BERLIN, 16 JUNE 2026 – IMPETUS Capital managing partner Viktor Manev is the guest on the latest episode of Emerging Forward, a podcast about how capital really moves between Europe and the world’s emerging markets. Recorded on the sidelines of SuperReturn and SuperVenture in Berlin, the conversation runs through CEE liquidity, exits, and what LPs and emerging managers still get wrong about the region.
He argues the IPO is a beginning, not an end; that small listings are the missing rung in CEE’s funding ladder; and that no amount of liquidity engineering can substitute for the quality of revenue.
When I use the word IPO, almost everyone reacts the same way – no, no, no, this is the end of the story. And I keep telling them: no, we use the IPO somewhere near the beginning of a company’s life, not at the end of it.
– Viktor Manev, on the episode
His starting point is a structural gap: in CEE there is capital at seed and almost none in the middle, with private investment over GDP running four to fifteen times below the European average. The founders who hit that wall are often profitable and growing 40–50% a year – and unfundable by venture capital for exactly that reason. His answer is the small IPO: the €10–20 million listing that bulge-bracket banks ignore but local retail, private wealth and pension funds can comfortably underwrite – the missing rung in the funding ladder.
Pulling one off is less about money than coordination – a ‘conductor’ aligning banks, auditors, lawyers and exchanges, listing first at home and then dual-listing abroad, as IMPETUS did bridging the Bulgarian Stock Exchange and Deutsche Börse. Liquidity, he insists, ‘doesn’t fall from the sky like rain’; it is built through fair day-one pricing that leaves room for the next investor. The proof is Shelly Group, backed at a €10 million valuation and now a roughly €1.2 billion company in Frankfurt’s SDAX – though none of it holds without the quality of revenue beneath it.
The blind spot he presses on: secondaries and continuation funds supply liquidity but dodge the return question, while most allocators sit on one side of the private-or-public divide and miss the IPO as the connector between them. That, he suggests, is what makes CEE a liquidity lab – small enough to make the model legible, and increasingly deep in local wealth to fund it. The episode even closes on his rule for eating well on the road: skip the brochure restaurants and follow the locals – advice he says applies equally to markets.
Listen to Episode 10 of Emerging Forward on Substack, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The episode even closes on Viktor’s rule for eating well on the road – skip the brochure restaurants and follow the locals – advice he suggests applies equally to markets.
Emerging Forward is hosted by Adi Bhatnagar, FRSA, a venture investor and former founder who works with investors and early-stage companies across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The series is a short, focused show about the mechanics of cross-border capital – sourcing, structuring and the on-the-ground realities behind the headlines – made for investors, emerging managers and founders. Bhatnagar described the exchange as one that could have run to two parts; the pair have agreed to return for a second round on policy, regulation and institutional investors.
