Knowledge base
From startup to scale-up: what you can learn from Picnic, Crisp and Sendcloud
20 May 2026
The step from startup to scale-up is the hardest one for many founders. You have a working product and a first group of customers, but how do you build that out into an organisation that grows in a controlled way? Three Dutch companies, Picnic, Crisp and Sendcloud, show how it can be done. And what you can take from it.
Startup and scale-up are not the same thing
A startup is looking for a scalable business model. A scale-up has found that model and focuses on fast, controlled growth. The transition is more than a rising line in your revenue. It calls for different things: from doing everything yourself to building structure, from small teams to management layers, from seed money to bigger rounds.
The five thresholds almost every scale-up runs into: scaling up customer acquisition without the costs running away, professionalising your team, making your processes and systems scalable, holding on to your culture as you grow, and securing funding based on numbers instead of promises.
Picnic: start small, optimise, then scale
When Picnic started in 2015, it didn’t think of itself as a supermarket but as an IT and logistics company that delivers groceries. Free delivery, fixed delivery times, its own electric vehicles and a route that was optimised per neighbourhood. They started in a single city and optimised everything there down to the detail before they expanded.
Clever detail: Picnic worked with a waiting list per postcode. That stopped the logistics from getting overloaded and at the same time created scarcity. Validation before growth, not the other way around. In 2021 Picnic raised 600 million euros, led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, for European expansion.
What you can take from it: growth starts with focus. First get a small area or segment exactly right, then expand.
Crisp: choose a sharp positioning
In 2018 Crisp chose not to compete on price, but on quality, convenience and conscious eating. Fresh, sourced locally from farmers and makers, without middlemen. They built their operation around that promise, not the other way around, and grew through a community, PR and word of mouth. In October 2022 Crisp raised 75 million euros in growth capital.
What you can take from it: dare to choose. Not “we’re cheaper or faster”, but a clear place in the market that a specific customer recognises themselves in.
Sendcloud: solve a small problem really well
In 2012 the founders of Sendcloud had a webshop of their own and got stuck on the shipping process. They built a plugin that automatically created shipping labels based on orders, linked to PostNL and DHL. They deliberately chose a niche, small to medium-sized webshops with the same problem, and only expanded to other platforms and countries later. In 2021 they raised 150 million euros, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
What you can take from it: don’t start with a big platform. Start with a small problem that comes up often, solve it in a practical way, and only build further from there.
Your own transition to scale-up
The same thread runs through all three stories:
- Narrow your target group, focus first on who delivers the most value.
- Standardise your internal processes before you get too big.
- Make your funding well-founded: numbers over vision.
- Think about your own role as a founder, what you’re going to let go of, delegate and structure.
How we do this at Confidato
The transition to scale-up is exactly the moment when finance becomes strategic. We help you lay a scalable foundation: clear numbers, a well-founded growth case and the structure to grow in a controlled way instead of on gut feeling. So that you don’t just grow bigger, but smarter too.