For the CEE region, 2026 marks a recovery. After a stagnant period between 2023 and 2025, when the exit market froze, the ecosystem entered a more aggressive and decisive dynamic.
According to the current outlook by Wellington Management, liquidity is returning to the venture ecosystem, albeit unevenly. Investors are now navigating a selective, quality-oriented environment where underwriting discipline and deep market insight take center stage.
Behind this shift lies a hard market reality: venture capital funds are sitting on record piles of dry powder, uninvested capital, which, combined with the escalating requirement to return cash to limited partners, has changed the playing field.
Funds are no longer simply looking for exits, according to Bain & Company, they are forced to realize large, rapid transactions to clear their books and satisfy their investors.
Lessons from the $32 billion exit
This financial urgency, among other factors, paved the way for the deal of the decade: on March 11, 2026, Google officially completed the largest acquisition in its history, purchasing cloud security specialist Wiz for $32 billion in cash. The company was sold in this transaction at a multiple of approximately 20x to 30x its ARR.
The transaction stands as both the largest acquisition in Google’s history and the largest-ever buyout of a venture-backed startup. It also serves as the ultimate symbol that the market is no longer just talking about a recovery; it is actively deploying record-breaking sums.
However, this deal does not signal an easy win for everyone. While the market is opening up, with total exit values nearly doubling to $297.6 billion in 2025, it remains extremely selective, according to TrueBridge Capital.
Capital is no longer spreading thin; it is concentrating in the hands of a narrow group of winners. This dynamic is driven by a fundamental shift in corporate strategy. In the ongoing AI arms race, giants can no longer rely on slow, in-house development. Instead, they are aggressively buying ready-made teams and infrastructure just to keep pace with the killer speed of innovation.
This explains why global M&A volume has surged by 40% year-over-year. Tech giants aren’t just looking for growth; they are buying strategic shortcuts.
How to sell a startup in 2026
The main lesson from the Wiz case is that the metric of success has shifted toward efficiency and speed of integration. Wiz reached the legendary $100 million ARR milestone in a record time of just eighteen months.
For founders in Prague, Warsaw, or Tallinn, the lesson is clear: in 2026, Big Tech is no longer buying promises of future growth or optimistic user-count charts. They are buying precision-tuned money machines that can be instantly and painlessly integrated with existing platforms like Azure or Google Cloud.
While the region was previously popular mainly for cheap engineering talent, today, US corporations are willing to pay premium prices for finished products that are critical to their business. In the era of generative AI, tech giants no longer have the time for five-year internal development cycles; they prefer to buy a shortcut to the market in the form of teams that already possess functional code and deep intellectual property in areas such as data analytics or security.
Moreover, a deal like Wiz was offered has confirmed that cloud security has ceased to be a supplementary service and has become a first-tier critical infrastructure. This shift impacts the CEE because holding a dominant position now requires more than just great code.
Exit preparation is now a matter of intentional product design. If a startup’s API is not compatible with global standards or if the product does not solve a problem that is easily integrated, the chances of a billion-dollar exit drop dramatically.
Furthermore, analyses from leading M&A firms confirm that, beyond technology, regulatory feasibility is now under extreme scrutiny. While acquisitions of, for example, social media networks face fierce resistance from antitrust authorities (such as the FTC in the US or the EU), vertical acquisitions in security or AI infrastructure are getting the green light from regulators.
This is further supported by the fact that while the IPO market is building on the momentum of 2025, procedural and regulatory cleanliness remains a necessary condition for any type of liquidity.
Even 2026 will not be about thousands of small exits, but rather about a few massive deals that define the entire decade. The story of the merger between Wiz and Google is a symptom of a broader trend where Big Tech is not afraid to overpay for quality; for them, the price of losing the technological war for cloud dominance is far higher than a few tens of billions of dollars.
This creates a unique window of opportunity for the Central European ecosystem. The region has technical depth, cost discipline, and now a clear global benchmark. For founders, the question is no longer whether to sell at all, but how to build a company that the global digital economy cannot do without.
