Flink, Quick Commerce, and the VC Reset

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

In 2021, VCs paid for your late-night ice cream. Everyone suddenly needed groceries in 10 minutes. VCs wired $5.5bn into European quick commerce in one year. New brands popped up every month. Discount codes everywhere (Yay, VC subsidy). Dark stores on every corner. It felt unstoppable.

Today, most of them are gone: Gorillas got absorbed. Getir pulled out. A lot of others just… disappeared.

And then there’s Flink. Co-founded by WHU alums Julian Dames (BSc 2011 & MSc 2013) and Christoph Cordes (D 2006), they just raised another $100m at around a $900m valuation. In 2021, they were valued at $2.1bn. That swing alone tells you how venture works.

VC is not built for stable, linear markets. It’s built for extremes. What happens in the worst case: Investors believe a market could become huge and dominated by one or two players. They all rush in. Too much money chases the same opportunity. Everyone expands too fast. Nobody worries about margins. Then the music stops.

Such a drop in valuation can result from what people mean when they talk about the “winner’s curse”. You raise at a very high valuation during a hype cycle. However, you don’t just get money, you get expectations. You now have to grow into that price tag. Fast.

If the market cools down and your next round happens at a lower valuation, it’s painful:

• Early investors see paper losses.
• Employees with stock options feel it.
• New investors get cautious.
• And suddenly raising money becomes much harder than it was during the boom.

A down round is not just financial. It’s psychological. Many companies don’t survive that phase because confidence fades. That’s why this new $100m round matters. It shows that Flink managed to reset, operate more discipline, and convince serious investors again after the hype had passed.

Less “10-minute miracle” (more like 30 minutes now). More focus on bigger baskets. Their average order is now above €45. Less geographic ego. More discipline on where a location actually makes money. They also leaned into REWE instead of pretending they could out-negotiate the entire grocery industry alone. And now they say they’re EBITDA positive. A huge difference from delivering a single chocolate bar at a loss.

And here’s the real venture bet: Online grocery penetration in Germany is still around 3.5%. In the UK it’s roughly 14%. If Germany moves even halfway in that direction over the next decade, the market expands massively without Flink needing to invent new behavior. They just need to capture a share of a growing pie.

That’s why money comes back in after a crash. Hopefully not because the hype has returned. But because the field is less crowded. In venture, “winner takes most” often means: First, everyone burns cash. Then most die. Then the survivors raise again... this time on better terms.

You sometimes have to survive long enough to deserve the market. Flink did that.

Back to Max Eckel’s blog overview