By Dilyan Dimitrov
EnduroSat raised USD 205 million on 16 September. The company said the valuation had “significantly exceeded” a billion dollars and left it there. The press called it a unicorn.
The number is not a secret. EnduroSat S.à r.l. issued 26,795 new Series C shares subscribed in cash for EUR 176.2 million (176,184,627.60 to be precise), or EUR 6,575 a share. With 144,236 issued shares, that means close to EUR 950 million post-money and, with the option pool and beneficiary units, about EUR 1.03 billion fully diluted. The largest cheque, EUR 34.5 million, came from the EIC Fund, the European Commission’s venture vehicle. Riot Ventures and Atreides put in EUR 25.7 million each, GV and Lux Capital EUR 17.1 million each.
So there is the valuation. And I think it is still the least important thing about the round.
What unicorns are good for
I co-founded Eleven, one of the first two venture funds in Bulgaria, back in 2012. In 2016 I sold my stake to Vassil Terziev, of whom more below, and I have spent the ten years since on the M&A side of rounds like this one. Between the two seats I have come to think that a private valuation is a vanity metric. Useful for recruiting, useful for the next round, useful for a headline. It does not do the one thing an ecosystem needs done.
In his book Startup Communities, Brad Feld describes how entrepreneurial ecosystems actually work, and I still agree. Startup ecosystems are led by entrepreneurs. Not governments, not investors. Entrepreneurs, and specifically those who have already exited, because those are the people with both the money and the time to put back in: as angels, as LPs, as mentors, as founders of the next company. The wheel has to complete at least one full revolution. Grassroots, scale-ups, big private valuations, exits, and then a cohort of people with capital and experience who start the cycle again. Until the exit, nothing has been recycled. The money is still in the company, and the people are still at their desks.
Bulgaria has made that full turn exactly once. Telerik sold to Progress in 2014 for USD 262.5 million, about 4.4 times its revenue at the time. Look at what that single exit produced over the following decade: the country’s most active angel investors, Campus X, a generation of second-time founders, and a mayor of Sofia. One exit, one turn of the wheel, and most of what we now call an ecosystem grew out of it.
At that scale, everything since has been paper. Payhawk’s billion in 2022 was a minority round on preferred shares. EnduroSat’s billion this month is a minority round on preferred shares. Nobody has been paid. The founders, the early employees, the Bulgarian angels who wrote the first cheques in 2015 and 2017 are all still holding paper. The one real cash event so far went almost unnoticed: in June 2025 EnduroSat’s holding company bought back the shares of Neo Ventures, a Sofia fund that first invested in 2017, for EUR 20.84 million, seven times what the fund had put in. That is a Bulgarian fund returning real money to Bulgarian investors from a Bulgarian company, which is precisely the thing Feld says an ecosystem runs on. It got two lines. The paper billion got every front page in the country.
What the price actually is
A few things about the EUR 6,575.28 that the headlines do not carry.
It is the price of a preferred share, sold last, to the buyers with the most information, with anti-dilution rights written into the articles and a liquidation waterfall in a shareholders’ agreement none of us can read. The ordinary shares sitting under the founder’s holding company, which held 46% of the company at the last filing we have, are Schrodinger’s shares: nobody knows what one is worth, EUR 6,575 or a good deal less, until an exit opens the box and the preferences are paid out. Until then both answers are true at once, and only one of them makes the headline.
It is a price for 2028, not for 2025. The last audited accounts show EUR 19.8 million of revenue in 2024, an operating profit of EUR 2.3 million and a year’s worth of revenue sitting in receivables. The company says 2025 came in at EUR 34 to 35 million and should double this year. Even so, the round is thirty times revenue, against three to four times for listed companies that build satellites and nine times for Shelly, the one Bulgarian technology company whose billion is set by the stock market every day. Investors are paying for the business EnduroSat is to become: a space-as-a-service operator, and Riot, Atreides, GV and Lux have seen enough satellite companies to know what they are doing. It is a serious bet by serious people. It is still a bet.
And it is public whether the company likes it or not. I have some sympathy for not announcing a post-money: it is a negotiating number, it invites the wrong comparisons, and a preferred price is a poor guide to what the company would fetch. But if the holding company is in Luxembourg, the number is on the register within days, so the silence is theatre. Better to say it and explain what it means.
Proof beats PR
Don’t get me wrong, none of this is a complaint about EnduroSat. A company from Sofia that builds a satellite in eight hours, has 103 of them in orbit, and has just been handed EUR 176 million by Google, Founders Fund and the European Commission to build a factory in America is the best thing to happen to Bulgarian technology since Telerik. I want it to work much more than I want to be right about multiples.
It is a complaint about the word. Unicorn describes a stage, and in Bulgaria we keep treating it as the finish. The finish is the exit, and the exit is what puts money and time into the hands of the people who build the next ten companies.
To be fair, there have been exits since Telerik, forty or so in the last five years by my count, and the founders have not vanished. Most stayed on with the buyer, which is what the buyer paid for. Several went straight back to building: the Gtmhub, Leanplum, Rush and NitroPack founders all have new companies, and the NitroPack pair are among the most active angels in the country. That is the wheel turning, and I do not want to belittle it. But nearly all of those exits were in the single or low double-digit millions, and an exit of that size recycles talent, not capital. What Vassil Terziev and Svetozar Georgiev did after 2014 - putting a decade of their time and a good part of a quarter-billion-dollar exit into Campus X, the Academy, a fund and fifty-odd angel cheques - needed an exit of that scale to be possible. Nobody since has had the chance. So the question for the next big one is not only whether it happens but what the people at the top do the morning after. We have yet to see how the EnduroSat team will answer that, when and if the exit comes.
The good news is that the finish is closer than it has ever been. Shelly, with Schneider Electric confirmed at the door, could be the first billion-euro cash exit from Sofia within a year. EnduroSat and Payhawk are the first two Bulgarian companies with the scale to list. When one of them clears, in cash, at a number with nine zeros, the wheel turns for the second time in the country’s history, and this time it will leave several hundred people with capital and experience where the first turn left a handful.
Until then, it is a promise. A promise from very good investors, well documented in Luxembourg, but a promise. Proof beats PR, and I would be delighted to be proved right by any of them.
(Sources: EnduroSat S.à r.l. filings with the Registre de Commerce et des Sociétés, Luxembourg, RCS B272910, including the deed of 8 September 2026 filed 17 September 2026, the deed of 5 May 2025, the deed of 23 March 2023 and the shareholder filing of 21 August 2025; EnduroSat EAD consolidated financial statements for 2024, audit report dated 19 December 2025; EnduroSat announcement, 16 September 2026; BTA, 17 September 2026; Capital, 31 July 2026; Forbes Bulgaria, 31 October 2025; Progress Software, 22 October 2014; Shelly Group, 29 July and 12 August 2026; Payhawk, 8 July 2026; stockanalysis.com market data, 12 to 19 September 2026; Brad Feld, Startup Communities, 2012)