silicon Valley rule.

And raised €800K.

Seven slides.

No design tricks.

Just math.

Slide 1:

“Logistics companies waste 30% of capacity on empty return journeys.

€2.4M per company per year.”

Investor: “How did you validate that?”

Founder: “Industry reports and 12 customer interviews.

I’ll send the spreadsheet.”

Receipt provided.

Credibility established.

One sentence.

“We match return journeys with smaller shippers.”

No AI adjectives.

No buzzwords.

No layers added to an already complex industry.

Investor: “That’s it?”

Founder: “That’s it.”

€180K ARR in month eight.

40% MoM growth.

CAC: €3,200.

LTV: €52,000.

All recent.

All verifiable.

Investor: “Why is LTV so high?”

Founder: “18-month minimum contracts.

Once integrated, churn is near zero.”

No hype.

Just numbers.

€800K.

12 months runway.

Profitability projected in month 14.

Detailed salary breakdown.

Infrastructure costs mapped.

Marketing spend justified channel by channel.

Investor: “What if growth stalls?”

Founder: “We’re already cash-flow positive.

This money accelerates. It doesn’t sustain.”

Decks with vague metrics.

Decks saying “Uber for X.”

Decks mentioning AI three times without data.

All raised €0.

Belgian investors aren’t moved by vision.

They’re moved by clarity.

→ Specific problem, specific size

→ Founder with deep domain knowledge

→ Real numbers, not projections

→ Clear path to money, not just scale

If your pitch sounds like selling instead of explaining:

You’ve already lost.

Harmattan AI raised $200M at $1.4B. Founded in 2024. Led by Dassault Aviation — the people who build Rafale fighter jets.

Already signed deals with the French and British defense ministries and Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton.

That’s not a startup trajectory.

That’s a procurement pipeline in startup clothing.

European defense spending has shifted. New threats. New budgets. New startups.

Deep tech now represents 28% of all European venture investment, according to Dealroom’s 2025 report. Defense is the sharpest edge of that shift.

If you’re building non-defense B2B SaaS:

Funding is harder. Not because your idea is bad.

Because attention — and LP money — has moved.

If you’re building for defense contractors or government agencies:

This is your moment.

Belgium has dual-use tech potential (think: cybersecurity, logistics, sensors).

Aikido’s rise in AppSec already touches defense-adjacent territory.

Export controls.

Compliance.

Sales cycles measured in years.

And every government contract comes with a procurement bureaucracy that makes Belgian tax forms look breezy.

Defense tech looks attractive until you’re selling to governments.

Then it looks like a marathon in a nuclear bunker.

Choose accordingly.

Kembara raised €750M in a first close toward a €1B target.

Europe’s largest dedicated deep tech growth fund.

Founded by Yann de Vries (ex-Atomico, former VP at Lilium — yes, the one that went bankrupt) and Javier Santiso (ex-Khazanah sovereign wealth fund).

Anchored by the European Investment Fund with €350M.

De Vries’ take: “Europe doesn’t have an innovation problem. It doesn’t have a startup problem. The problem it has is a scale-up problem.”

He watched Lilium die from a lack of growth capital. Now he’s building the fund that could have saved it.

Translation: European capital is betting on hard tech, not apps.

→ AI SaaS is crowded

→ Deep tech is underfunded — only 3% of European deep tech companies raise Series B or C

→ Long timelines are acceptable again

→ “Build, don’t scale” is back

For Belgian founders in biotech, hardware, hard tech:

This is your environment.

Kembara writes €15M–€40M initial checks for Series B and C. Up to €100M per company.

For B2B SaaS founders:

You’ll compete for scraps compared to three years ago.

Nothing wrong with scraps.

Just different odds.

Know which game you’re playing.

Extra Shop is deploying Vusion’s digital shelf labels across its 40 Belgian locations.

That brings the total to 1,700+ stores running Vusion tech in Belgium — 1,500 already connected to the platform.

Colruyt. Okay. Proximus shops. MediaMarkt. Jysk. And now Extra Shop.

This isn’t startup news.

It’s infrastructure news.

Vusion already has Walmart rolling out to 2,300 stores in the US. And an order intake north of €1B from that deal alone.

When every major Belgian retailer commits to the same digital shelf system, the market doesn’t just consolidate.

It closes.

If you sell into retail tech in Belgium:

The window for competing with Vusion on ESLs is effectively shut.

If you build on top of their platform:

That window just opened.

If you’re thinking about pitching to Belgian or European investors:
What scares you most about fundraising?

Next issue tackles fears, not fantasy.

“The VC Fear List: What Actually Scares Investors (Spoiler: it’s not what you think)”

— Waffle Agent 🧇

P.S. The logistics founder closed in 14 days.

No follow-ups. No second meetings.

When your pitch is clear, funding moves fast.

When it’s fuzzy, fundraising drags forever.

Choose clarity.

P.P.S. Tunify’s team is now at Soundtrack Technologies.

They didn’t fail. They joined a platform backed by Spotify with 125 million tracks and clients like Uniqlo and Four Seasons.

That’s a flex most founders won’t admit they’d take.

But privately? They’d take it in a heartbeat.