Tink was hard to reach. In 2020, Zoé Fabian-Frey and her team had identified the Swedish company as the pan-European leader in open banking. Zoé, General Partner and co-founder of Noteus Partners, told the story on the latest episode of my DEALMACHER Podcast.

Noteus is an independent European growth investor. Zoé and her three partners left Eurazeo in 2023 and closed their first fund in 2025 at €413 million, well above target. Here are five things from our conversation:

1. How her team built the Tink deal

The way in came through an angel investor Zoé knew from another connection. He considered selling shares. He never did, but her team got data, and their sector work was already done. That allowed a fast process.

Then they introduced Tink to a company in Munich that Tink went on to acquire. The round Zoé’s team created financed that acquisition. On the podcast she described the effect as a clean multiple arbitrage: Tink bought the Munich company at one multiple and was later sold to Visa at a much higher one.

The introduction to Visa also came from her team, almost in passing. Visa showed interest, and the board had to decide. It was not an easy decision. At the same time, a very active hedge fund had put an alternative term sheet on the table. In Zoé’s words, it gave the founders “mental freedom”: they knew they did not have to take the offer.

Tink went to Visa six months after her team had invested. Zoé was frustrated at the time. They had put in around 30 million and wanted to invest at least twice that again. “In hindsight I have to say: luckily not.” The sale closed in 2021, before the tech market turned in 2022 and 2023.

2. A skeptic on every deal

I asked Zoé how she avoids falling in love with a deal. Her answer: you hardly can. It happens because Noteus works closely with founders, and she wants it that way.

So Noteus built a structure around it. Every deal has a deal partner, as everywhere. And every deal gets a second partner who did not do the deal, often the person who was most skeptical in the investment committee. That partner checks whether the company is on track within the four- to seven-year horizon Noteus usually has. Founders do not notice this, she said.

Part of that check is thinking about the exit early. Which strategic buyers should hear about the product roadmap today? They should understand early why the company matters to them.

3. What founders should settle before an exit

For Zoé, exit preparation starts with a personal question. Do I want to be a public-company CEO? Hand over? Sell to private equity? Could I see myself working inside a strategic buyer? “Nothing is harder than when your own attitude doesn’t fit the exit plan.”

The answer decides which partners fit. A founder who wants freedom to invest in growth and product may struggle with a private equity owner. Her biggest learning from the investor side is optionality: the best outcome needs more than one route open.

She was equally direct about founders who have run out of energy after hard years. Saying “this far and no further” is not a problem, she said. A founder can look for an exit, run a profitable company, or bring in external management and move into a chair role. It only becomes difficult when someone promises what they cannot deliver. Since founding Noteus herself, she has much more empathy for the ups and downs nobody sees from the outside.

4. The question she can’t settle: do moats still last?

Noteus looks for proprietary data built over a long time, regulated verticals with deep access into large markets, and real-world infrastructure. Scalable Capital is one example: building a full banking licence and its own infrastructure was part of the Noteus investment thesis. Another is switching costs that come from human workflows, where someone still has to sign off and carries the liability.

Noteus finds it hard to invest in companies that are only a wrapper on top of someone else’s model, even when they grow fast. In Zoé’s view, the smart move there is to invest early and exit early, and that is not the Noteus model. In some of those cohorts she has seen only half the customer base left after a year.

And then she said something investors rarely say in public: “I keep talking about differentiation and moats. But do they really still exist?” She finds it hardest to hold both thoughts at once. A few years ago, she said, her thinking was much more black and white.

5. Raising a first fund

Zoé has known her partners for 13 to 17 years. She started her career with one of them at Blackstone in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis. Noteus now has around 18 people in five offices: Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris and Los Angeles.

Philipp Möhring, General Partner at Tiny and my guest in the previous episode, left her a question: how do you build a big fund that still feels small? Her answer starts with focus. A big fund does not mean many people or many investments. Without a clear position, fundraising does not work, because LPs cannot place you. The rest is discipline in staffing, so that no silos form. “A local maximum gets us nothing”, she said: the goal is the best deal across Europe, not the best German deal.

Her three tips for first-time fund managers are focus, continuous communication and resilience. Communication, for her, means telling LPs what you believed, what happened and what turned out differently. Many LPs sit across from managers whose portfolio marks are only paper gains. Resilience matters because some of the Noteus LP processes took more than two years and still ended as planned.

The full episode with Zoé Fabian-Frey is on the DEALMACHER Podcast: www.id.vc/dealmacher-podcast