› We need to treat Europe as one market — otherwise we're too small.▍

The through-line of Linda Brunner's CV is repair. Her first financial role was at Switzerland's earliest fintech — too early, she says, for the regulation and the technology of its moment. She then built the risk function at a bank, and from there moved to the operator side of cyber.

As Chief Commercial Officer at Futurae, she scaled a security business selling to banks, credit-card networks and stock exchanges across the globe. After which she spents years consulting as an operator for startups. The pattern she saw was clear enough to fix it: European buyers who wanted European security, European research that produced roughly a third of the world's top cyber talent, and an investment layer that could not meet either group where they stood.

IYK is her answer. A pre-seed and seed fund built to close the capital gap in European cyber — at the stage where technical judgment matters most, and where most European capital simply is not.

There are exactly two places on earth where the cyber flywheel spins the way it's supposed to: the United States and Israel. In both, buyers, operators, researchers and investors sit close enough to the same table that a young product gets a real chance in a real environment. In Israel especially, an Israeli product is granted that chance by default — not because it's finished, but because the ecosystem has learned to.

Europe has the talent and, increasingly, the demand. What it lacks is proximity. IYK's operating theory is that the flywheel is buildable here — it just needs the players in one room. That's why the fund runs events with enterprises, startups, researchers and investors on purpose: not as marketing, as infrastructure.

By Series A, most funds can read the room. At pre-seed, a CISO is fixing what's broken in the next six to twelve months — not what will matter in three years. Some CISOs are forward-looking. Most, understandably, are not. Listening only to them is risky; ignoring them is worse.

IYK's edge is the ability to hold both timeframes at once. Her partner Claudio is a well-known cyber expert who has built and scaled a company himself, and, in Linda's words, connects dots across markets in a way she has rarely seen. Together they ask a two-part question of every pre-seed thesis: is it a relevant threat, and is it a good architecture? Then they ask whether the buyer — maybe not today, but two years out — will actually pay for it.

Reading two years into the future is the tricky part. It comes from depth in how systems actually work, not from tracking hype cycles. AI, for instance, is quietly opening a new class of vulnerabilities around non-human identity and machine-to-machine access. Some of those will become the biggest threats of the decade. Most of what's on stage this year won't.

Building a fund, Linda notes, is not so different from scaling a cyber startup. Both are trust businesses. Both demand an institutional-grade setup long before the buyer or the LP owes you anything. The topic resonates — nobody argues with the urgency. The friction is that LP evaluation criteria still default to finance-driven templates from a decade or two ago. A third fund with a track record beats an emerging manager, even when the data says emerging managers tend to outperform funds two and three.

The workaround is to build relationships that overcome what you don't yet have. Keep the fund structure plain vanilla — no exotic carry, no surprises — so nothing else has to be defended. And treat the European context as an opportunity to build a different kind of edge: sector depth, regional access, technical judgment.

The bigger structural problem is fragmentation. Setting up a fund in Europe is expensive: regulation, cross-border rules on both LP and investment sides, country-by-country silos of otherwise abundant venture capital. On defence and cyber there is finally a cross-Europe vehicle via the EIF, but almost everything else is still local. Her position, repeated twice for emphasis: treat Europe as one market. Otherwise we're too small.

Her one-word answer for what to change today: simplify. Then: remove borders. Then, unprompted, the deeper diagnosis. The United States invests a lot to win a lot. Europe invests little to lose little. That mindset produces the sovereignty conversation we keep having about AI, space, and infrastructure — a lot of talking, not enough doing, and pension capital that hasn't yet decided venture is worth the risk.

If Europe wants category leaders of its own, the bets have to be made early — and they have to be made at all. That, in the end, is the case for IYK: an emerging manager willing to underwrite European cyber at the stage where the risk is real, the buyers are close, and the architecture is still being drawn.