WHU’s 16th Unicorn? Why Startup Counts Mislead

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

WHU may have just got its 16th unicorn. Or maybe this is exactly why I don’t fully trust unicorn counts. What do we actually decide to count when we talk about ecosystem output? Funding rounds? Exits? Why not bootstrapping success or family business?

I try to celebrate all of it. But the truth is, I love the VC-backed startup game, because it is such a fast-paced gamble for really big outcomes. VC financing enabled the buildup of the world's most valuable companies. It actually requires truly big valuations to make sense as an asset class. And that's also why VCs, and by extension startup ecosystems, count their unicorns.

That's why the following news is intriguing: the Financial Times reports that STARK is seeking at least €300m in fresh funding at a possible valuation of around €2.5bn. The company builds defence technology around unmanned systems, including loitering munitions, maritime drones, and command-and-control software.

And yes, there is a WHU angle. Uwe Horstmann is a WHU alum, has been with STARK from the very beginning - first as an investor and since last year full-time operationally. He is clearly putting his full reputation into this company now, as the person driving the next phase publicly and operationally. STARK itself now calls him “Co-Founder and CEO.” 

Still, counting this as “WHU unicorn number 16” is not as clean as it sounds. What do we do with cases where someone is not the romantic garage-founder from day one, but joins so early and becomes so decisive that the company would probably not become the same company without them? In many startups, the “founder” title is not only about who had the first idea but also about who carried founding-level risk and created founding-level momentum.

That is why I find unicorn counts useful and annoying at the same time. Useful, because they make exceptional outcomes visible. Annoying, because they flatten very different company journeys into one clean number.

To give you some other examples: tonies is a global success, but went public before ever showing up neatly as a private unicorn. Other companies, like flaschenpost SE, can exit at numbers that would make every ecosystem proud, but because the price is not public, they disappear from the easy leaderboard logic. So maybe the honest answer is: yes, we can probably say WHU has another unicorn story with STARK.

But the number is not the point. The point is that our community keeps showing up in companies that matter, including in sectors most business school graduates did not seriously talk about ten years ago. Uwe was driving DefenseTech before it became the cool kid on the block. That is much more important than whether the next slide says 15 or 16. In any case, super impressive what you are building, Uwe.

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