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E 770 — Unicorn Atlas #5: HappyRobot's $1.2B Address Gap · Startup & Tech News from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by Startuprad.io™

• 0:04
  €118,000. $15.6 million.
• 0:09
  $500 million. $1.2
• 0:13
  billion. 4
• 0:17
  rounds, 4 countries, 1 company, and the German
• 0:21
  money was first in and last to own anything.
• 0:26
  This Is the 4 addresses
• 0:29
  test, and once you have it, you cannot unsee it.
• 0:43
  I'm Joe Manager in Frankfurt am Main, and this is Startup Radio,
• 0:47
  the English language authority on the startup ecosystem in
• 0:51
  Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On the 4th of August, a
• 0:54
  company called Happy Robots announced a
• 0:58
  $150 million Series C
• 1:02
  investment at $1.2
• 1:05
  billion post-money valuation. 3 days
• 1:09
  later, on the 7th of August, the Technical University of
• 1:13
  Munich, part called Unternehmertum, announced
• 1:17
  that Happy Robot was its 23rd
• 1:21
  unicorn. Both of these
• 1:25
  statements are true. Neither of them is the story.
• 1:29
  If you work inside a European ecosystem organization, or you're
• 1:33
  raising money in one, stay with me. Before the end of this episode,
• 1:36
  I'm going to hand you a test you can apply to your own
• 1:40
  company. It takes about 90
• 1:44
  seconds, and it will tell you something
• 1:47
  uncomfortable. 3 facts to set this up,
• 1:51
  all of them from primary documents. One, on the
• 1:55
  4th of August 2026, Happy Robots announced
• 1:59
  $150 million Series C at
• 2:02
  $1.2 billion post-money valuation, led
• 2:06
  by Prism Capital, co-led by
• 2:10
  Euroseo. That valuation is company
• 2:13
  confirmed and explicitly stated as
• 2:16
  post-money. It is not a media estimate.
• 2:20
  2, 3 days later, Unternehmer.TUM
• 2:25
  published a press release with the headline, Happy
• 2:28
  Robots is TUM's 23rd
• 2:32
  unicorn. 3,
• 2:35
  Happy Robots' own funding announcement, the Business Wire
• 2:39
  release, and the post on the company's own blog does not
• 2:43
  mention Unternehmertum or Munich or TUM or Garching
• 2:47
  or Germany. Not once.
• 2:51
  Here is the argument: Europe's scale-up gap is
• 2:55
  not primarily a capital gap, it's all—
• 2:59
  and it is not primarily a demand gap.
• 3:04
  It is a formation capture gap.
• 3:07
  European institutions reliably fund and house
• 3:11
  the moment a company comes into existence, And then
• 3:15
  have no claim whatsoever on the compounding that
• 3:18
  follows. And because unicorn lists record
• 3:22
  exactly one address per company, that loss is
• 3:26
  invisible, not hidden, invisible by construction.
• 3:30
  Happy Robot is the cleanest document case I've seen here.
• 3:35
  Quick note on where this sits in the
• 3:38
  argument we've been running over time. In April, we
• 3:42
  said Europe's gap is structural, not cultural.
• 3:46
  In June, in Demand Without Deployment, we said
• 3:50
  Europe struggles to buy from its own startups. And in July,
• 3:54
  we said the failure is between breakthrough and
• 3:57
  scale, not at the science. And on the
• 4:01
  4th of August, the same day actually Happy Robot announced this round,
• 4:05
  we published a piece called The European Scale-Up Question. The
• 4:08
  question got answered the same day we asked it. We just
• 4:12
  didn't notice for 2 weeks. One correction on the
• 4:16
  record. In 2022, we published an episode titled
• 4:20
  Unternehmertum Helps Entrepreneurs to Start World-Class Companies.
• 4:24
  We ran that framing on the institution's own account. Researching this
• 4:28
  episode, I went looking for documentation of Unternehmertum's
• 4:31
  role in Happy Robots specifically, and I found one clause
• 4:35
  at the Unternehmertum press release. I found no
• 4:39
  Unternehmertum Author document naming
• 4:43
  happy robots at all. That doesn't retract the
• 4:46
  2022 episode, but our evidence standard is
• 4:49
  higher now than it has been then, and I'd rather say
• 4:53
  that than let you find it. Now, before I go
• 4:57
  further, I want to give the strongest case against my own
• 5:00
  thesis properly, not a straw man. The case against me goes
• 5:04
  like this: provenance is sentimental bookkeeping,
• 5:08
  and measuring it makes Europe's problem worse. What did Germany
• 5:12
  actually give this company? A stipend of roughly
• 5:15
  €118,000, desk space
• 5:20
  in Garching, and 2 young engineers who had, on most accounts,
• 5:24
  already met each other in Madrid. What
• 5:28
  created the €1.2 billion? None of that. It
• 5:31
  was Likely Y Combinator, because the pivot happened
• 5:35
  inside the Y Combinator batch. They applied with a
• 5:39
  computer vision product and abandoned it midway through.
• 5:44
  That's not my interpretation, the founder says it
• 5:47
  himself, and in a podcast episode literally titled
• 5:50
  First-Time Founder Completely Pivots After YC.
• 5:55
  It was Andreessen Horowitz at Series A. A Base10
• 5:58
  partner at Series B, 150
• 6:02
  enterprise customers mostly anchored in the United States.
• 6:06
  It was— sorry for butchering the name— Javier
• 6:10
  Palafox's logistics network built over 9 years at the
• 6:13
  Spanish consumer goods group largely out of Dallas, Texas.
• 6:18
  Strip all of that out and you have a promising unfunded
• 6:21
  computer vision team in Garching, and Here's the sharp end of the
• 6:25
  objection. Counting provenance is exactly how Europe
• 6:29
  avoids confronting the gap. If TUM books Happy Robots
• 6:33
  as a unicorn 23 and Celebradio
• 6:36
  books it at ecosystem prominence strong, then Munich
• 6:40
  gets to feel like a unicorn factory while the equity, the
• 6:44
  tax base, the senior jobs, and all of the computing
• 6:47
  sits in San Francisco. And provenance column
• 6:51
  is a consolation prize with a
• 6:54
  spreadsheet attached. The honest response says this
• 6:58
  argument is to say plainly, Germany lost this one, and stop
• 7:02
  counting. This is a serious argument, and
• 7:06
  I think it is right about almost everything.
• 7:10
  It is wrong about one thing, and it defeats itself on it.
• 7:15
  I want to say Germany lost this one, but I cannot say How
• 7:19
  much was lost? Because the instruments it's defending,
• 7:23
  the Single Address Unicorn List, has no field in which to
• 7:26
  record the loss. Tomb's List can only count up.
• 7:30
  Our own atlas can only count include and exclude.
• 7:34
  Both of these are a 1-bit instrument, and 1 bit
• 7:38
  cannot express formed here, owned here. So
• 7:42
  the alternative to sentimental bookkeeping is in silence. It's
• 7:46
  honest bookkeeping, which is what I'm going to give
• 7:50
  you in my 20 minutes.
• 7:54
  Let's talk about what a company actually is. So
• 7:57
  what is this company? Happy Robots sells AI
• 8:01
  agents that do enterprise operations work like voice calls,
• 8:05
  emails, text messages, and chat. It
• 8:08
  started with freight brokers. Carrier sales
• 8:12
  calls, check calls, collecting proof of delivery,
• 8:16
  negotiating rates, booking appointments. It has
• 8:19
  since expanded into logistics, utilities,
• 8:23
  insurance, telecom, and recruiting.
• 8:26
  More than 150 enterprise customers. Named customers
• 8:31
  include, for example, DHL Supply Chain,
• 8:35
  Kühne Nagel, Uber, Natuji
• 8:39
  and Repsol. Now the corporate
• 8:42
  facts, because they matter more than usually here.
• 8:47
  The legal entity is Happy Robots Inc. It
• 8:50
  is a Delaware Corporation incorporated on
• 8:54
  the 13th of May, 2023, California entity
• 8:58
  number 5743817.
• 9:02
  Principal address: 3rd Street, San Francisco. No German
• 9:06
  entity, no German office, and no German-based employees were
• 9:10
  located in the public records of the 20th of
• 9:13
  August 2026. Reuters reported in September
• 9:17
  2025 that Staff were, quote,
• 9:20
  mostly based in San Francisco and Madrid.
• 9:25
  Now hold that date: Delaware, May 2023.
• 9:29
  Because in January 2023, 5 months earlier,
• 9:33
  there's a document from TUM School of Management. It's a project
• 9:36
  study listing looking for student interns and says Happy
• 9:40
  Robots maintains an office and incubator space located in Garching
• 9:44
  and wants interns there several days a week.
• 9:49
  It is also describing what they were building, not AI agents,
• 9:52
  quote, a no-code computer vision platform for instant model generation.
• 9:57
  So the company existed and worked in Garching for some time, like
• 10:01
  9 months, before it legally existed anywhere. And it's
• 10:05
  not an accident, it's a rule. UnternehmerTUM's own incubator page
• 10:09
  says admissions require at least one
• 10:12
  TUM-affiliated founder, and quote, admissions is only
• 10:15
  possible in the pre-seed phase before establishing the spin-off.
• 10:20
  The TUM incubator is by design a place for
• 10:24
  companies that do not yet exist, which is the
• 10:28
  single most interesting thing about this whole story, and I'll come back to it.
• 10:32
  One more thing we do not know, and I want to be explicit
• 10:36
  about: there's no absolute revenue figure for this
• 10:39
  company. None. Happy Robots told Fortune that revenue has
• 10:43
  grown more than fivefold since Series B and that net
• 10:47
  dollar retention exceeds 150%.
• 10:50
  Neither figure is independently audited and No absolute
• 10:54
  revenue figure has been disclosed. There's also no price page.
• 10:58
  It returns a 404.
• 11:02
  So if you see a number for Happy Robots ARR,
• 11:06
  somebody made it up. The capital
• 11:09
  sequence. Now the part I actually want
• 11:13
  you to remember— the capital sequence. Around July
• 11:17
  2022, an existing startup grant through TUM
• 11:21
  Tomb states this: The Room locks about
• 11:24
  €118,000, and that's a database figure,
• 11:27
  treat it as an approximation. German federal money,
• 11:32
  first money in April 2023, pre-seed.
• 11:36
  Array Ventures, American. Summer 2023,
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  Y Combinator. Summer 2023 batch, American.
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  4th of December 2024, Series A,
• 11:49
  $15.6 million, led by
• 11:53
  Andreessen Horowitz, American. 3rd of
• 11:56
  September 2025, Series B,
• 12:00
  $44 million, led by Base10 Partners,
• 12:04
  American. Reuters reported a valuation of about
• 12:08
  $500 million, citing a source familiar with the deal.
• 12:11
  The company has not confirmed the Series B valuation.
• 12:16
  And that Series B is where Wave X comes in,
• 12:20
  the corporate venture arm of Walter Group in Vienna.
• 12:24
  Austrian money at roughly $500
• 12:27
  million. 4th of August 2026, Series C,
• 12:31
  $150 million. Prism Capital leading,
• 12:35
  Eurocea co-leading, and that cap table:
• 12:39
  T.Capital, Deutsche Telekom Investmentarm, German corporate
• 12:43
  money at $1.2 billion.
• 12:47
  Why structurally? Read the sequence back as one sentence.
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  German public money at €118,000. American venture
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  capital at $15.6 million.
• 12:58
  Austrian corporate capital at around $500 million.
• 13:02
  German corporate capital at about $1.2 billion.
• 13:06
  Germany was there at the beginning. Germany was there at the end.
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  Germany was absent for the entire middle, which is the only
• 13:13
  part where ownership gets set. That is
• 13:17
  the European scale-up gap in one cap table with
• 13:21
  no inference required. Who benefits? Who
• 13:25
  loses? Andreessen Horowitz benefits. They wrote the December
• 13:28
  2024 check at $15.6 million, and
• 13:32
  they are marked up roughly 8 times. 80 times
• 13:36
  on paper by August 2026. Deutsche Telekom gets
• 13:39
  exposure at $1.2 billion. A German fund that only
• 13:43
  sees this company at CRC is not competing with
• 13:47
  Andreessen Horowitz, it is buying from
• 13:50
  Andreessen Horowitz. In Germany, the country supplied the
• 13:54
  founders the grant and the room and now buys the product back.
• 13:58
  Because here's the other side of ledger: On the 12th of
• 14:02
  November, 2025, DHL Group issued its own press release,
• 14:06
  not a Happy Robots press release, DHL's, announcing
• 14:10
  that DHL Supply Chain has deployed Happy Robots AI
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  agent across hundreds of thousands of emails and millions
• 14:18
  of voice minutes a year. Kühne Nagel
• 14:21
  runs the agent in 5 languages. German is one of them.
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  LKW Walter in Austria has 5 to 10 live use
• 14:29
  cases. Germany formed the company, and Germany is
• 14:33
  now a customer of the company. What changes next?
• 14:37
  Nothing, unless somebody measures it. What people are getting
• 14:41
  wrong: everybody read this as a story about vertical
• 14:45
  AI. It's a story about capital timing.
• 14:48
  And if I were an investor, I would take one thing from this: the
• 14:52
  TUM incubator's own admission rule, precede before the spin-off
• 14:56
  exists, means it's a public, dated, legible list of
• 14:59
  companies at exactly the stage where European capital is not present.
• 15:04
  That is a deal flow asset sitting in the open. Almost nobody
• 15:07
  treats it as one. After the break, I went looking for a list of
• 15:11
  TUM's 23 unicorns. I want to tell you exactly what I found
• 15:15
  and what I did not find, because it isn't what I expected
• 15:19
  and it changes what the number means.
• 15:27
  23 unicorns. That's a real big number. TUM
• 15:31
  is, by any measure, Europe's most successful entrepreneurial
• 15:34
  university. I want to be very clear about my starting point:
• 15:38
  I expect to verify the number and move on. Here's what
• 15:42
  TUM's own press release documents. Unicorn number 1: Celonis,
• 15:46
  August 2018. We published a full Unicorn Atlas
• 15:50
  edition on Celonis 3 days ago, so I'll put it here.
• 15:54
  Number 2, Lilium. Number 3, Personio, January
• 15:58
  2021. Then nothing. The next
• 16:02
  ordinal tune published is number 21,
• 16:06
  eGym, October 2024. Number 22, ESA
• 16:10
  Aerospace, June 2025.
• 16:14
  Number 23, Happy Robots, August
• 16:17
  2026. 17 slots
• 16:20
  between number 3 and number 21. No
• 16:24
  naming press releases located for any of them. And here's the
• 16:28
  careful sentence because I want to be precise rather than
• 16:31
  dramatic: no enumerated public list of the 23
• 16:35
  companies was located across TUM's press releases,
• 16:38
  Startup Wall, entrepreneurship pages, TUM Venture Labs, or
• 16:42
  UnternehmerTUM as of the 20th of August
• 16:45
  2026. And no tomb naming release was located
• 16:50
  for the ordinals between 3rd and 21st.
• 16:55
  And no tomb naming release was located for
• 16:58
  the ordinals between 3rd and
• 17:01
  21st. That is a
• 17:05
  statement about what I could find. It is not a statement
• 17:09
  that the list doesn't exist. If Toon publishes it,
• 17:13
  I will publish it, and I will say so.
• 17:17
  Now, second thing. Unicorn number 2 is Lilium.
• 17:21
  Lilium ceased operations, unfortunately, in February 2025.
• 17:25
  Insolvent. Its patents were sold to Archer in
• 17:28
  October 2025. 4 months after Lilium stopped,
• 17:32
  Toome announced Isar Aerospace as number 2022. The
• 17:36
  count did not go down. It has never gone down. And
• 17:39
  the third thing, Dealroom, using an alumni
• 17:43
  founder measure, attributes 52 unicorns
• 17:47
  to TU Munich. TU Munich
• 17:50
  meaning the Technical University Munich against TUM's own
• 17:54
  claims of 23. Now that gap is
• 17:57
  interesting and not in the direction you'd expect. TUM's
• 18:01
  number is lower than the databases,
• 18:05
  which means TUM is applying a filter, a real one,
• 18:08
  which they have simply never described.
• 18:12
  What does 23 mean? It
• 18:16
  means cultivate, never decrement
• 18:19
  it. No published inclusion test, no denominator, and
• 18:23
  no delisting rule. It mixes German and foreign headquarters.
• 18:27
  It mixes currently private unicorns with companies that have
• 18:31
  gone public. merged or gone insolvent.
• 18:36
  And I want to say this next part clearly because
• 18:40
  it would be easy to turn this into a TUM story, and
• 18:43
  it's not one. TUM is not lying. Every claim
• 18:47
  in their press release about Happy Robots appears to be
• 18:51
  accurate. They say the team got an EXIST startup grant
• 18:55
  in 2022 and was accepted into the TUM
• 18:58
  incubator. There's an independent document from January
• 19:01
  2023 putting the company in Garching, It checks out.
• 19:06
  The problem isn't honesty. The problem is that
• 19:10
  23 is an unfalsifiable number,
• 19:14
  and every institutional unicorn count in Europe is
• 19:18
  building the same way. Universities, state
• 19:22
  agencies, regional clusters, national associations—
• 19:25
  they all count up, they all count alumni, and
• 19:29
  none of them publishes a denominator. I've asked
• 19:33
  TUM for a list. Admittedly, Friday— I sent out the email on
• 19:37
  Friday afternoon, so I don't expect to hear back before
• 19:41
  the publication of this episode. But
• 19:45
  if they send it, the list, that's an episode. If they don't,
• 19:49
  that's also an episode. And one thing I will not
• 19:53
  say, I will not tell you that UnternehmerTUM created or
• 19:56
  built or incubated Happy Robots. The entire
• 20:00
  evidentiary basis for a Unternehmen Matom roll is
• 20:04
  one clause in Tooms own press release. What I can tell you is
• 20:08
  this: Happy Robot is listed as a team of Toom Venture Labs,
• 20:12
  and Toom Venture Labs describes itself in its own words
• 20:16
  as a joint initiative of Toom and Unternehmer Toom. That's a
• 20:19
  defensible sentence. Anything stronger somebody made up.
• 20:23
  The other side of the ledger: there's a German trade publication
• 20:27
  called Startbase, and when they covered this round. They
• 20:31
  used exactly the right word, and I don't think they get enough credit for it.
• 20:35
  The headline was Happy Robot wird Unicorn
• 20:39
  mit deutscher Beteiligung, meaning Happy Robot becomes a unicorn
• 20:43
  with German participation. Not a German unicorn,
• 20:47
  participation. That is the most accurate 4 words anybody
• 20:51
  wrote about this company in August, and they're in language
• 20:55
  most of coverage doesn't even reach. The 4-address test.
• 20:59
  All right. Here's a test. This is the thing to take away.
• 21:04
  Every scale company has 4 addresses.
• 21:07
  Unicorn lists, report one, and imply the other 3.
• 21:12
  Address 1, the formation address where the team and the company were
• 21:16
  formed before incorporation. Address 2,
• 21:20
  incorporation address where the legal entity was
• 21:24
  created. Address 3, The operating
• 21:28
  address, where the work, the payroll, and the customers actually
• 21:31
  are. Address 4, claiming address,
• 21:36
  who counts it in their tally. The rule is this: when all
• 21:39
  4 differ, a list that reports one address is not
• 21:43
  measuring an ecosystem. It is measuring whichever address
• 21:47
  flattens the counter. Happy Robot,
• 21:50
  formation address: Garching, Germany. Incorporation address,
• 21:54
  Delaware. Operating address, San Francisco and Madrid.
• 21:57
  Claiming address here, Munich. 4 addresses,
• 22:01
  1 company. And the distance between addresses 1 and
• 22:05
  address 3, that's the whole loss,
• 22:09
  explicit per company on the record. Now go and do it for
• 22:12
  your own company or your portfolio or your ecosystem's unicorn list.
• 22:17
  90 seconds. I'll wait. Just imagine
• 22:21
  the Jeopardy music playing here. 3
• 22:25
  predictions on the record with confidence level, so you can hold me
• 22:28
  to them. 1, TUM will announce a unicorn number
• 22:32
  24 before it publishes an
• 22:35
  enumerated methodology discourse list of the
• 22:38
  23. Confidence high, about
• 22:42
  75%. Results end of 2027.
• 22:45
  Prediction number 2: Happy Robots will not establish a German legal
• 22:49
  entity or German office before its next primary
• 22:53
  priced round. Confidence moderate, about 60%.
• 22:57
  Resolves end of 2027. Prediction number 3:
• 23:01
  At least one further institution in Germany, Austria, or
• 23:04
  Switzerland— a university, a state agency, original cluster—
• 23:08
  will claim a new unicorn in the next 12
• 23:11
  months for a company who is no legal entity in Germany,
• 23:15
  Austria, or Switzerland. Confidence actually
• 23:18
  moderate to high, about 70%. Resolves
• 23:22
  20th of August 2027. One thread
• 23:26
  connects all of this: Europe's scale-up gap is
• 23:30
  politically survivable because it is unmeasured. And
• 23:34
  it isn't measured because we count companies by simply One
• 23:38
  address. TUM counts formation and calls it a unicorn. We
• 23:42
  count headquarters and call it not a unicorn.
• 23:46
  Um, that's actually not an official term. Both of us are describing
• 23:50
  the same company, and between us we have said nothing true
• 23:54
  about what actually happened. What actually happened is
• 23:57
  that German public money paid for a company to come into
• 24:01
  existence. An American fund bought the
• 24:04
  compounding for $15.6 million US dollars,
• 24:08
  and German corporate money bought back at $1.2
• 24:12
  billion. You cannot fix that, but you can absolutely
• 24:15
  count it. And for the Unicorn Atlas, that's a ruling I have
• 24:19
  to make on air. Happy Robot does not enter the
• 24:23
  Atlas as a core member. Delaware Corporation, San
• 24:26
  Francisco headquarters, non-German entity located. That's our
• 24:30
  methodology, and I'm not bending it for a good story. But it
• 24:34
  does enter the Atlas under the ecosystem provenance.
• 24:38
  Full addresses, awful recorded methodology stated on
• 24:42
  the page. Because a list that can only say yes or
• 24:46
  no about a company like this isn't an intelligence platform,
• 24:50
  it's a scoreboard. And scoreboards are how you lose an
• 24:53
  argument you didn't know you were having. Specifics.
• 24:58
  If our founder in Munich
• 25:02
  Treat Dixie Grant and the incubator seed as
• 25:05
  what they are— formation capital, excellent at what it does
• 25:09
  and structurally incapable of setting ownership. Plan
• 25:13
  your Series A geography on day 1, not
• 25:18
  during Series A. Write down your 4 addresses now
• 25:22
  before somebody else writes them down for you. If your
• 25:25
  incorporation address is already Delaware, stop telling a Munich story to German
• 25:29
  investors and a San Francisco story to American One of them
• 25:33
  will check. Notice which door
• 25:37
  actually opened for this company. An $1,800 million
• 25:41
  American broker found them through a demo posted on Discord
• 25:44
  server. A press release from DHL did more for their
• 25:48
  credibility than any grant ever did. Distribution,
• 25:52
  not domicile. If I were an investor—
• 25:56
  Read the sequence, not the round. Use formation addresses
• 26:00
  as deal flow, not for national accounting.
• 26:04
  Assume every institutional unicorn claim you read is
• 26:07
  unaudited until the institution publishes the
• 26:10
  denominator. Ask for the list. The request itself
• 26:14
  is diligence. One thing to take away: Europe's scale-up gap
• 26:17
  survives because it is unmeasured, and it is unmeasured because
• 26:21
  we count every company by exactly one address. 4
• 26:24
  addresses: formation, Incorporation. Operation.
• 26:28
  Claiming. Write down all 4 for your own company this
• 26:32
  week. The full written analysis with every source,
• 26:36
  the founding table, the claim ledger, and the reconstructed
• 26:40
  tomb ordinal list is on the startuprate.io.
• 26:43
  Everything this episode is sourced there. Where the evidence is
• 26:47
  thin, I've said so on the page as well as here.
• 26:51
  If this was useful, send it to one founder still
• 26:55
  operating on last cycle assumptions about where a company is
• 27:00
  from. I'm Joe Manager. This has been
• 27:03
  startuprate.io from Frankfurt am Main. Next Monday, the Unicorn Atlas
• 27:07
  continues with Quantum Systems.