🏷️ Sticker over barcode

Adyen 🇳🇱 paid €750m in cash for Talon.One 🇩🇪 this summer. The Berlin company runs promotions and loyalty schemes for 300 retailers, and the price came to 12.5 times the €60m of recurring revenue it expects by the end of 2026. Adyen made €642m of Ebitda in the first half, so the cheque came out of the till.

The deal stands out because its price is public. In early October SAP 🇩🇪 agreed to buy TechWolf 🇧🇪, a Ghent company of 120 people whose AI maps the skills of a workforce. TechWolf calls it the largest sale of a venture-backed Belgian software company, and nobody has said for how much. Silence is the norm: of 860 European exits in 2025, only 75 came with a disclosed price.

Across 9,700 European transactions tracked by ScaleX Invest, the median multiple has sat at 5 times revenue for 2 years. Rounds are priced at 9.3 times, sales at 2.7. These are not the same companies, but the gap says venture funds paid prices that few buyers will now accept. Valuations have stopped falling. Buyers have not finished coming back.

A fund buying a startup plans to sell it for more, so it is paying for the next exit, and that arithmetic rarely supports 9.3 times revenue. A corporate buyer pays more when the target is worth more inside it than alone, as TechWolf is meant to feed SAP's HR agents. A premium is no promise of value, and plenty of acquirers carry the write-downs to prove it. It is still the only thing that lifts a price above the median.

Paying also needs a currency, and each buyer has its own. Adyen pays from profits. Legora 🇸🇪 has bought 5 startups this year, including Qura 🇸🇪 and London's Wexler 🇬🇧, on the back of a Series D valuing it at €4.8bn. Rocket Lab paid for Mynaric 🇩🇪, the Munich maker of laser terminals sold by its creditors, with €133m of Nasdaq stock. The only known price came from an American buyer, while Airbus 🇪🇺 builds the same terminals through Tesat 🇩🇪.

Europe has buyers, SAP and Adyen first among them, but too few with both an industrial reason and the means. The shortage hurts the middle most. A loss-making startup is valued at 4 to 16 times revenue, a profitable one at 2.5 to 5.9 times, one that has just broken even at less still. Plenty of scale-ups stopped burning cash because their investors asked them to, and slowed to 15% growth a year. Those investors have since lost interest, and with no strategic buyer in sight, the companies are left on the shelf.

Another European fund will not close the gap on its own. Public money does most good when it finances a buyer. Adyen, founded in 2006, took 20 years to become one that pays in cash. Legora, founded in 2023, is already buying, with paper its investors could stop underwriting. Whether the next generation buys with its own cash depends on someone being patient enough to let it get there.