$49M European space investment, WordPress turns 22, profitability and sales

🇧🇬 Bulgaria-based microsatellite company EnduroSat presented their new funding round - $49M led by Founders Fund.

Raycho Raychev (founder of EnduroSat) and Delian Asparouhov (Partner at Founders Fund) broke the news during the Digitalk Conference in Sofia this week - paving the road to Enduro becoming the second largest satellite manufacturer worldwide.

A pretty monumental accomplishment I’ve captured briefly on X as I attended the event:

(I quoted $43M in the tweet, but it turned out to be 43M EUR, which is the equivalent of $49M) 

Bulgaria and the European space missions

Delian himself is also the co-founder and president of Varda Space Industries, with 3 successful capsule launches in space. Also of Bulgarian origins, both founders push the European space efforts in the competitive cosmic space.

This encapsulated other defense conversations, drone manufacturing, AI augmentation, and more over the full-day event. I summarized the day in this LinkedIn post.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria has been accelerating in the aerospace field after sending a cosmonaut in open space back in 1979, marking the 6th country worldwide with a human launched on a rocket mission. Moreover, Dronamics founder Svilen Rangelov presented on a panel, calling out for European support and paying attention to making real impact, not “pop-up banners”. And other callouts for the defense industry in Europe:

Lots of food for thought gathered on the ground. With more on-site events popping up, strategic conversations and partnerships are shaped faster than ever. It’s also yet another reason why social media has been going down (or the result of the polluted social feeds online).

And WordPress turned 22

Speaking of the open web, WordPress celebrated its 22nd birthday on May 27th. We organized a local party, gathered the WordPress community, and also coincidentally mixed in and mingled with the AI ecosystem in town. It shaped up to be a strong community event (photo with the community here).

Powering 43% of the web, WordPress has been the core software platform we’ve been using in DevriX for over a decade now. While hosted SaaS or custom-coded apps have their pros in different cases, open source is still mandatory and sought after for most government, enterprise, and conservative corporation projects dependent on 100% data ownership and governance.

Plenty of countries adopt Linux in their administrations for similar reasons - full control, no risks for software licensing upsells, and interoperability in the future. WordPress follows a similar mission here.

Events have been buzzing as social channels are staying quiet. I’ve definitely had more impactful and long-lasting conversations this week along on-site than the total number of replies, comments, and mentions across social networks for the past week. This is unprecedented, but raising different questions about the future of the web - with everything Google did for SEO with AI Overviews and the new AI mode, and all the AI bots polluting the web consistently (the numbers are just going up on a daily basis).

On profitability and sales

I’ll be touching on sales, go-to-market, profitability and revenue in more of the upcoming newsletter issues, but the key reason I’m able to make the series of events over the past couple of months (a mini-tour) and fund sponsorships or the organization for the meetup (among others) is: profitability.

With ongoing layoffs and augmenting AI like crazy, most businesses out there are trying to adapt to an uncertain future with an endless radical shifts occurring over the past 5 years: the pandemic, wars, hyperinflation, recession, VC pullback, trade wars, you name it.

⚠️ Unless you’re OpenAI or managed to raise funds for an AI wrapper, chances are, AI is not directly contributing to revenue gains for your business.

I’ve been seeing this over and over and over and over again. The battle right now is managing the books in a way that keeps a business afloat, with more optimal and high-performance processes, even if churn has occurred over the past 2-3 years or with price pressure due to better automation or tooling available today.

Real businesses need to stay profitable

Profitability has always been a north star for me ever since I went into freelancing in the early 2000s, went full-time solo in 2008, and founded DevriX in 2010. When no VC funds exist, making payroll is a monthly question mark. Running in the red consistently is not an option, despite what’s been popularized by VC-backed media out there.

As an angel investor, I’m also not thrilled when an investment of mine goes down because the runway keeps crunching while expenses stay high. While rapid growth is common for VC, managing risks is another factor that’s often neglected. I’m surprised how many startups keep pumping ad spend or hiring BDRs without proven product-market fit, or relying on outdated playbooks for cold calls and emails for a commoditized service. This is not working.

Ensuring profitability opens up opportunities for long-term investments: partnerships, R&D, explorations, developing longer term business relationships, studying the ICP better, finding new angles and problems in the market based on common objections and complaints at hallway tracks, etc. There’s a reason why masterminds exist, business coaches and advisors operate, Slack groups emerge for peer sharing, and dark social accounts for over 80% of recommendations in many B2B industries.

The most effective sales journeys are consulting-led, with education and transparent outline of best practices and realistic scenarios.

It’s not uncommon for me to recommend a competitive solution or firm when our stack or process is not the best fit. I also had 2 sales “meetings” today, neither resulting in a pitch or quote, simply because closing a deal does not come “at all cost”. I provide options, outline possible plans, and recommend follow-ups as much as needed.

Closing the wrong deal is often more damaging than missing out in the first place. This isn’t theoretical; it gets very practical when weekend escalations come up often, emergency emails pop up, or a stakeholder always comes up grumpy with random expectations outside of the paid SLA.

So while I’m working on the new flexible GTM options with the teams here, my key takeaway is: sort out the billing with profitability in mind, retention first, and a financial model that keeps the business in the green at least for the next 3-4 months (given the global unpredictability, long-term planning is guesswork at best). With the summer approaching, this is a safe bet before the new season starting in September.

Mario

💼 Raising in Europe is rough. The entire B2B doom and gloom of late 2022 still ongoing was due to tons of capital poured into startups with minimum supervision. But other businesses like Sword had to grind consistently for years, raising hundreds of thousands at a time, until hitting the US market and closing $250M in a single year after.

📰 Can ChatGPT do what your wrapper does? A common question asked by Svetozar Georgiev on a panel with Eilla AI founder, demonstrating the importance of data quality and accuracy, in-depth industry know-how, and understanding the entire ecosystem better than a set of documents compiled online. Worth watching the short.

💼 Working with enterprises is about incremental improvements. An example I saw yesterday outlined once again how a single second of faster load times or better conversion rates can yield hundreds of millions in extra revenue (or jeopardize this opportunity when missed out). This isn’t obvious for a startup or an SMB, but pretty clear at a massive scale.

🔖 Track the right metrics in personalization. Learn which 9 metrics reveal whether your personalized campaigns are actually driving results.

🔖 Scale real-time analytics with confidence. This guide explains how to benchmark latency and performance before your systems go live.

🔖 Turn digital content into recurring revenue. Explore how Digital Rights Management helps protect assets while enabling monetization.

🔖 Lead with purpose in high-pressure moments. Neuroscience shows that value-based decisions help leaders respond faster during crises.

🔖 Steinway’s secret to lifelong customer loyalty. The brand relies on relationship equity over marketing to retain generations of users.

🔖 Build habits that align with your brain. Real behavioral change starts by understanding how routines form over time.

🔖 Use boundaries to boost sustained focus. The five-step Boundary Framework helps founders protect energy and perform more consistently.

📰 Volkswagen execs sentenced. A German court sends former leaders to prison over the long-running Dieselgate case.

📰 Soft housing data signals risk. Weak residential investment is offering another red flag for a slowing economy.

📰 Cutthroat EV pricing intensifies. BYD’s sharp discounting forces a new competitive phase in the Chinese auto market.

📰 Robots start to read the room. Intempus uses human biometrics to help machines react in more emotionally aware ways.

📰 Financial regulation faces test. A Supreme Court case could curb regulator autonomy and shift attitudes toward market oversight.

📰 Cybertruck resale values fall fast. Tesla’s recent trade-ins show steep depreciation and raise questions about long-term resale appeal.

📰 Battery projects face tariff pressure. Proposed tariffs and subsidy cuts could disrupt U.S. clean energy storage, exposing fragile supply chains.

📰 Russia sanctions back on table. Trump’s rhetoric drives fresh geopolitical worries and potential exposure across global portfolios.

📰 Delayed EU tariffs lift markets. Trump’s surprise comment boosted European stocks and created short-term investor momentum.

📰 Visuals get sharper in cars. Jaguar Land Rover tests a lens that cuts display lag in AR dashboards.

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Need My Help?

Keeping myself busy - here are the main projects I focus on:

🌐 Scaling enterprises on top of WordPress? DevriX provides martech retainers to SMEs, publishers, eCommerce, SaaS, and more. Our plans start from $1,200/mo to $40K/mo and we manage high-traffic platforms (hundreds of millions of monthly views), B2B SaaS apps, partnership management solutions, supporting $10M - $250M businesses with scalability, custom funnels, CRO, big data augmentation, AI-driven processes, HubSpot workflows, programmatic SEO - and everything a modern business requires in digital in 2025.

🚀 Work 1:1 with me? At Growth Shuttle, I run two popular plans: Async Advisory ($1,800/mo) for $3M - $30M founders and executive teams and the smaller Strategic Growth Circle ($497/mo) for $100K - $500K entrepreneurs, agency founders, scale ups.

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📊 Into digital M&A? I work closely with Flippa’s marketplace. They offer a vast variety of online businesses for any buyer’s interest. Or if you’re ready for an exit, Flippa provides the tools to list your business and close the deal.

💼 Looking for investment opportunities? Check out SeedBlink.