(00:47) Mads at the BBCA / UKPC. Same name, same problem, same answers nobody's implementing. Plus a quick spin through Ben Evans' latest, ASML's revenue upgrade, and Meta canning 8,000 engineers. Cool, cool, cool.

(02:30) Nvidia returns $80B to shareholders - roughly the GDP of Tunisia, give or take. Free cash flow of $49B a quarter. Stock down on earnings - maybe we've collectively lost our minds.

(07:00) The Great IPO Unfreeze. SpaceX at $2T (an AI company wearing a rocket suit wearing a telecoms business), OpenAI at $1T (the most consequential S-1 of the decade, Dan bets it ain't pretty), and Anthropic's "final-final" pre-IPO round, number four. Sure.

(13:24) Unitree IPOs in Shanghai at $67B. The dancing robot company actually shipping units. The Android of humanoids? Europe, please build the layer on top.

(20:00) Europe writes its own future. Mistral grabs Vienna's EMMIE for neural physics simulation, EQT wins the €5B Scale-Up Europe mandate (sorry Atomico), and HMRC picks Quantexa over Palantir for £175M. Buying British: hopefully not the B-player.

(27:30) American AI rebellion. AI now polls worse than ICE. Molotovs at Sam Altman's house. Europe, take note.

(33:30) Prediction: France will cave on ESOP rules by end of '26. Mads disagrees.

(36:30) Deal of the week: Isomorphic Labs, $2.1B Series B. Demis's side hustle is going great.

(38:50) Week ahead: Salesforce earnings (where art thou, Agentforce?), AI-stack reports, and the S&P 500 rule change that could let SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic into the index faster than feels reasonable.

Recorded live from a Montenegrin port at a European LP/GP gathering of 80 investors, Dan asked 5 European investors the same question: 

If you had to put every penny of your fund and personal capital into one bet in Europe, where would it go?

(01:21) Jens Lapinski — German super angel 

Jens would back the full AI stack, money transfer infrastructure, training environments, enterprise deployment. On sovereign AI, he argues the US-Europe relationship is one investment continuum rather than two competing blocs: chips, foundation models, hyperscalers, operating systems and the application layer are predominantly US-built, and pretending otherwise isn't productive. He acknowledges defence and security carve-outs make sense, but the broader play is co-investing with American capital, not against it. The one structural fix: unlock European pension fund and insurance capital flows into venture, and fix the public market exit path so companies don't default to US listings.

(07:24) Andra Bagdonaite — First Pick, Lithuania 

First-check pre-seed investor for Baltic founders since 2022. Andra's bet: AI applied to traditional SMBs; logistics, manufacturing, businesses still running on legacy ERPs and Excel. Lithuania functions as a fast sandbox for founders to pilot with one or two customers before going global. She frames this as a long compounding opportunity rather than a rocket ship, the scale of legacy process digitisation across European SMBs is the prize.

(12:21) Ella Goldner — Zinc 

Ella would concentrate on transformative deep tech climate. Her view: incremental solutions won't shift the trajectory, so a portfolio approach to moonshot bets, fusion and energy provision featured explicitly, is the rational play. She cites Kate Bingham's COVID Vaccine Taskforce as the model: urgency strips out bureaucracy and accelerates the research-to-commercialisation path. Insurance pricing is already starting to reflect climate risk, which she sees as an early commercial signal. Her one change for Europe: cultural rather than structural, building a problem-solving, business-building mindset from school age. She contrasts this with Israel and the US, where building and discussing ventures is embedded in everyday conversation.

(23:58) Mike Reiner — 432 Legacy, Netherlands 

Mike's bet: the software and safety layer around physical AI. Roughly 11% of revenue is currently lost to safety-driven slowdowns and caging where robots and humans share environments. His firm has already backed a Swiss company using ultra-wideband to detect people through walls for multi-sensor safety platforms. The thesis comes from a proprietary value-chain analysis system: the same tool surfaced transformer and specialist hardware supply as the binding constraint on data centre buildout (not just energy), and identified firmware security (portfolio company Binary) as a durable cyber gap less likely to be absorbed by the foundation model providers. On founders, he looks for trauma-driven ambition paired with active self-development work, the combination he sees correlating with mission-driven, durable companies. His one change: more funds willing to take on tough problems with longer fund cycles, which he argues is also where the largest demand-supply gaps, and returns sit.

(34:39) Dave Haynes — FOV Ventures 

Dave's bet: robotics and physical AI. He separates the two cleanly; robotics is the embodiment, physical AI (or world models) is the intelligence layer that understands real-world physics rather than text and images. Sizing: digital economy roughly $15T, physical economy in the hundreds of trillions, and software has only meaningfully disrupted the former. FOV maps the space across four layers: hardware and infrastructure (sensors, hyperspectral imaging, wireless power, portfolio company Willow), software and operating systems, the intelligence layer (world models, where Yann LeCun's Amy sits as a European entrant), and vertical applications. Europe's edge, in his view, is in vertical deployment; labour shortages, real industrial pull, and strong robotics talent from TUM, ETH and Imperial. He frames the shift as "Robotics 2.0": where Robotics 1.0 needed £5m of CapEx, founders can now build serious automation businesses on a £500k cheque, mirroring the Web 1.0 to 2.0 transition. He estimates the ChatGPT-equivalent moment for robotics is roughly five years out.

[02:30] — ARM vs Spotify: One the Market Loves, One It Doesn't Both posted good numbers. ARM got rewarded, Spotify got a -13% haircut and a 25% YTD drawdown despite record margins and 761m MAUs. Lomax calls ARM's AGI CPU pivot a "bet the farm." Mads drops the CPU:GPU ratio shift from 1:8 to potentially 1:1 as agentic AI explodes tool calls. Infrastructure compounds, consumer optimises, and the market knows which is which.

[10:38] — Anthropic: $200bn Google Deal, $45bn ARR, Just Give Them Europe Too $200bn to Google Cloud. ARR at $45bn (up from ~$9bn in January). Potential $50bn raise north of $1tn. Lomax declares Anthropic "so, so hot right now" — secondary-market appetite lives in WhatsApp groups and members' club washrooms.

[16:15] — Enterprise AI JVs: Palantir Meets Accenture Meets PE's Existential Crisis Anthropic and OpenAI both announced PE-backed JVs on May the 4th. Zero investor overlap. Andrew warns frontier labs risk becoming expensive consulting firms. Lomax: PE returns are compressed, LPs restless, AI is the new pitch to juice portfolio EBITDA. Everyone agrees this is IPO prep dressed in a consulting trench coat.

[23:15] — Mythos, Trump's AI Safety U-Turn, and Regulatory Capture Mythos is so good at hacking that Trump is drafting FDA-style pre-deployment AI reviews — having revoked Biden's AI EO on Day One. Andrew deploys the nuclear weapons analogy (drink!). Lomax offers the conspiracy theory: everyone in the administration has so much money in these companies that regulation now suits them. He then distances himself from that theory. Barely.

[31:30] — EU vs Meta/WhatsApp: Brussels Says Open Sesame, Zuck Says Pay Me Meta kicked rival chatbots out of WhatsApp, offered to let them back for a fee. Brussels rejected it. Mads lands the kill shot: open banking made UK payments vastly superior to America's. Sometimes the regulator is right. Potential fine: ~$16-20bn.

[39:27] — ASML: "No One Is Coming for Us" (Famous Last Words?) Fouquet went to Milken and said "come at me." Lomax notes China isn't replicating EUV — they're engineering around it with Huawei's CloudMatrix. Mads roasts Fouquet for lacking Jensen's paranoia. Lomax delivers the closer: founder mode vs. conference mode.

[46:33] — UK Fusion: Always 30 Years Away, Now Only 10 (Maybe) Sounds like a Bond villain's energy company: Gates money + American stellarator IP + UK magnets. 400MW by mid-2030s. Andrew: "magnets are not the reactor." Lomax: anemic growth, £120bn in interest payments, defence plan a year overdue. Building a fusion industry — or buying a franchise?

[56:09] — 🏆 Deal of the Week: SAP Acquires Prior Labs for €1bn 15-month-old startup. €9m seed. €1bn exit. The "GPT for spreadsheets." Possibly the fastest seed-to-exit in European venture history.

[57:30] — Week Ahead: Anthropic IPO board watch (they won't) · EU AI Act trilogue (~13 May) · Tencent Q1 earnings (13 May) · Fed transition — Powell's last day (15 May) · SpaceX S-1 (week of 18-22 May)

[59:46] — Dan's back next week. The nation breathes a sigh of relief.

Charles hands Trump a bell, Musk says he's not building AGI (this week), and Brussels manages 12 hours of trilogue with absolutely nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Big Tech spent the GDP of a small country on GPUs, and Europe, yes, Europe, quietly dropped two near-billion-dollar AI rounds out of UCL. Buckle up.

(00:48) Round-up King Charles's grooming of Trump hits new heights with HMS Trump's actual ship's bell. Whisky tariff dropped one win, banked. Hormuz still a mess, Brent at $126, Canada launches a sovereign wealth fund, and Musk testifies under oath that Tesla isn't pursuing AGI. Six weeks after saying it would. Pick your audience, pick your claim.

(02:42) Big Tech Earnings: capex needs cloud growth to justify itself Alphabet (+22%, cloud +63%) and Amazon (AWS +28%) get rewarded. Microsoft and Meta punished. Meta's stock down 8.5% for the crime of having no cloud P&L. Apple, supposedly the AI laggard, is the only one to trade up after print: iPhone +22%, Greater China +28%, and Tim Cookie insists AI will be "fast, personal, private." Memory is the new bottleneck    SK Hynix sold out for all of 2026.

(09:14) Frontier-Lab Politics: state-level chess Musk vs Altman in court, with OpenAI's lawyer delivering the line of the week. China blocks Meta's $2bn Manus acquisition not tit-for-tat, but China running the US export-control playbook in reverse. Google's "up to $40bn" into Anthropic at a flat valuation: smart hedge, not a bailout.

(14:31) Europe quietly outperforms Ineffable: $1.1bn at $5.1bn, David Silver, RL-from-scratch. Recursive Superintelligence: $500m, Tim Rocktäschel, AI that improves itself. Two UCL professors, two near-unicorn rounds, one week. The DeepMind diaspora is real.

(16:29) Frontier Models: monetisation arrives GPT-5.5, Kimi K2.6, Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 all in eight days. Cadence is no longer the story. OpenAI doubled API prices. Anthropic pulled every quiet lever it had, and your Claude bill went 10-50x. Nobody's leaving. Run-rate $9bn → $30bn in four months. Models commoditise; stacks don't.

(21:09) SpaceX S-1: $1.75–2tn target Biggest IPO in history filing in May. 220x earnings. Bull case is space compute Musk's bet that we run out of Earth-based power before we run out of orbital sunlight. Don't bet against him, etc.

(26:54) EU AI Act vs UK AI Plan Trilogue collapses. The Omnibus that would have softened the Act is what died Act now harder, not easier. London becomes the only place in Europe to build an AI lab. Not enough, but we'll take it.

(30:04) Energy & SMRs UK industrial energy: 125% above EU-14 median. SMRs won't power a data centre until the 2030s. Even fixing energy doesn't fix the electrician shortage. Build everything, in parallel, yesterday.

(35:43) Predictions Dan: France becomes Europe's OPEC by Q1 2027. Mads: Anthropic should IPO, probably won’t, the May board vote is the marker.

Deal of the Week (38:40) Mads: Ineffable, obviously. Dan: Atech, £681k from Lovable, making hardware prototyping accessible.

Until next week, muchachos. 

This week: the EU admits it wrote a bad AI Act (shocking), Sergey Brin is wheeled out of retirement again, SpaceX buys a coding company because of course, and Wall Street invents a new way to short private credit. Dan and Mads untangle.

(02:00) DeepSeek V4 drops overnight — Chinese open-weights model benchmarking at Opus 4.6 level. The gap between Western frontier and Chinese open source is now 78 days. Trained entirely on Huawei chips, so the three-year US chip embargo has been going brilliantly. Anthropic will probably survive, but NVIDIA might want to glance at its share price.

(07:30) The EU quietly euthanises its own AI Act — Monday's trilogue is gutting the juicy bits and calling it "simplification." Translation: Brussels is admitting it was wrong without admitting it was wrong. Europe needs inference chips, public procurement as anchor demand, pension capital unlocked, a real 28th regime, and nuclear next to datacentres. Otherwise we're just tidying.

(11:00) Cyber week: three stories, one confused headline — France's ANTS loses 19M identity records (run by Atos, which is insolvent, what could possibly go wrong). The UK Biobank "breach" isn't a breach, it's a 2003 open-science policy finally meeting 2026 strategic competition. 

(18:40) Sergey Brin un-retires (third time lucky?) — Leaked DeepMind memo: every Gemini engineer must now use Google's own agents, because they'd been quietly reaching for Claude Code when they actually wanted to ship. Embarrassing. Meanwhile Google owns 14% of Anthropic and just sold them $10bn of TPUs. Panic stations over here, revenue party over there. Beautifully incestuous.

(24:20) SpaceX options Cursor at $60bn — or pays $10bn in compute to walk away. OpenAI has Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, xAI had vibes. Now it has a distribution front door. Every frontier lab is becoming an application company. Europe's shot is here; Lovable, enterprise workflows, anything touching physical AI.

(28:45) Europe has ceded space to SpaceX — we just haven't admitted it — Starlink: 7,000 satellites. Eutelsat: 600. IRIS² won't be operational until ~2030. The architecture's right, the scale is pathetic, procurement is pork-barrel nonsense. Fix: scrap ESA geographical return, let a thousand flowers bloom at every input layer, anchor with state demand.

(33:30) Wall Street opens a short on private credit — JPM, Barclays, Morgan Stanley now making markets in CDS against Blackstone, Apollo, Ares. ~20% of BDC loans went to SaaS. AI is eating 25-35% of that. Blackstone took $3.8bn of redemptions in Q1 and posted its first monthly loss in three years. Not 2008, but a slow, jagged repricing of old-economy SaaS. 

(40:30) Predictions — Dan: the next trillion-dollar European company will be a defence prime, not software. Anthropic crosses $100bn ARR and never IPOs (Mads: sad, it should).

(41:20) Deals of the week — Mads: ATMOS Space Cargo (€25.7M Series A: Europe can finally bring things back from orbit without asking SpaceX, Russia, or China nicely). Dan: €1.07bn into 57 EDF defence projects, yikes grants, yes, but hopefully the bedrock rather than a grantrepreneur buffet.

(43:30) Week ahead — EU AI Act trilogue Tuesday, Ariane 6 launching American Kuiper satellites the same day (the irony writes itself), $14 trillion of hyperscaler earnings Wednesday, and a BoE decision that's drifted from "two cuts" to "possibly a hike." Cheers, Iran.

Anthropic is having the week of its life, Jamie Dimon wants you to know the sky is falling (again), and Germany spent €2 billion learning that shipbuilding is hard. Dan and Lomax fly as a duo this week.

00:00 – Intro & News Radar – Iran ceasefire (maybe), global VC hits $300B in Q1 alone (70% of all 2025 deployment), four companies absorbed $188B of that, Russian hackers are in your router, and a Brit insists he isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. Busy week.

04:16 – Anthropic: The Full Picture – Run rate has tripled to $30B, overtaking OpenAI's $25B. Over 1,000 enterprise customers spending $1M+, eight of the Fortune 10 on the books, and 32% of the enterprise LLM API market locked down. Mythos, their new frontier model, found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and hit a 72.4% exploit rate versus Opus 4.6's 14.4%. So powerful only 40 organisations have access. They also acquired Coefficient Bio for $400M in stock — six employees, founded last year, backed by Dimension Capital who turned $10M into $204M in Anthropic paper. EMEA is their fastest-growing region with 9x revenue growth and offices across six European cities.

22:15 – Jamie Dimon's Annual Letter – 48 pages of structural warnings. Historically brilliant on multi-year calls (fiscal deficits, fintech disruption, HTM accounting), less brilliant on timing — he's called recession four years running. This year: inflation as "the skunk at the party," private credit's $1.8T transparency problem, and JPM spending $20B a year building AI in-house with $2B in cost savings already.

29:36 – Mega IPOs – SpaceX ($2T, June), Anthropic (October, $60B raise), OpenAI (Q4/Q1 '27, $852B). Combined primary issuance could exceed 2025's entire US equity capital formation of $232B. Every major 2025 IPO traded down. Worth noting.

37:43 – Climate Tech Returns – Rebranded as energy security and resilience. Climate VC hit $40.5B in 2025, up 8%. 87% of US companies quietly increased sustainability spend. The money's flowing — just under different letterhead.

43:32 – Germany's Defence Nightmare – €10B for six warships, four years behind, prime contractor fired, Dutch-French-German finger-pointing all round. Defence budget rising from €86B to €152B by 2029 but procurement can't keep up. The EU's new AGILE fund offers €115M for defence startups with a four-month turnaround. Welcome to the age of cheap warfare.

48:34 – OpenAI Buys TBPN – A one-year-old live tech show with 58,000 YouTube subscribers, acquired for low hundreds of millions weeks before a potential IPO. OpenAI says it'll stay independent. Sure.

50:44 – Predictions & Deals of the Week – Dan calls Anthropic becoming Europe's de facto AI partner. Lomax brings Gilead's $5B acquisition of German biotech Tubulis. Dan flags Zero Shot Fund from OpenAI alumni.

00:00 — Meet Harry Destecroix Dan butchers the fund status (already closed, Dan), Harry sets out the SCVC thesis: generalist deep tech, breakthrough technologies from UK universities, everything from quantum to advanced therapeutics.

01:40 — EIF's €15B Fund of Funds: Salvation or Same Old? The EU's massive growth-stage vehicle promises to unlock €80B in scale-up funding. Will it diversify European VC or just keep writing cheques to the same crowd? Harry drops the bomb that the ECF still has a €5M max round size. Lomax reminds everyone that 0.02% of EU pension assets are in venture. And the House of Lords just torpedoed Mansion House. Lovely.

07:10 — Fund Size Is Strategy A €50M seed fund split 20 ways produces "horrible syndicated rounds." The US writes $10-20M seeds while Europe argues over whether £5M is too generous.

11:02 — Should Europe Just Own the Application Layer? Let America build foundation models, let China sell cheap tokens, let Europe double down on defence, sovereignty, and AI applications. Harry agrees but insists deep tech still needs deep pockets.

14:07 — Getting Governments Out of VC Lomax makes the case for private capital. Harry points out 5% allocation to high-risk assets is hardly betting the farm. Dan reveals his portfolio is "95% that way."

21:10 — Project Prometheus: Bezos Drops $100B on Physical AI Buy old-economy manufacturers, juice them with AI. Europe has 20% GDP in manufacturing vs 10% in the US — massive opportunity. Harry suggests maybe it's just a clever way around EU planning laws. The eternal question: buy incumbents or build from scratch?

28:21 — China's Token Economy: The New OPEC? China prices inference at 1/180th of OpenAI. Chinese models hold 4 of the top 5 spots on Open Router. NIST found them 12x more susceptible to hijacking attacks. Great for cash-strapped startups. Terrifying for enterprise CTOs.

34:19 — Cursor's Kimi Scandal Got hammered not for using Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5, but for not being upfront about it. A cautionary tale in transparency.

36:14 — ARM Builds Its Own Chip After 36 Years ARM sacrifices its licensing model on the altar of AI inference. Meta is first customer. Dan asks if Intel still exists.

39:54 — Innovate UK Gets a Founder at the Helm Tom Adeyoola takes the reins of ~£1B annual budget. Harry (council member) is cautiously optimistic: stop spreading money thin, start tracking "deal flow," stop wasting founders' time. Can a founder survive the civil service?

48:12 — PREDICTIONS 🔮 Lomax: Hyperscaler revenue won't justify $602B capex. Amazon alone outspends the entire US energy sector. 🔮 Harry: Mag Seven fragmenting. Microsoft and Meta at 52-week lows. SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs could trigger rotation — unless Iran blows it up. 🔮 Dan: AI revenue reporting is smoke and mirrors. Anthropic's "$6B month" was run-rate maths. 79% of OpenAI customers also pay for Anthropic. Everyone's buying everything — and that stops.

56:19 — Deals of the Week 🏆 Lomax: Air Street Capital Fund III — $232M, solo GP. 🏆 Dan: Granola hits unicorn status. British. Brilliant. 🏆 Harry: Lace Lithography — Norwegian startup breaking below EUV limits. Harry explains optical physics without his PhD colleague. Brave.

Hosts Lomax Ward, Dan Bowyer and Harry Destecroix. 

Guest: Dr. Harry Destecroix - founder, PhD chemist, sold Ziylo to Novo Nordisk for £800M, founder of SCVC, Innovate UK council member,  and "super fabulous."

Hosted by Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, and Lomax Ward, all European venture capitalists. 

00:00 — Nvidia's GTC: Jensen Drops a Trillion-Dollar Bomb 

Three new chips announced, each more ridiculous than the last. The Groq inference chip does 35x tokens per watt. Vera Rubin does 10x Blackwell. And the Feynman chip (2028) stacks silicon on silicon like a semiconductor lasagne. Marginal improvements these are not.

04:38 — Star Cloud: Data Centres in Space, Because Why Not 

A seed-stage startup founded by an English bloke gets its video played at the biggest GPU conference on earth. The lads are impressed. Dan remains "not sold" but concedes it's "a lovely story." Literal moonshots, baby.

07:54 — Is Nvidia a Buy? (This Is Not Investment Advice™) 

Mads runs the numbers: Nvidia trades at 21x forward earnings, basically the S&P average, except the S&P doesn't grow 73% a year. Bull case: it's cheap. Bear case: three of its biggest customers are building competing silicon. Classic.

12:00 — The AI Lab Business Model Hunger Games 

OpenAI kills side gigs and panics into enterprise. Anthropic does a Palantir cosplay with Blackstone. Mistral quietly shows up with a billion-dollar run rate. Mads says without consumer monetisation, OpenAI is "toast." Dan doesn't buy the ad model. Lomax says think outside the box. 

20:42 — Norway's $2.2 Trillion Fund Manager Is Spooked 

Nikolai Tangen says markets are sleepwalking past the Iran risk and an AI bubble could vaporise 35% of his fund. Amazon is free cash flow negative for the first time since the Clinton administration. Alphabet's FCF is down 90%. Meta's is near zero. The hyperscalers went from the greatest cash machines ever built to borrowing money for GPUs. Meanwhile Apple sits at the bottom of the CapEx chart, vibing.

30:00 — A Man, His Dying Dog, and ChatGPT 

Sydney tech founder uses ChatGPT + AlphaFold + a university lab to build a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his rescue dog. Lomax provides the necessary reality check (the dog still has cancer) but admits personalised medicine is coming, just give it 20-30 years. Meanwhile DeepMind can't define AGI and is paying researchers $200K to help them figure it out.

41:00 — Google Stitch: Vibe Design & Lovable's Nightmare 

Google coins "vibe design" (jury's out on whether that sticks) and launches a free AI design canvas that ships code straight to MCP. Lovable's head of growth already said her biggest fear is platforms with distribution. Lovable responds by pivoting into... everything? The internet is not impressed.

45:49 — Rachel Reeves Discovers Non-Competes Are Bad 

The Chancellor uses the Mais lecture to announce non-compete limits, £500M for sovereign AI, and £2B for quantum, including actually buying quantum computers from UK companies. Then she mentions £13.8M for quantum research hubs and the mood deflates slightly.

50:10 — EU Inc: Europe's Delaware (Pending Lobbying Apocalypse) 

The EU wants 48-hour company formation, under €100, no notary. Andreas Klinger's movement becomes official policy. The gang gives it a 50/50 chance of surviving the legislative sausage factory. Lomax notes that even Delaware made him send a fax, so maybe the bar is lower than we thought.

53:33 — Travis Comes Out of Stealth (Not the Band) 

The Uber founder resurfaces after eight years of cloud kitchens with "Atoms" - a physical AI company targeting food, transport, and mining. The combination makes zero obvious sense but nobody wants to bet against the man who built Uber. Fair.

This week, Trump may have speed-run a global recession. Europe is having a moment. Cursor might be toast. And Jensen Huang promises a chip that will "surprise the world."

00:00 — The Oil Shock: Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, 20M barrels/day offline, IEA buffer lasts ~20 days. Dan calls it: we're in recession territory.

01:37 — Europe's Energy Crisis 2.0: Gas storage down 40%, prices doubled, the post-2022 diversification strategy is broken.

03:00 — Silver linings: UK nuclear push, EU Industrial Accelerator Act, sovereignty becoming investable.

04:54 — Defence Tech & Drone Economics: Ukraine is the Silicon Valley of drone warfare. $20K Shahed drones are taking out $300M US radar bases.

07:00 — The $3.6M Tomahawk problem: US firing missiles faster than it orders them. George Bush quote of the week involving a camel.

08:38 — AI in warfare: school tragedy raises hard questions about AI-guided targeting and accountability gaps.

11:08 — Poland rejects €44B EU defence loan for political reasons. Polish Iron Dome: €3.5B. US Golden Dome: $1T. "It's gold. It's Trump."

13:03 — Europe's Big Week: AMI Labs raises $1B seed (Europe's first Instacorn), Revolut gets UK licence, Alan hits €800M ARR, #LondonMaxing trends.

15:29 — World Models vs LLMs: LeCun thinks current AI is the wrong path to AGI. Mads agrees — you can't have general intelligence if you can't cross a room.

25:19 — Cursor at $50B? 20x in a year, but it's a middleman. Claude Code killed the IDE. The Jasper parallel is not flattering.

30:00 — AI & Chips: Meta building its own inference chips. Custom ASICs growing 3x faster than GPUs. Nvidia's moat showing cracks. GTC next week.

33:30 — Atlassian & Oracle cutting jobs. AI as cover for a general RIF?

34:18 — Deal of the Week: UForce (Ukrainian defence, UK-based), $1B valuation, $50M raise.

34:53 — Week Ahead: Fed holds, rate cuts pushed to September, ECB meeting, 42% chance of a 2026 rate hike.

36:00 — Hot Take: AI pendants and wearable mics — Dan's not buying it.

🔥 BEST LINES

"I don't know anybody who is a leading thinker on coding who writes their own code." 

"Computer science seems to be largely a solved problem." 

"Of course it's gold. It's Trump!” 

Hosts: Dan, Lomax and Mads - All European early stage VCs.

02:00 — Why Hormuz matters more than you think. 

04:08 — Europe: affected, not influential. Europe keeps ending up front row for crises it cannot shape.

10:38 — The startup angles: energy, drones, sovereignty

13:29 — “Fast fashion” warfare. Ukraine-style low-cost interceptor drones versus million-dollar missiles. Warfare has entered its brutally efficient Zara phase.

17:29 — Anthropic vs the Pentagon. Anthropic says no to some defence use cases, Washington gets angry, OpenAI pounces, and Claude fans turn the whole thing into a consumer loyalty event.

19:54 — Mads: pick a lane. You cannot call AI the new nuclear weapon and then act shocked when governments treat it like strategic infrastructure.

24:30 — Lomax: moral stance, fine. Pentagon contracts, also fine? Anthropic can absolutely posture as the ethical lab. It just looks awkward while cashing defence-adjacent cheques.

27:49 — AI layoffs… or just layoffs with better branding? Dan calls BS on Block’s “AI-driven” cuts: more likely a classic overhiring hangover dressed up in robot costume.

32:30 — The tech is real, the memo is theatre. Mads agrees AI is delivering genuine productivity gains. That does not mean every layoff deck suddenly becomes visionary.

34:19 — $650bn of AI infra: boom or bubble? Answer from the group: yes.

35:57 — Mads: froth on top, substance underneath. Some of the market is ridiculous. But revenue growth at the top labs is so real that “it’s all a bubble” no longer survives contact with reality.

38:26 — Black Swan memo season. Lomax reviews Lux’s warning to founders: preserve runway, know your infra risk, and do not assume the money tap stays on forever.

45:23 — Real advice needs real trade-offs. Mads’ sharpest point: “raise more if it’s easy” is not advice. The real question is whether founders should spend time fundraising or building.

47:05 — Merz drops the diplomatic niceties. Germany’s chancellor says Europeans are not productive enough, boosts defence, and generally sounds like someone who has seen the spreadsheet.

51:20 — Lomax: kill FCAS. His take on the Franco-German-Spanish fighter programme: too slow, too old, too late. Back the future, not the museum.

56:07 — Defence primes vs insurgents. Should Europe protect legacy giants or let new defence players eat their lunch? The answer gets lively.

1:01:25 — Proxima Fusion: Europe swings big. A rare hopeful note: a European fusion startup is trying to build something properly enormous and properly ambitious.

1:02:12 — Stellarators, briefly. Mads explains fusion like a sane person: tokamaks are more proven but unstable; stellarators are harder to build but may work better long term.

VC Hosts: Dan, Mads, Lomax

[03:05] Nvidia Earnings — 14th consecutive beat. Data centre rev up 75% to $62B. Stock basically flat. The market has priced in perfection. Bull case: 16x 2028 earnings, Rubin shipping, China at zero = pure upside. Bear case: custom ASICs climbing, 75% margins under siege. "The question is whether the AI companies can actually monetise it."

[09:11] Ukraine, Four Years On — From aid recipient to defence-tech supplier. Ukrainian startups raised $105M in 2025 — a third of all European early-stage defence capital. European defence budgets heading from ~$300B to ~$600B. Defence tech investment: $100M in 2019 → $1.5B in 2025. The 100:1 drone kill ratio is extraordinary economics. War is maths, and Ukraine is winning it.

[23:30] Anthropic's Safety Meets Reality — Founded to be the safe one. Now dropping guardrails weeks after a $30B raise. Pentagon threatened to brand them a supply chain risk. Lomax: "Call me cynical." Mads: "Existential threats rewire moral calculus. It happened to OpenAI. It happened to Google. Now it's Anthropic's turn." RIP Bletchley Park.

[29:25] Chinese Distillation — 24,000 fake accounts. 16M exchanges. DeepSeek, Moonshot and Minimax caught training on Anthropic's models at industrial scale. National security issue? Obviously. But China has a chokehold on the US defence supply chain, so good luck with that conversation.

[32:00] Anthropic Goes Enterprise — Salesforce, Slack, DocuSign integrations. Partner or Trojan horse? Mads: building enterprise apps is way harder than vibe coding on a Thursday afternoon.

[35:30] SaaSpocalypse or Renaissance? — The market can't decide. Current thesis: SaaS = system of record, AI = system of action. Honest answer? Nobody knows.

[36:20] AI Margins — OpenAI hit 33% gross margin (targeted 46%). Anthropic hit 30% (targeted 40%). Nearly $4B spent on free users. Break-even pushed to 2028-2030. Lomax: "Can you run a giant tech company on 30% gross margin? The multiple doesn't work."

[41:45] European Quantum — Funding hit $1.5B in 2025 (+170% YoY). Strong science layer, governments actually buying from startups. But PsiQuantum alone raised $1B in the US. Mads: "Europe has €16T in pension capital. The deficit is plumbing, not capability."

[52:45] The Doomsday Paper — "What if AI succeeds so hard it triggers a macro crisis?" Mads dismantles it. Jamie Dimon tie-in: maybe SaaS is the new subprime.

[57:35] Deal of the Week — Wayve raising $1.2B at $8.6B. First automotive investor: Nissan.

[58:20] Week Ahead — UK Spring Statement. DeepSeek DBC-4. OpenAI $100B round. Hegseth vs Amodei showdown — Dan's prediction: Anthropic caves.

Hosts: Dan Bowyer, Lomax Ward Guest: Eyal Malinger — Co-founder, Resurge Growth Partners (venture equity — the gap between VC and PE)

[02:18] Humanoid Robots at China's Spring Festival Gala Four Chinese firms showed off cable-free dancing robots. Eyal's reaction progression: "game over" → "Clone Wars" → "why are there swords near children?" China controls ~90% of humanoid shipments. H1/G1 robots going for $6-10K. Europe has… Neuro Robotics and OverSonic at Series A. Cool.

[05:59] Will Robots Replace Soldiers? Eyal: if you don't need to risk soldiers, you will use them. Lomax: nukes still deter total war, but skirmishes could proliferate. Everyone: yes, we'd have a robot butler. Lomax: depends on the price (he lives in Portugal).

[10:57] Raspberry Pi — Europe's First Meme Stock? Stock pumped after CEO bought shares + Reddit hype around OpenClaw. Trading at ~£600M. Edge AI debate ensues. Lomax: "Isn't this a time to celebrate Europe finally has its own meme stock?"

[14:36] AI Causing a Fuss: Anthropic vs The Pentagon Anthropic doesn't want autonomous kill decisions. Eyal channels Palantir's Alex Karp: "Our adversaries will not pause for theatrical debate." Lomax: Dario wants to have his cake and eat it. Everyone broadly agrees ethics are a luxury when the other side doesn't play by the rules.

[17:19] Peter Steinberger Leaves Europe for OpenAI Created OpenClaw, Europe celebrated for two weeks, then he bounced to San Francisco. Lomax: "I thought things had got better." Dan: who in Europe could've called him? Eyal: if he'd been in London instead of Austria, maybe different story. Cue weekly EU ecosystem lament. Macron pledged €30M for AI. Anthropic just raised $30B. Right.

[24:00] VC AI Toolkits — David Stark Open-Sources His Setup WhatsApp meeting briefs, auto-transcription, deal flow into HubSpot. Lomax calls it "cute." Eyal: most of this is just Zapier with extra steps. Real alpha = agentic AI that sources and approaches founders autonomously. Dan: if everyone has Harmonic, nobody has alpha.

[31:00] Munich Security Conference Recap 62nd edition. Rubio slightly less abrasive than JD Vance (low bar). Merz says the old order is over. Starmer accelerating UK defence spend to 3%. Stark (drones) raised big from Founders Fund — German defence minister uncomfortable with Peter Thiel on the cap table. Sovereignty debates continue. Lomax: "You can't tell Europe to be sovereign then beat them for being sovereign."

[37:56] Health & Bio Good News Compass Pathways nails second Phase 3 trial for synthetic psilocybin treating resistant depression — could be on market by 2027. Savo Health working on non-invasive CGM patches (goodbye arm claws).

[39:56] Deals of the Week

• Quantonation — largest European quantum fund ever
• Ineffable — $1B seed (!!) at $4B pre-money, led by Sequoia. David Silver (AlphaGo architect) leaves DeepMind
• Netflix / Warner Bros M&A — Eyal hopes it signals FTC/DOJ reopening the exit valve for VC and PE

[42:30] Fin. 🎙️

03:21 - The Great Model Migration Sam finally kicked OpenAI off his iPhone homepage. Claude's in. 

08:23 - Claude Code: Mads' Love Letter Mads hasn't looked back since discovering Claude Code's skills and agentic workflows. It's not just better writing anymore—it's a whole different way of working.

09:36 - HBR Report: AI Makes Us Work MORE Generative AI isn't reducing work, it's intensifying it. Turns out when you can do everything yourself, you just... do everything yourself. Constant dopamine hits. 

14:07 - AI as Your Second Opinion Mads fed his DNA and blood work to an LLM. 

19:38 - Alphabet's 100-Year Bond Google just raised £5B more than expected. Priced like government bonds. Too big to fail, baby. 

22:59 - Your Pension is Funding US Hyperscalers €35 trillion in European savings. None of these pension holders know they're financing 100-year bonds for Google. The rules say "minimise volatility," not "maximise returns." Cool cool cool.

26:31 - European Sovereignty: Words → Action? Merz and von der Leyen saying the quiet parts loud. Two-tier EU? 28th regime? Ignoring planning rules? Also Mistral going from $25M to $400M run rate with a full sovereign stack (no US tech).

27:31 - "What Even Is an AI Business?" If you're not using AI for what you're doing... what ARE you doing? Material science? Better use AI. Biotech? Better use AI. 

30:32 - The Only Office Suite Update Was Google European governments spend billions yearly on decades-old Microsoft IP. Open source alternatives exist. Nobody cares.

31:28 - Mistral: Not Dead, Actually Dan had written them off. Turns out they're crushing it with enterprise. Not a chatbot play—it's consultancy + transformation + Anthropic-level models. 

34:50 - The China Manufacturing Model, Reversed German manufacturers using Chinese AI for factories? Probability: nil to zero. Regional fragmentation + massive AI growth = very large companies serving regional markets.

35:42 - Europe Finally Saying It Out Loud Von der Leyen threatening breakaway subset unless countries get on board. Big words from the "protein" European government. Tax attempts always flounder but... momentum feels different?

38:07 - Space: Orbex Down, Data Centres Up? UK's Orbex (low-carbon micro launcher) filed for administration. £49M debt. Government didn't support. Meanwhile: Elon eyeing Google's orbital data centre research. 

40:45 - Billionaires Should Burn Capital McCalip's plea: goad more billionaires into irrational high-variance projects that advance civilisation. "No one cares about your Loro Piana." Build cathedrals. Fund ugly metal. Light up corners of the future.

42:00 - Europe's Launch Problem No European small launcher has reached orbit. Not one. Airbus worked because we collaborated. Launch requires same logic. "We are mid-sized countries pretending we're still empires."

43:15 - Fusion: Europe's Real Shot? Should Europe double down on quantum and fusion instead of chasing AI? Mads: "Fix capital markets union first." Everything circles back.

45:04 - Deal of the Week: Olix 25-year-old British founder James de Combe raised £220M at $1B+ valuation for AI inference chips. Also runs Comind (raised £100M as a teenager). Is this our Elon without the red cap?

46:22 - Upside Closeout "Nothing happens until somebody decides to do something." More entrepreneurs. Less standing in their way. 

Hosted by Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen Guest: Sam Marchant

01:22 — AI models: two flagships drop 20 minutes apart
Anthropic ships Opus 4.6; OpenAI replies with GPT 5.3.
Key tension: best model vs stickiest workflow (tooling + habits = raw benchmarks).
China keeps coming: Kimi K2.5, Qwen3 Max — strong performance at lower cost, plus “swarm”/multi-agent vibes.

07:02 — Recursive AI + security flex
OpenAI: “GPT 5.3 helped build itself” (debugging training pipeline).
Anthropic: claims model found 500+ serious open-source security issues → “bots find bugs better than eyeballs.”

11:06 — Alphabet CapEx shock
Alphabet expected $180B CapEx in 2026 → market flinches despite earnings beat.
Take: hyperscalers signalling capacity constraint and “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Debate: monster spend now vs how long monetisation takes (ads, pricing, enterprise budgets).

18:53 — “SaaSpocalypse”
~$300B wiped off software stocks on fear that seat-based SaaS collapses into usage/agent-driven economics.
Claude Code “agentic workflows” spook the market: if models do the work, why pay the tool tax?
Counterpoint: SaaS doesn’t die—it de-rates (from “growth multiple” to “utility multiple”).
Lomax: market likely overcorrecting; enterprise adoption is slow and messy.

26:07 — EU–US tech uncoupling (or… vibes?)
France moves to ban civil servants from Zoom/Teams/WebEx → pushes homegrown “Visio” by 2027.
Germany (Schleswig-Holstein) + Austrian army shifting off Microsoft to open-source alternatives.
Group take: sovereignty goal is real, but government-built software ≠ winning strategy; better to back founders + procurement pathways.

32:44 — Spain vs social media
Pedro Sánchez pushes: CEO accountability, misinformation/hate speech enforcement, under-16 social restriction.
Smart framing: shifts from “free speech” to public health.
Pushback: slippery slope risk → censorship-by-proxy debate.

39:20 — Muskonomics: SpaceX + xAI + “data centres in space”
Core claim gets roasted: physics/energy/cooling/payload/latency all feel brutal.
Bull case (Lomax): if anyone can brute-force iterate at scale, it’s Musk + launch cadence.
Bear case (Mads): narrative may be a financial wrapper to justify merging/funding xAI via SpaceX halo.

51:10 — Anthropic Super Bowl ads + OpenAI shade
Anthropic pokes OpenAI over ads in AI (“we’d never”).
Take: brand landgrab + positioning move; debate whether the ads were funny or cringe.

53:52 — Europe corner: critical minerals reality check
EU auditor warns Critical Raw Materials Act targets likely missed (dependency on China still extreme).
Problem isn’t geology—it’s permitting + processing + time (10–20 years to mine/start).
US hosts rare earth summit; Europe tries to coordinate while still exporting heavily to the US.

56:53 — Deal of the Week
Lomax’s portfolio: Portuguese founder Pedro building LLM-driven clinical trial planning → reduces protocol amendments/costs.
Raises $52.5M Series A (one of Iberia’s biggest; top-tier EU Series A scale).
Dan: January saw 5 new European unicorns (Aikido shoutout highlighted).
Mads: new European growth fund Cambara targeting €30–50M checks; €750M raised toward €1B.

🤖 AI Corner

07:32 — Clawdbot → Moltbot now OpenClaw?! AI intern… with admin rights.
09:19 — Early wins: negotiates car deals, plans diets, orders Tesco shops.
10:38 — Early fear: unconstrained agents + inbox access = mild terror.
12:22 — It wakes itself up and takes action. Cool. Also horrifying.
13:17 — Security stories emerge. Nobody gives it their bank login (yet).

💰 AI Mega-Rounds

14:19 — SoftBank doubles down on OpenAI. Masa swings hard. Again.
16:06 — Anthropic: hotter growth, $20bn round chatter, IPO whispers.
16:50 — OpenAI ads incoming. Users threaten to… switch? Maybe.

🧠 China Swarms

18:01 — Moonshot drops “Swarm” models: 100 agents, one brain.
19:34 — Parallel thinking = faster, not cheaper. Tokens go brrrr.
20:55 — Open source as geopolitical side-eye.

📊 Earnings Season

21:40 — ASML prints money: AI capex not slowing, China still ~20%.
23:05 — Memory beats logic: HBM crunch, chipmakers fully booked.
25:38 — Meta vs Microsoft: ads + AI good, capex + slowing Azure bad.
26:44 — Tesla: sales, “physical AI” story saves the stock.
30:22 — Klarna –30%: credit nerves. Everyone shrugs.

🇪🇺 Europe, Again

32:19 — “United States of Europe?” Telegraph panics. Reality unimpressed.
35:15 — Europe only moves when scared enough. Not there yet.
39:35 — Integration: go wide, go deep, or argue forever.
43:05 — Starmer in China: finance, vibes, low expectations.
43:21 — EU–India deal > UK deals. Market size still matters.

🪖 Defence

45:49 — Europe rearms: drones, satellites, ISR, startups rejoice.
51:21 — US spends ~$900bn; Europe debates what it actually needs.
53:09 — Bull case: Ukraine = Europe’s defence tech lab.

📱 Society

54:23 — Social media bans for kids: messy science, real concern.
56:47 — US sues, EU regulates. Meta lawyers busy.
59:21 — Design-choice lawsuits = tobacco vibes.

🧾 Deals

1:01:34 — UK plans to train 10m people in AI. Ambitious. Necessary.
1:03:12 — Deal of the Week: Sword Health buys Kaia for $285m. 
1:04:24 — Synthesia hits ~$4bn. Regret levels spike.
1:04:45 — Wrap. Brains emptied. See you next week.

A £1bn London-area data-centre project gets halted after a planning/EIA mess-up → delays of 9–12+ months, potentially worse.

The twist: data centres are being upgraded to “nationally significant infrastructure,” enabling central-government fast-track (DCO route) instead of local NIMBY planning.

Still: EIAs + judicial reviews can keep slowing everything down. Core complaint: the system keeps “deciding whether to build” after we’ve already decided we must.

10:24–20:01 — Davos: in a fractured world, can middle powers go solo?

Big takeaway: the old global order isn’t coming back. Middle powers doing bilateral deals risk being picked off one-by-one. The only viable strategy is bigger blocs + coordination.

On AI/robotics: Europe shouldn’t obsess over winning foundation models; the opportunity is physical AI (robotics, manufacturing, automation) layered onto Europe’s engineering base—if politics and fragmentation don’t smother it.

20:01–22:22 — AI vs jobs: don’t overkill the headline

Entry-level postings are down since early 2023, but the consensus here is: macro + rates explain most of it. AI will reshuffle work (especially junior/clerical tasks), but mass unemployment isn’t the base case.

22:22–27:46 — EU Inc / “28th regime”: real momentum and real resistance

EU Inc aims to make a pan-EU startup entity that’s fast/cheap to set up (48 hours, no minimum capital), plus simpler ESOPs (ideally tax deferred until liquidity).

The fight now: Regulation vs Directive

• Regulation = uniform + immediate, but needs unanimity
• Directive = easier, but invites delay + fragmentation

Expect pushback framed around labour standards and “race-to-the-bottom” fears.

27:46–34:51 — Has China already won AI?

Reframe “winning”: it’s not god-like AI dominance; it’s economic + military power with AI as a lever. Models converge fast, advantages erode, and the “months not years” gap matters.

Europe’s real risk is strategic irrelevance unless it scales power: capital markets, energy, defence capacity, and political cohesion (with a nod to the UK needing to be onside).

34:51–39:30 — US science funding “collapse”: brutal in pockets, not total

Big cuts and cancellations are real—especially in politically sensitive areas—but most US R&D is private sector, and defence-linked R&D keeps growing. Europe is trying to attract researchers, but this doesn’t yet look like a permanent talent migration.

39:30–43:13 — SaaS: dead? no? trapped?

SaaS faces a fork:

1. Mature into a cash machine (cut bloat, optimise margins), or
2. Become a “system of context” by embedding AI/agents deeply

Why the pain: ZIRP-era bloat + expensive orgs + incentive traps.
 Bright spot: incumbents with distribution are already monetising AI add-ons at meaningful ARR.

43:13–45:47 — Defence IPO era: the Overton window moved

A blockbuster European defence IPO becomes the poster child for a broader trend: defence re-rated, ESG lines shifting, and a growing pipeline as European defence budgets rise for the next decade.

45:47–47:02 — Quick hits

Billion-scale European fund raise gets a shout-out. More big AI deals bubbling. New fund launch focused on robotics/manufacturing, positioned as aligned with what Europe needs next.

(00:34) BBC on YouTube: “iPlayer walked so Netflix could run”

• Dan: YouTube is enormous; BBC is adapting for younger audiences (and maybe… survival mode).
• Mads: iPlayer was genuinely visionary; regulators stopped BBC going too commercial back then.
• Andrew: Stop geo-blocking. Just take my money. (“Not in your region” = crime.)

(02:51) EU–Mercosur trade deal: 25 years, 700M people, farmers furious

• Biggest-ever EU trade deal: Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay. (03:30)
• Why now: EU wants options beyond US gridlock + China dependence.

(06:07) Open Cosmos: “EU Starlink?” …Not quite, but it’s something

• Takeaway: not a consumer Starlink clone; more “secure, sovereign comms” for governments. (07:56–08:32)

(08:32) Meta’s 20-year nuclear power deals: AI runs on electricity (and contracts)

• Hyperscalers locking in long-term nuclear PPAs in the US; Europe stuck with slower buildout, planning pain, and NIMBY boss fights.

(10:12) UK drops digital IDs: “25 incompatible IDs is the national strategy”

• Mads: Digital ID is foundational (identity + access). Most OECD countries have it; UK is the holdout. (10:45–12:14)
• UK backlash feels emotional; we already have loads of IDs that don’t talk to each other.
• Cost debate: rollout ~£2bn-ish vs long-term fraud reduction. (13:33–13:48)

(15:35) Anthropic CoWork: “built in 10 days… by Claude Code”

• CoWork: “Claude Code for knowledge workers” — chat UI + sandboxed VM. (19:31)
• It’s early/buggy, but the meta-point is wild: AI building AI products at startup speed. (18:17–18:34)

(20:30) Yann LeCun “world models”: why LLMs aren’t the whole story

• LLMs can talk; they don’t understand physics.
• Four buckets: video prediction, interactive simulators (e.g. “move left/right”), physics engines, and latent world models (JEPA). (22:41–23:27)
• Robot “pick and place” success rate cited as a compelling signal for JEPA. (23:27–24:15)

(28:13) Grok: sexualised imagery = policy grenade

• Group consensus: when it’s minors, “platform self-policing” isn’t cutting it.

(32:19) JPM Health conference: biotech meets the LLM invasion

• Nvidia + Eli Lilly: $1B partnership for AI drug discovery. (33:28)
• Big pharma facing $200–$300B revenue going off-patent → likely acquisitions spree. (33:28–33:53)
• Torch acquisition: “unified medical memory” pulling from records/wearables/visits. (36:54–37:10)
• Cool paper alert: stroke triage via CT platform cuts transfer time by 64 minutes; “2M brain cells die per minute.” (38:57–39:25)

(42:19) Deals of the Week — “capital markets therapy session”

• Quantinuum files confidentially for IPO; quantum + encryption randomness today, “R&D roadmap” tomorrow. (42:32–43:52)
• Aikido Security (Ghent) hits unicorn: $60M Series B led by DST. (46:41–47:05)
• Parloa (Germany, call centre automation): $350M Series D @ $3B, six months after Series C. (46:41–47:05)
• Equal1 (Ireland, UCD spinout): $60M for quantum servers in data centers. (47:20)
• Harmattan AI (France, drones): €200M Series B @ €1.4B, Dassault invested; supplying drones incl. UK Army contract mentions. (47:36–48:12)

Episode summary

This week we cover Trump’s Greenland rhetoric and the broader implications for NATO, European defence spending, and sovereignty. Then we dive into the tech and markets that (quietly) moved: Meta’s acquisition of Manus, Octopus/“Kraken” spinning out as a major energy-software player, Discord’s IPO momentum, Revolut’s Turkey expansion via license acquisition, and why UK pensions are underperforming (plus what reform could actually fix). We finish with a big CES-driven AI corner—Nvidia’s autonomous-driving stack “Alpamayo,” the China compute/memory bottleneck, AMD vs Nvidia software moats, Grok’s enormous fundraise, and why Claude Code is showing up even inside Google.

Topics
00:37 OpenAI “Health ChatGPT” launches (not in Europe) — what’s the deal?
02:26 FDA signals faster AI regulation: “move at the speed of Silicon Valley”
08:10 Trump + Greenland: history, Thule, and where’s the grift?
11:29 Pax Americana cracks
16:10 France: ban social media under-15s
18:21 EU regulation vs US deregulation: wedge widens
21:06 Meta buying Manus
22:27 Kraken (Octopus) spinout: big UK tech hiding in plain sight
25:02 IPO watch: Discord momentum + how it monetises
26:15 Revolut → Turkey via FUPS: buying access and licenses globally
29:19 UK pensions: underperformance + pushback on forced private allocations
31:57 Why pensions underperform
39:09 German dentists pension lawsuit + “shrimp farm VC” cautionary tale
40:27 Markets: FTSE hits 10,000 + quietly outperforms S&P
43:15 Biotech rebound + psychedelics
47:02 CES 2026... 
48:05 Nvidia’s “Alpamayo”: full autonomy stack + open models/data
50:34 Nvidia vertical apps vs chips: execution risk outside core semis
52:07 China + H200s: memory bottlenecks and geopolitics of compute supply
53:20 AMD vs Nvidia: the CUDA/software moat
54:35 Grok raises: $20B at $230B
56:44 Claude Code: adoption even inside Google
57:25 Deals of the week: Faculty exit to Accenture
59:47 Biographica raises to build next-gen crop tech

Notable moments / quotables

• “The only people using cash or violence to negotiate are mobsters.” (12:32)
• “It’s super easy to get autonomy to 99%… the last 1% takes 10 years.” (48:52, referenced)
• “Much better to pay 2% to deliver 15% than 0.1% to deliver 1%.” (30:25)

Deal of the week

• Lomax: Faculty reportedly sold to Accenture (UK AI/enterprise decision intelligence)
• Dan: Kraken spun out of Octopus Energy (energy metering + grid/flows platform)
• Mads: Biographica raises to build technology for next-gen, more resilient crops

Part 1 — 2025 predictions: what hit, what missed?

02:59 — OpenAI “dethroned”: debate, but mostly “yes”

04:47 — China/Taiwan “decisive year”: mostly no

05:46 — Defence tech surge: yes

06:46 — Europe/UK tech sovereignty: yes-ish but hard to measure

07:25 — Space enabling tech keeps attracting capital: yes

07:30 — US recession H2 2025: nope

09:07 — Stock correction early 2025: correct-ish

09:45 — M&A rebounds: yes

10:24 — IPO window reopens: yes-ish

---

Part 2 — 2026 predictions (with yardsticks)

11:29 — (1) Dan Gray: “European Re-industrialisation”

Big industrial families + family offices start allocating more directly into innovation (seen around Munich/TUM).

13:11 — (2) Dan Bowyer: “Apple wins personal AI”

Dan bets 2026 is Apple’s “Siri actually works” year—especially via on-device models + partnerships (Google mentioned).

16:35 — (3) Mads: “3 major tech IPOs”

From this list: SpaceX, Databricks, Canva, Anduril, Anthropic — pick 3/5.
Mads goes big on Anthropic growth + enterprise leadership.
Dan Gray adds: IPOs cluster; post-IPO M&A often spikes; real test is 6–9 months later.

19:08 — (4) Lomax: “Biotech comes back from the dead”

Biotech rally underway (XBI up hard off lows).

24:39 — (5) Dan Gray: “Politics kills the 28th regime”

He doubts a single EU incorporation regime survives politics, but suggests a workaround:

28:51 — (6) Mads: “Chinese open-source AI hits 60% of downloads”

Notes China open-source share ~44% by end of 2025 (per the conversation), and cites growing adoption of open-source models in startups.

30:11 — (7) Lomax: “Longevity clinics go from boutique → (somewhat) mainstream”

Thesis: preventative, subscription-style health scales (Neko, Function Health examples).

33:31 — (8) Mads: “EU expands tariffs on Chinese goods beyond EVs”

Europe stops pretending tariffs are morally evil, and starts protecting industrial base more aggressively (supply chain breadth and/or higher rates).

34:50 — (9) Mads: “No AGI in 2026”

AGI definition mess continues.

40:19 — (10) Lomax: “Cyber becomes a clear and present threat”

AI lowers cost of recon, phishing, persistence; cyber as statecraft sits below “war thresholds.”

43:14 — Bonus (Mads): Robotaxis

Waymo keeps lead in the West (incl. London expansion/testing), Tesla makes progress but stays behind.

2025 year-in-review for European tech: capital, unicorns, geopolitics, AI, health, defence, and space space spaaaace.

01:25 – European tech in numbers

• $45bn into European startups (flat vs 2023–24, still ~½ of 2021 peak).
• 28 new unicorns in 2025 (up from 14 in 2024).
• US dominates: ~$250bn private tech funding.
• VC fundraising still tight (~$10bn into European funds).
• Exits are back: Wiz–Google, Klarna IPO, SMG IPO.

04:16 – 2025 in one sentence

• Dan: “Extreme volatility.”
• Lomax: “The final nail in globalisation.”
• Mads: “China became a true peer to the US.”
• Andrew: “Shipping fast beat gold-plated tech.”

05:49 – Most exciting tech moments

• Mads: Claude Code, Chinese open-source AI, ASML–Mistral deal.
• Lomax: Wiz’s $32bn cash exit.
• Andrew: 6G moves from lab to real specs.

08:39 – Darwin Awards (biggest screw-ups)

• Dan: Meta / Zuckerberg.
• Lomax: The entire EU institutional stack.
• Mads: Europe exporting founders to the US (incentive failure).
• Andrew: Rachel Reeves & UK growth policy.

11:59 – What smart people got wrong

• Mads: GPU bans didn’t stop China—backfired.
• Lomax: AI bubble didn’t burst.
• Dan: Investors piling blindly into defence.
• Andrew: LLMs are “dial-up,” not the endgame.

16:42 – Why 2025 was a good year

• Europe got a massive wake-up call (Dan).
• 4 new European decacorns (Lomax).
• Founders kept building despite chaos (Mads).
• VC rediscovered deep tech & hardware (Andrew).

21:23 – Geopolitics: a less naive world

• Globalisation fragmenting into blocs.
• Trust replaced by “trust but verify.”
• Sovereignty = opportunity for European founders (AI, defence, energy).

34:30 – AI Corner: the year AI got real

• DeepSeek shock wipes ~$600bn off Nvidia (Jan).
• Claude Code: $1bn ARR in ~6 months.
• Google Gemini comeback beats rivals on benchmarks.
• China dominates open-source AI.
• Rise of VLAs (Vision-Language-Action models) → physical AI, robotics.
• Big question for 2026: “Are we the horses?”

47:44 – Health & bio highlights

• GLP-1s everywhere: diabetes → cardio, kidney, neuro.
• Sales ~$62bn, heading toward $120bn+.
• Preventative health clinics scale (Function, Neko).
• Biotech rebounds; AI-designed drugs hit Phase 2.
• Psychedelics back: AbbVie deal, mental health momentum.

56:51 – Defence & space

• Modern warfare now rewards fast shipping founders.
• Global launch cadence: every ~1.5 days.
• Space shifts from experimentation → permanent infrastructure.
• Blue Origin finally launches New Glenn; SpaceX eyes Mars (again).

With European VCs - Lomax Ward, Dan Bowyer and Mads Jensen

What’s on the docket this week:

•SpaceX mega-raise / IPO noise: “what are you really buying?”

•“Europe’s euro success”: North–South polarity flipping

•China’s $1T+ goods trade surplus + what it means for Europe

•US defence spend reality check

•AI corner: chips, models, and AI bubble chatter

00:44 — Is DeepMind a “UK business”?

02:07 — Sovereignty is back baby!

•In defence / strategic sectors, cap table sovereignty now affects outcomes.

•Mentioned: UK rules requiring government consent in certain sectors (context: national security screening).

03:18 — DeepMind × UK DSIT partnership

•New partnership + UK research lab expansion; tied to the AI Security Institute and public services.

06:20 — AI tutor moment (education-focused Gemini)

•Vision: curriculum-grounded AI tutor as a once-in-a-generation lever for education.

08:56 — SpaceX: IPO in 2026? Raise ~ $30B? Valuation talk: $1.5T

•Why IPO now if private markets still open? Answer: scale + capital needs + timing.

◦Starlink: fast-growing, high-margin connectivity “golden goose”

14:18 — The “rest of the valuation”: orbital data centres thesis

•Speculative upside: compute in orbit (solar intensity, cooling, vacuum data transmission).

•Reality check: today’s revenue is tiny; power + mass constraints are brutal.

•Europe lens: founder talent often needs the US ecosystem to build at this frontier.

20:02 — Europe gets hit from both sides: US + China

•US signals Western Europe is lower priority; more warmth to Central/Eastern Europe (per discussion).

•China’s exports keep powering ahead; tariffs leak via third-country routing.

25:45 — Musk vs EU + the single-market problem

•Musk lobs political grenades after X/EU regulatory action (context: DSA).

•Core structural issue raised: no true EU single market in financial services → higher friction + lost productivity.

29:17 — Defence spending

•Warning to VCs: commitments don’t equal budgets landing now.

•Startup mismatch: defence procurement cycles vs 18–24 month funding cadence.

32:19 — AI corner: “bubble” talk + positioning

•Institutions trimming exposure at the margin, but not fleeing.

•View expressed: still upside runway, despite concentration and risk-off hedging.

33:44 — Europe W: Mistral open-sources DevStral 2 (coding model)

•Narrative: Europe “back in the open-source game.”

•Contrast: Meta reportedly leaning toward a closed model strategy (“Avocado” mentioned).

35:23 — Chips geopolitics: Nvidia H200s, China domestic ramp

•Thesis: export controls accelerate Chinese domestic chip ecosystems.

•Mentions: Huawei Ascend; Moore Threads momentum (plus broader “self-reliance” logic).

38:18 — Deal of the week: Unconventional AI — $475M seed

Bending Spoons

01:27 Berkshire-like roll-up; mostly debt-funded; big integration/tech-debt execution risk.

3:30 “US→Italy arbitrage”—cut expensive US costs, rebuild with top Italian talent + high-efficiency culture; cash-cow ops; high employee satisfaction.

05:13 Success likely hinges on better distribution/ops than previous owners.

Brexit + Europe’s challenges

07:01 “trade intensity” vs G7—UK uniquely diverging down since 2019; services don’t offset goods loss.

09:20 Labour red lines may shift; customs union helps goods but politically messy (standards).

11:02 IKEA label anecdote → regulatory complexity.

12:30 VW/Europe: China competition + governance/union constraints; Europe slow to reform; supply-chain ripple risks.

23:00 Ecosystem fix: more R&D, talent/immigration, cut red tape, govt as buyer; biggest issue = late-stage capital/pensions.

AI Corner
32:20 OpenAI “code red” on Google; distribution battle; OpenAI focusing on product vs ads/monetisation.

36:03 Winners = product + distribution + cost at scale (Google infra/TPUs advantage).

39:03 Anthropic IPO rumours (2026) debated: access to bigger pools vs “top of cycle” cynicism.

Deal of the week
41:54 Black Forest Labs — $300m at $3.25bn; image-model leader; strong ARR rumoured.

43:13 ICEYE — €200m at ~€2.5bn; SAR satellites; defence demand.

44:05 Expedition Growth Capital fundraise — €323m.

44:23 Neurocore — ~$2.5m; platform tooling for robotics ML teams.

Topics: Germany’s slowdown • Social media bans • UK budget • Solo GPs • N26 • Europe vs Big Tech • AI Corner

01:21 – Robin’s Background

100+ investments, 8 unicorns. Co-founded SmartRecruiters → sold to SAP ($100M ARR). Former GP at Revaya (€600M AUM). Now building a 50-year solo GP franchise.

03:58 – Social Media Ban for Under-16s

Mads: EU Parliament pushes advisory resolution; strong evidence social media harms teen mental health, especially girls.

06:39 – US Says “Go Easy on Big Tech”

Lomax: US Commerce voices warn EU that tech regulation ties into trade/tariff negotiations. Don’t conflate antitrust with child safety—two different battles.

10:00 – UK Budget

Improved EMI stock options - More flexible EIS / VCT rules. Nice to hear a Chancellor talk about startups & innovation.

12:17 – EU Space Surveillance

ESA launches its first military space programme (€1B). Far behind the US, but a step toward defence autonomy.

13:19 – N26 Troubles

Regulatory caps slowed growth for years, BaFin repeatedly intervened. Leadership now reshuffling. Big question: Would N26 be Revolut-sized if founded outside Germany?

18:49 – German Economy Reality Check

GDP still below 2019 levels. Insolvencies highest in a decade. Restaurants down 20–40%. Years of underinvestment in tech, infrastructure, energy. Early nuclear shutdown = higher energy costs, fallback to coal.

25:04 – Why No Nuclear Return?

Public wants it (~75%). Politics block it; ideology > pragmatism.

27:07 – German Decline Impact on Startups

ESOP improved (still heavy tax). Bureaucracy is brutal: notaries, translations, delays. Many founders incorporate Delaware C-Corp + German GmbH.

Solo GP / Part-Time VC Trend

34:21 – The Movement

US led the way: Elad Gil, Auren, Buckley.

Three types: Lifelong solo GPs. Solo-to-multi-GP founders. Part-time solo GPs (e.g., 11 Labs’ Carlos Reiner). It works at $15–30M scale; Fund II usually becomes full-time.

40:10 – OpenAI, Google & Anthropic

OpenAI may need $200B+ by 2030. Google’s Gemini 3 beating OpenAI on many benchmarks. Monetisation gap: only ~5% of ChatGPT users pay. Warren Buffett buying Google is a signal?

44:57 – The Scary Bit: God-AI

Robin cites Eric Schmidt: If an adversary builds god-AI first, “we might have to bomb it.”

In AI Corner: why 70% of AI startups now ship on open-source models, Google’s new TPU-trained Gemini 3, and another blowout quarter from Nvidia. Plus: Deal of the Week — Voize, the AI tool transforming nursing-home documentation.

03:15 — Slush Deep Dive
Mads on Helsinki’s neon-lit founder festival, matchmaking tables, and why Slush still beats Web Summit.

07:45 — Germany’s €35B Space Strategy
Why Berlin is going big on space-as-defence — and whether Europe can ever compete at scale.

12:10 — Immigrant Founders Powerhouse
The surprising stats: 50–90% of US unicorn founders are immigrants; half of the UK’s fastest-growing companies too.

26:10 — Cookies Out, AI Regulation Rolled Back
The EU’s Digital Omnibus: fewer cookie banners, looser GDPR for AI training, and a major regulatory U-turn.

46:40 — AI Corner: TPUs vs GPUs & Open Source Wins
70% of startups using open-source LLMs; Google’s TPU-trained Gemini 3 beats benchmarks; Nvidia still sold out through 2026.

Upside #66 - The theme this week is back to tech sovereignty, what that really means, what’s trade, what’s security - and ultimately will we all become full stack nations?

01:04 – UK exit tax: what it was and why it was dropped
The mooted UK “exit tax” (tax on unrealised gains when leaving the country), why it would be disastrous for founders, political “pitch-rolling” before budgets, and Tom Blomfield’s alternative idea of taxing gains accrued while in the UK.

08:17 – State of AI (McKinsey / QuantumBlack report)
Quick take on enterprise AI: almost every large org says it’s using AI, mostly for agentic/workflow use cases, but only ~1% report mature deployment or meaningful bottom-line impact, implying a long runway but slower-than-hyped progress.

09:54 – Nexperia & Europe’s chip vulnerability
Deep dive into Nexperia’s role in Europe’s mid-tech auto chips, EU–China tensions, how wafers are made in Europe but packaged in China, and what that reveals about the fragility of the European automotive supply chain.

13:15 – Ripping out Huawei/ZTE from 5G
Discussion of the EU’s move to give legal force to removing Chinese vendors from 5G infrastructure, the huge retrofit costs for telcos (esp. German operators), and whether this is driven by trade, security, or both.

16:18 – Einride SPAC & Palantir / Alex Karp
Einride’s US SPAC at a $1.8B valuation vs the Nikola fiasco; Palantir’s soaring stock, Alex Karp’s persona and “word salad” style, his emphasis on privacy-centric data architectures for governments, and the tension between admiration for serious infra and discomfort with founder-power.

23:06 – AI market wobble & Michael Burry’s bearish case
The recent pull-back in Mag7/AI names (esp. Nvidia), and whether it’s a blip or bubble-pop; Burry’s big short on hyperscalers and AI plays, and his history as an early Cassandra of the GFC.

23:52 – Chinese open-source models & hyperscaler accounting games
How Chinese open-source models (e.g. Kimi K2) are catching frontier labs and threatening closed-source economics, plus Burry’s argument that hyperscalers are overstating profits by stretching GPU lifetimes (4→6 years) and front-loading capex based on optimistic AI revenue expectations.

33:28 – Tech sovereignty, AI-powered cyber attacks & kill switches
Anthropic’s disclosure of LLM-assisted cyber attacks using Claude Code via social engineering; concerns over remote kill switches in Chinese-made buses in UK/Scandi fleets; broader questions about dependence on Chinese vendors and the push for “full-stack” sovereignty.

41:45 – De-globalisation & the cost of going ‘full stack’
Debate over whether every region trying to do everything domestically is sustainable; loss of cheap-labour-driven low inflation, need for critical minerals and energy at home, and how much poorer or safer societies might become under techno-sovereignty.

47:49 – Deals of the Week: BillionToOne and Gamma
BillionToOne’s ~$4.5–5B IPO (YC 2017; strong European VC participation); Pfizer’s $10B acquisition of GLP-1 player Metsera and what it signals for biotech; Gamma’s $68M Series B at a $2.1B valuation as a potential disruptor of the traditional Office/Slides stack.

Hosts: Dan, Mads, Lomax, Andrew

02:41 — Bending Spoons deep dive
Debt-fuelled roll-up, “Berkshire of consumer apps” analogy; Ukrainian peer Gentek noted; why more post-COVID roll-ups didn’t materialise.

04:34 — US debt vs Europe risk
Market’s view on capital allocation/dynamism; Decacorns vs unicorns; power-law returns reinforce Botha’s point.

06:01 — “VC isn’t an asset class” debate
Power-law concentration, PR angle, and incentives; media takeaways.

07:31 — Euro VC vibes
Lakestar & optics; ecosystem still 5× over decade despite headlines.

08:30 — Feature: Should governments buy stocks?
Khosla’s 10% stake in all public companies to offset AI/AGI shocks:

• Pros: Alignment with growth; potential UBI funding; sovereign-wealth-style upside.
• Cons: Partial nationalisation optics, execution complexity, tying state finances tighter to market swings.
• Middle paths: SWF/index recycling of taxes; robot/compute taxation; focus on efficient government vs expropriation.

17:45 — Back-of-envelope math
US equities ~$60T → 10% ≈ $6T; even 10% yield wouldn’t cover current US interest bill; cautions on bull-market assumptions.

19:03 — UK Budget preview (26 Nov)
Backdrop: softer productivity, fiscal squeeze.

• Likely: CGT/inheritance tweaks, mansion tax; maybe EMI/startup relief refinements.
• Founder advice: avoid doom loop—head down and build; some may move to US, less so Dubai.

22:25 — Should founders raise now (pre-correction)?

• Consensus: If you can raise on decent terms, extend runway; always-be-raising (selectively).
• Don’t panic or over-dilute; keep shipping.
• If no PMF, fix product/positioning before chasing capital.

29:02 — AI Corner

• NVIDIA at $5T: Hyperscalers’ capex still ramping; huge backlog; dominance but margins likely compress with competition/custom silicon.
• Nokia stake: Smart edge/5G–6G positioning; GPUs closer to towers for network optimisation & edge AI.
• OpenAI recap: For-profit structure finalised; Microsoft looks like the clearest public proxy (exclusivities, licenses).
• Meta’s mixed moment & layoffs framed more as performance-management cycles than AI doom.

42:58 — Deals of the Week

• Sales Patriot (Warsaw): €4.2m to modernise defence procurement; aim to be system of record.
• Legora (legal AI, Stockholm): $150m at $1.8B, ~5 months after Series B.
• Robin AI: Sale process after $70m raised—cautionary tale on GTM/scale.
• Bending Spoons ↔ AOL/Vimeo: More roll-up momentum.
• Synthesia: $200m at $4B; reportedly turned down a $3B Adobe offer—go-for-growth stance.

45:50 — UK quantum spotlight
QFX round (Paul Graham involved); UK’s deep quantum bench (PsiQuantum/Quantinuum roots; Oxford Ionics ~$1B sale to IonQ). Challenge: scaling while keeping firms in the UK.

TL;DR

• Defence-first wins on capability and returns; primes are partners and channels.
• Helsing: buys platforms/revenue for access; layers AI—different from Anduril’s buy-TRL-tech + scale model.
• Beyond drones: biggest gap/opportunity is tactical EW.
• Procurement: more fast lanes (SOF, pilots); primes getting easier to work with.
• AI: real profits exist (esp. NVIDIA), but value chain is fragile; expect a correction, not a collapse. Picking winners > timing.

02:40 — Why defence-first
Beats dual-use on outcomes and returns; lifelong focus.

04:32 — Definitions
Customer = MoDs + primes; aim: lethality/readiness and societal resilience. Beware “defence-washing”.

06:37 — What’s hot
Avoid herd to drones only; counter-UAS, EW, human performance, deception, survivability.

08:23 — Helsing buys Grob
Neo-prime play: new co buys legacy manufacturing for platform access.

10:42 — The two Defence M&A playbooks
Anduril: buys mid-TRL tech (Area-I, Dive LD/Ghost Shark, Adranos) → scales via brand/distribution.
Helsing: buys finished products/revenue (Mittelstand) → immediate customers; then add AI.

14:25 — Prime status & capital
Distribution + capital to AI-enable platforms.

17:47 — Roll-up vs build
Narrative “build”; execution “roll-up + build”.

19:47 — Drones & ‘drone wall’
Layered answer: blunt with drones, hold with conventional forces.

21:49 — The big one: Electronic Warfare (EW)
NATO underinvested; tactical EW is the unmet need; legacy kit is ’80s/’90s.

24:54 — Startup wedge
Put EW at the edge (drones/aircraft/fixed) → near-term wins.

26:33 — Baltic realism
History, 2007–09 Estonia cyber, current incursions; likely Kaliningrad corridor.

28:19 — Founder mistakes
Tech ≠ win by itself; experience + gov engagement matters; US analogue: top funds have IC/SOF DNA.

30:43 —  Are there really only a “Few buyers?”
Many real buyers inside a MoD/DoD (services, sub-units, innovation orgs).

36:23 — Sovereignty & US primes
US strategics will buy abroad; Europe balancing autonomy with jobs/exits.

41:07 — Starlink vs IRIS²
Starlink’s lead + cadence; IRIS² slower—watch timelines vs evolving threats.

47:18 — AI bubble?
Warnings vs fundamentals; self-funded capex; real profits.

49:37 — NVIDIA ramp
$4.4B (2023) → $73B this year; growth tempers multiples.

51:48 — AI Circular money & margins
Cursor → Anthropic → hyperscalers → NVIDIA; only NVIDIA mints big margins; margin pressure coming (new semis, China, SLMs).

53:12 — Picking beats timing
Dot-com lesson: Cisco losses vs Amazon wins.

54:19 — Capacity vs efficiency
Capex likely useful long-run, but open source squeezes costs.

55:52 — Platform risk
Frontier labs moving up-stack; vertical AI + trust + data = moat.

58:58 — Base case
Likely correction (30–50%) at some point; timing is unknowable (not investment advice).

Hosts: Dan · Lomax · Andrew
Recorded: Oct 2, 2025

01:00 – Quick News Highlights

• 🇺🇸 US Shutdown — $15B GDP loss per week; political theatre more than fiscal risk.
• 🇬🇧 Labour Party Conference — Starmer’s 13% approval, OBR to cut productivity; £10B headroom could flip to £20B deficit.
• 💰 UK recovers $5B from Bitcoin fraud (FT)
• 🔐 UK demands Apple backdoor again (TechCrunch)
• 🤖 OpenAI $500B valuation (FT)
• 🌉 EF exits Europe, launches “Bridge” Bay Area program (Sifted)
• 🎬 Sora 2 video model - Sam A videos. Bwahaha 

10:00 – EF’s US Pivot

EF closes Paris/Berlin, focusing on US founder “sheep-dipping.”
 Validation of EU founder quality but reminder: growth capital + urgency still American advantages.

17:00 – Germany’s Lithium Discovery

• 43M tons found in northern Germany — ~$600B in-ground value.
• DLE extraction (from brines) cleaner but unproven.
• Europe could cover 50 years of demand, yet permitting, costs, and NIMBY issues loom.
• Real win may lie in refining and gigafactory build-out, not mining alone.

22:00 – London’s IPO Decline

• London slips to #23 globally; IPO volume down 69% ($248M → $42M).
• Causes: low equity appetite, no tech weighting, over-regulation, pension conservatism.
• Fixes: incentivise pension investment, cut stamp duty, attract tech listings.

27:00 – Should Governments Bail Out?

• UK guarantees £1.5B loan to JLR (post-cyberattack).
• Critics: moral hazard, no cyber-insurance, political pork-barrelling.
• Compare: Germany’s bold €500B public investment plan.
• Consensus: backstop only if government gets warrants + drives reform.

41:00 – Reinventing VC

• US mega-firms become RIAs, investing across public/private assets.
• New players: Evantic ($400M), Striker (10 LPs × 10 startups).
• AI models now beat humans at picking founders.
• Europe lags — still relationship-driven, early-stage remains “artisanal.”

51:00 – Deals of the Week

• 💥 Concept Ventures – £88M pre-seed fund (UK)
• 🧪 Periodic Labs – $300M seed (ex-DeepMind/OpenAI)
• 💼 Creator Fund – €80M pan-EU deep tech
• ⚖️ Legora – raising $100M @ $1.7B
• 🧠 Black Forest Labs – $4B valuation talks
• 🦄 Cleo, Tide hit unicorn status

57:00 – Defence & Tech

• Highlights from London Resilience Conference: surge in EU defence startups, faster US build cycles, procurement reform lagging.
• MI6’s real “Q” reveals gadget: surveillance dog poo.

59:00 – Wrap

Europe’s week in contrast: industrial ambition (Germany), structural pain (London), creative churn (VC & AI). Momentum builds — even amid the mess.

02:00 🇬🇧 UK in the doldrums
* Little to no growth (1.5% vs US 3.8%).
* Inflation stubborn at 3.8%.
* 130k jobs lost since last budget.
* Housing, Heathrow, HS2 — stalled megaprojects.

06:30 📉 Structural weaknesses
* UK pensions: only 4.4% in UK equities (vs 50% in past).
* FTSE = $2.8T — smaller than Apple alone.
* R&D spend at 1.7% vs US 3.5%.

10:00 🚀 Reasons for optimism
* Revolut hits 70m users, Canary Wharf HQ, £3bn UK investment.
* UK AI leaders: Wayve, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Cleo.
* Nvidia building Europe’s biggest GPU cluster (120k Blackwells by 2026).

13:00 🤝 Trump visit & £150bn US deal
* Breakdown: £90bn Blackstone, £22bn Microsoft, £5bn Google, £1.5bn Palantir, £3.9bn Prologis.
* UK pledges $80bn procurement from US tech/defence.
* Historic scale, but execution challenges loom.

18:30 📝 What the UK must do — 5-Point Plan
1. Regulatory bonfire
2. Pension capital unlocked
3. Energy independence
4. Planning revolution
5. Startup Central (“29th Regime”)

24:00 🌍 H1B debacle
* US slaps $100k fee on new H1Bs (was $1.5k).
* Big Tech shrugs, startups squeezed.
* Europe’s opening: 24h visas for £100k+ roles could flip the script.

28:30 🤖 AI Corner
* Nvidia invests $100B into OpenAI — vertical integration play.
* Cohere hits $7B with AMD deal; Modular raises $250M to break CUDA lock-in.
* DeepSeek achieves GPT-4-level performance at 1/20th cost.
* JLR cyberattack halts production for 3+ weeks; systemic risk exposed.

37:00 🛡️ Defence Corner
* Russian drones breach NATO airspace — first NATO shots fired.
* Copenhagen airport shut, Polish & Baltic incursions.
* NATO launches Eastern Sentry, Europe boosts spend to 3.5% GDP.
* Defence unicorns rising: Helsing ($12B), Quantum Systems, Tekever.

45:00 💸 Deals of the Week
* nScale: £1.1B raise at £3B — Europe’s newest AI datacenter unicorn.
* Ōura: $875M raise at $11B valuation.
* Aerospacelab: $110M for satellite constellation.

On today: Dan, Mads, Lomax, Andrew.

This week it's Mads, Lomax and Dan. All European early stage VCs looking behind the headlines to explore what's affecting venture, founders and investors.

00:00–03:07 — “28th regime” for EU VC?Dan proposes a structured EU venture vehicle

03:07–07:46 — Let chaos reign- Bottom-up or top-down? governments already big LPs; VC must deliver performance to unlock pensions.

07:46–13:11 — Macro & pensions.Dealroom report: EU VC-backed value ≈ $3.5T; domestic pensions rising but tiny vs need; UK fiscal context not worst in G7.

13:24–16:46 — Macro vs micro - Do we care?Great teams still raise; next KPI is a Europe-born “Mag-7-scale” company.

16:46–19:49 — Why UK tax payers support MAG7.Rules favour bonds (low fees/vol); reform prudential & tax to channel savings into EU productive assets.

19:49–21:25 — Can EU scale.Capital aggregation at multi-billion rounds remains the choke point.

22:41–25:48 — Google antitrust.No breakup; must share index/click data on commercial, non-discriminatory terms—light remedy.

26:18–30:16 — Isambard & AI adoption.UK supercomputer is symbolic; real edge is becoming the best AI adopter (health/life-sciences, public services).

32:25–39:47 — Power of Xi.China’s manufacturing lead; EU needs re-armament, industrial base, and alliances (US + Asian democracies).

40:24–41:54 — Deals of the week (Quantum).Quantinuum raises $600m (≈$10B val); IQM hits unicorn; prior Oxford Ionics → IonQ deal noted.

Hosts: Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen, with Joe Knowles from Smedvig Ventures

(01:15) US vs. Europe in Wealth Creation
US dominates wealth & compounders due to internet hyperscalers.
Europe: strong talent, growing startups, but weaker late-stage funding & exits.
Pension fund restrictions and lack of capital allocation are core structural issues.

(12:10) AI Race & Europe’s Challenge
US likely to win again; Europe risks falling far behind.
Strategic gaps: compute, energy costs, slow policy response.

(13:05) M&A Boom
H1 2025: ~$100bn in deals (+155% YoY), led by Google–Wiz ($32bn).
Hot areas: AI code gen, security, vertical apps.
Europe well-placed in application-layer M&A and AI-enabled services.
Exits recycle capital → critical for VC ecosystem health.

(21:21) Defence Tech Awakening
Porsche & Deutsche Telekom launching €500m fund; Lakestar raising €250m.
Cultural shift in Germany: mainstream corporates backing defence/dual-use.
Small monetarily, but signals a tide change.

(31:21) Energy & Batteries
Breakthroughs: lithium recycling (97%), sodium-ion at $10/kWh, EU gigafactories planned.
Europe must cut energy costs (4x US levels).
Nuclear, deregulation, and better storage key for AI competitiveness.

(35:06) AI Corner
GPT-5: Faster, unified model, free to ChatGPT’s 700M users. Incremental but strong in coding.
Perplexity vs. Chrome: DOJ may force Chrome divestiture; Perplexity rumored buyer (PR stunt?).
Economics: OpenAI at $500bn valuation despite $5bn losses; Anthropic ARR exploding ($1bn → $5bn in 7 months).

(42:15) Chips & Geopolitics
US restricting Nvidia chips to China; Trump proposes tariffed exports.
Europe’s Chips Act stuck with outdated tech; Intel project canceled.
Urgent need for “Chips 2.0” and partnerships with TSMC/Nvidia/ASML.

(48:03) Closing Notes
Italy’s record H1 (€655m raised).
Europe’s momentum building across defence, energy, and venture.

Recorded: Friday August 1st 2025
Hosts: VCs - Mads, Lomax, and Dan

00:50 – Big Tech Earnings Blowouts
Massive Meta and MS uplift. Massive efficiency gains via AI, despite headcount cuts. Microsoft: $13B AI cloud run rate. Growth driven by CoPilot and Azure.

11:20 – Fundamentally Flawed Figures 
Inflation sticky around 2.9%. Rates stuck. Why equity markets remain bullish despite macro pressure. AI productivity gains seen as the buffer against high rates. Not the dot-com? 

17:42 – Europe’s No Mag7
The sobering gap, but optimism for emerging EU-based players. Nurture “green shoots” of European innovation.

18:34 – Markets - Figma IPO – Is SaaS Back?
Massive Day 1 pop: from \$20B to \$65B market cap. 91% gross margin, 132% NDR, strong enterprise traction. Optimism for SaaS exits and public market appetite.

26:27 – Markets - Anthropic vs. Figma – AI Valuations in Context
Anthropic at \$170B valuation (\~30x revenue).Contrasted with Figma’s 60x multiple. SaaS more stable; AI still in sandbox.

27:23 – Markets - Return of Risk Appetite: Firefly & Space IPOs
Firefly targeting a $5B IPO despite revenue.

29:26 – Liberation Day 2.0 – Trump’s Trade Deal with the EU**
EU commits to $750B in US energy, $600B in US manufacturing investment. Concern over EU sovereignty and realism of enforcement.

37:54 – Implications for European Startups
Software firms largely unaffected. Hardware or hybrid firms need to rethink supply chains.Consumer hardware most at risk from tariffs.

40:17 – Geopolitical Signalling and the Long Game
EU’s long-term strategy will shift towards self-reliance and defence. Upside for local tech ecosystems.

41:23 – AI Corner – Latest Deals & Developments.
Anthropic: From $1B to $6B ARR in months. $5B raise underway.
Alibaba: Launches Claude Code competitor for 1/60th the cost.
Cognigy (Germany): Acquired for $1B by NICE (CX automation).
n8n: Open source automation tool now valued at \$1.5B.
OpenAI Study Mode: Personalised learning agents; education disruption incoming.

47:26 – Is Germany Becoming Europe’s AI Leader?
Germany, France, and the UK all seeing strong AI momentum. European AI isn’t centralised – strength lies in distributed hubs.

50:01 – Why Billion-Dollar Exits Are No Longer a Big Deal
Cognigy, Oxford Ionics → seen as “modest” compared to US mega-deals. Yet: exits like these power Europe’s VC ecosystem - billion-dollar exits still matter.

51:00 – Project Europe – What Europe Needs
Harry Stebbings’ “Project Europe”: €200k per startup, under-25 founders.6 companies in batch one: drones, brain-computer interfaces, cybersecurity, robotics. Focused on deep tech and hard problems – not consumer fluff. A bet on Europe’s technical edge and early-stage ecosystem.

56:30 – Challenges Ahead for Project Europe
Accelerators attract top-tier founders? Signalling risk? Success will require time, patient capital, and structural support.

63:57 – Stopping the Brain Drain
EU founders often register in the US, but real drain is sub-10%. IPO path must be restored in EU. Public markets offer cheaper capital vs. growth equity.

65:30 – Deal(s) of the Week
CyberArk acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $25B
Project Q (Germany) raises €7.5M for battlefield software. One to watch.

In this week's episode:

• AI in Public Services - OpenAI and the UK govt sign deal
• The US vs UK AI plans - how do they compare?
• Stablecoins - what are they really and why are they not in the UK?
• Deepmind wins the IMO maths competition - so what?
• Deal of the Week

01:50 – AI in UK Government and Public Services
UK government signs an MOU with OpenAI to explore AI in public services.
Introduction of “Humphrey,” a ChatGPT-powered assistant for civil servants.

03:21 – Will AI in Public Services Work?
NHS could be a testbed for AI adoption, potentially with citizen opt-ins for faster treatments using AI technologies.

05:26 – UK AI Plan and Public Sector Productivity
UK’s AI Opportunities Plan.
Potential AI use cases: fraud prevention and efficiency in administrative tasks.

08:24 – Challenges in Government AI Implementation

09:27 – AI in NHS & Healthcare
Debate on AI’s role in healthcare

11:46 – UK Sovereignty & AI Partnerships
Concerns about reliance on US AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic).

13:03 – Is Reliance on US AI a Problem?
Discussion on whether the UK should build its own foundational AI models.

16:31 – National AI Strategies
Debate on the UK government’s responsibility to invest heavily in domestic AI.
Comparison to the UK aerospace industry and state-backed R&D.

19:26 – Comparing US and UK AI Plans
Overview of both strategies:
US: Innovation, leadership, and global dominance.
UK: Sovereignty, public sector benefits, and homegrown champions.

22:24 – Key Differences Between US and UK AI Approaches

27:47 – What Should the UK Do Differently?
Invest in national AI infrastructure. Mandate “buy UK first” for AI solutions.

33:31 – AI in Large Organizations
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund sees 20% efficiency gains using AI (Claude).

36:01 – Transition to Stablecoins
What they are and why they matter.

41:02 – Dollar Dominance via Stablecoins
Stablecoins as a strategic tool to extend USD dominance.

48:25 – Future of Stablecoins
How stablecoins will reshape DeFi, cross-border transactions, and payments.

52:27 – AI Excels at Mathematics
Google DeepMind and OpenAI achieve gold-level performance at the IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad). Significance: AI is moving from computation to creative problem-solving and advanced reasoning.

55:47 – Implications of AI in Math & Science
AI’s ability to solve complex math problems signals breakthroughs in R&D and engineering.

58:14 – Philosophical Questions on AI Reasoning
Debate on whether AI’s reasoning is “synthetic” or genuinely creative.
AI’s utility matters more than its internal mechanics.

59:33 – Deal of the Week

Keywords: AI, public services, OpenAI, UK government, healthcare, stablecoins, financial system, mathematics, funding, trade deals.

If curious about startups, investing, venture capital, innovation, AI, and all things going on in and around Europe - that's what this weekly roundup is all about.

Hosts: Lomax from Outsized Ventures with Mads and myself from SuperSeed VC

On this week's show:

04:02 – Shout out for EU Inc and The 28th Regime
Legal fragmentation in Europe increases friction and costs for pre-seed and seed funding. Comparison to US (Delaware + SAFE) vs. Europe’s notary-heavy systems.
Potential savings of €350–500M annually by reducing legal overhead. ESOP (employee share options) complexity highlighted as a major barrier.

09:55 – The United States of Europe
EU Inc. could be a “small first step” toward a unified European market post-Brexit. Lobbying from notaries and national interests creates significant resistance. Watered down is as good as not at all.

15:14 – AI Corner: Huge AI news this week
Mira Murati’s new startup raises $2B from A16Z, Nvidia, AMD. China’s Moonshot AI (Kimi 2) - 1T parameter open-source LLM outperforming Anthropic’s Opus 4 on coding tasks. 
Europe is trailing the US and China in foundational AI, but vertical AI and apps offer big opportunities.

25:28 – The Application Layer Boom
Lovable Raised $200M at $1.8B valuation** with 75M ARR in 8 months.
AI application companies like Tandem Health and Legora are scaling rapidly.

31:51 – Apple Rumoured to Acquire Mistral?
$15B acquisition? Would be the largest European AI exit, but raises sovereignty concerns in France.

36:12 – UK Government Reforms
Rachel Reeves’ speeches: Streamlined reporting, pushing pension funds into riskier assets, and supporting LSE listings - symbolic or game-changing?

42:21 – Crypto Week in the US
Bitcoin hits $120K as three major US crypto acts debated: Clarity Act, Genius Act, Anti-CBDC Act. Europe already has MiCA regulations but lacks a cohesive narrative. But should we have our own Crypto week?

48:19 – European VC at 10-Year Low
2025 projections: $10B VC capital raised. Solutions: Unlock pension capital, simplify retail VC access, and recycle returns from big exits like Mistral.

54:28 – Deal of the Week: Numan
Men’s D2C health startup: Raised $57M (30M equity + 27M debt). Pivoted to GLP-1-based weight-loss products, doubling revenue to $90M in 2024.

56:16 – Closing Thoughts.

Dan, Mads & Lomax set the scene: Europe’s defence startup boom, OpenAI’s new browser play, WFH vs. culture, Trump’s ever-shifting tariffs, UK H1 VC stats, and Big Tech vs. EU regulators.

04:21 – Euro uplift 

€6.5b in June FundingEurope’s tech raises hit €6.5 billion across 323 deals; UK led with 30% (€1.95B) but dipped 18% MoM, while Germany surged past the UK on deep-tech, quantum, energy robotics & aerospace.

05:40 – Defence vs. Resilience vs. 

Dual-UseWhat’s the difference? Defence = pure military; resilience = protecting society (cyber-security→critical infrastructure); dual-use = tech with both civilian & military applications.

07:41 – German Market on Fire

DAX +22% YTD: Industrials up 30% (Rheinmetall, Airbus), Financials +16% on easing rates, Tech +14% via AI plays (SAP) & EV chip leader Infineon - autos and pharma lags.

08:46 – Founder Caution in Defence

Budgets may double to €1 trillion, but only ~5–10% goes to R&D, procurement is slow, buyers are few & timelines clash - “proceed with caution” is the advice.

10:56 – Defence Moral Debate

Is it OK to back companies making weapons? Europe’s “sleepy time under US umbrella” ends do we agree protecting citizens and way of life is a moral imperative?

17:03 – OpenAI’s Browser Bet

With 3b Chrome users feeding Google $200 B/yr in search ad profit, OpenAI’s upcoming “AI browser” could unlock ad revenue ($1B ’26; $25B ’29) by capturing click & intent data.

19:16 – Search Engine Wars Are Back AGAIN 

Beyond ChatGPT: Grok 4 (hooked to X), Perplexity’s Comet, and generative SEO shake up distribution—from keyword tags to “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimisation).

31:28 – Does WFH Kill Culture?

Values ≠ behaviours: true culture is “expected actions.” Zoom can’t replace serendipity, mentoring & rapid knowledge-share that happen when teams sit shoulder-to-shoulder.

40:59 – Trump’s Tariff Tracker

“90 deals in 90 days” fizzled - only UK, Vietnam & China. EU deadline pushed to August; Brazil hit with 50%; US aiming for $300b in tariff revenue.

48:39 – UK H1 VC Snapshot

£8 B raised (AI startups 30%), beats Germany & France combined; 188 unicorns (71 private) worth £230b; Oxford/Cambridge/Cardiff each hit £1b.

56:57 – Will Europe get the good stuff if we keep fining and controlling? 

EU vs. Big Tech. Apple appeals €500m App-Store fine; Google races to comply with the DMA (10% global-revenue penalty); EU’s proposed chat back-door sparks mass-surveillance concerns.

58:28 – Deal of the Week: 

Eutelsat €1.35 B RaiseFrance & UK gov’ts back a pan-European LEO+GEO satellite operator to rival Starlink - €1.35 B shows Europe’s push for sovereign space resilience.

1:00:43 – Parting Bytes

Andrew’s rooting for “pet-emotion AI” (Purosense AI’s seed round); Mads eyes Nvidia’s Q2 (ASML report on July 16); Lomax plans LP visits - and everyone’s beach-office-envious!

⏱️ 02:30 – Figma’s IPO & European Stakes

• Filing in NYC after failed Adobe acquisition
• $800M+ revenue, 91% margins, 132% NDR
• $5B Index Ventures payday
• Why this matters for Euro tech

⏱️ 08:50 – London’s IPO Disaster

• Worst first half in nearly 30 years: only $160M raised
• AstraZeneca flirting with a US listing
• Can London come back?
• 25+ years of decline traced to pension reform post-Maxwell scandal

⏱️ 14:10 – UK vs US Markets: Staggering Comparison

• US market cap: $60T vs UK: $3T
• Tech in FTSE 100: only 1%
• Apple alone = FTSE 100
• Institutional apathy + structural rot

⏱️ 18:00 – Pension Power & Mansion House Debate

• UK pension funds hold just 5% in UK equities
• £40B in annual tax breaks not translating into local investment
• Need for regulatory overhaul to unlock capital

⏱️ 22:00 – Fixing the Public Markets

• Public markets *should* be the exit path
• Without them, the entire private capital waterfall stalls
• Stagnation in public exits affects tax receipts, job creation, and the UK ecosystem

⏱️ 25:45 – European Equities Surge

• Biggest outperformance vs US stocks on record
• €46B inflows in 2025 vs €66B outflows in 2024
• Germany wakes up: €500B in infrastructure & defence spend
• Sustainable or a short-term Trump-driven rotation?

⏱️ 32:00 – UK Budget Black Hole

• £5B budget gap after Labour’s U-turn
• Highest tax burden since WWII
• Social care + NHS = nearly 50% of budget
• Stuck between tax pledges, borrowing risks, and spending pressures

⏱️ 41:00 – UK Future - 3-Paths

• Stasis: stealth taxes, zero reforms
• Further decline: shrinking influence
• Recovery: bold reforms in pensions, NHS tech, and civil service productivity
• What road will we take?

⏱️ 46:30 – EU AI Act: Incoming Train Wreck?

• Set for August rollout, but 44 major firms ask for pause
• Missed code-of-practice deadline - What do we do?
• Healthcare, finance, and SaaS startups at risk
• GDPR 2.0 on steroids?

⏱️ 52:45 – Can We Save the Open Web?

• Cloudflare’s bold move to gate AI scraping
• API-first monetisation and licensing models emerging

⏱️ 57:45 – AI vs Doctors

• Microsoft benchmark: AI got 80% of diagnoses right vs doctors’ 20%
• The end for doctors?
• Regulation, infrastructure, and explainability still big hurdles

⏱️ 01:05:00 – Deal of the Week: Portal Biotech

• $35M Series A led by Earlybird + NATO Innovation Fund
• Protein sequencing tech spun out of University of Groningen
• Hopes to be “the Illumina of proteins”
• A deeptech win for Europe

00:00 – Market Pulse: We’re So Back Baby!
US IPOs are red-hot (CoreWeave, Circle), S&P nearly at ATH, and Q2 GDP forecasts hit 3.5%.
The resurgence in AI and crypto-led optimism despite fiscal clouds.

03:00 – Bubble or Boom?
Are we heading into bubble territory?
US deficits are ballooning, but M&A tailwinds and LP liquidity look promising.

05:00 – The Sentiment Effect
Economic psychology: consumer sentiment drives GDP.
Europe’s problem? It talks itself down. The US? Belief + boldness.

06:50 – Big Tech Bets on Britain
Amazon pledges £40B UK investment (data centres, fulfilment, even a film studio).
British Business Bank expands to £25B. Visma chooses London IPO over Nasdaq—confidence win?

14:00 – UK’s 10-Year Industrial Push
Gov’t targets AI, defence, creative, and energy—aiming to slash grid connection delays.
Electricity costs still a major drag. Can policy execution catch up to rhetoric?

18:00 – The UK’s Economic Reality Check
High inflation + stagnant growth = stagflation-lite.
£66B in working-age benefits forecast by 2029. Labour’s internal revolt blocks real reform.

27:00 – Tariff Tensions Mount
Trump trade wars return: EU braces for July 9 deadline. Retaliation looms.
Could German auto exports be the pressure point?

32:00 – AI in the Wild
Apple eyes Perplexity. DocuSign sues scrappy 2-day clone.
Seed-strapped startups exit for millions without VC - Paradigm shift or PR hype?

37:00 – Copyright Battles Begin
Meta & Anthropic win round one using “transformative use” defence.
The big legal fight (OpenAI vs NYT) still looms.

41:00 – Robotaxi Rollout?
Tesla demos driverless fleet in Austin - damp squib? Still lagging Waymo.
Real progress or just share-price theatre?

43:00 – Europe’s Bay Area Dream
Can Europe become Silicon Valley? Should we can we?
It’s not about funding - it’s confidence, imagination, and embracing failure.

51:00 – Optimism Please!
Q2 earnings optimism and promising chip efficiency breakthroughs.
Markets strong, founders bold, and Europe's moment (maybe) coming.

This week 

• EU defence spend motors - will it save us?
• European Space Agency military satellites 
• US-China competition - European opportunity?
• US IPOs up 30% this year, so far, so what
• British surgical robotics start-up -> sell-out

⏱️ [01:13] – Geopolitical Hotspots and Defence

• Iran’s global influence and diaspora
• Ukraine’s resistance to Israel-Iran dynamics
• Cautious optimism about regime change 
• WWIII has begun?

⏱️ [03:35] – Oil & Markets

•  Brent crude spikes (from $70 → $77, possibly $100+)
•  Shipping, inflation, and interest rates affected
•  Bank of England holds rates amid uncertainty

⏱️ [05:52] – Impact on Venture?

• Founders not immediately impacted, but long-term capital flow risks flagged
• Defence tension might dry up funding or shift VC attention

⏱️ [06:56] – Defence as a European Economic Engine?

• Defence our financial lifeline? But VC exposure to defence is tiny

⏱️ [09:35] – Unicorns in EU Defense Tech

• 3 recent unicorns: Helsing, Tekever, Quantum Systems
• Helsing shifts gear
• VCs rush in - BUT Sales cycles, procurement, regulation

⏱️ [12:38] – Helsing’s Capital & The VC Taboo 

• US firms: Lightspeed, Accel, General Catalyst 
• Homegrown capital is crucial to reducing 10x funding gap with US
• EIF restricts arms/weapons investments
• Helsing’s value as a “reference company” for LPs

⏱️ [18:51] – ESA’s Satellite Plans

• EU Space Agency wants €1B+ to build military satellite network.

⏱️ [22:15] – Iris vs Starlink Context

• Iris <> Starlink
• EU must move fast on sovereignty or risk dependence

⏱️ [23:59] – NASA Cuts vs ESA Budgets

• NASA’s proposed 25% cut
• Europe’s ESA increasing funding—ironically divergent paths

⏱️ [25:52] – China, Trade Wars, and Supply Chains

• EU’s dependence on Chinese imports (clean tech, chemicals) 
• Fear of trade dumping post US-China de-coupling 
• Rare earth constraints impacting defence and auto industries

⏱️ [29:45] – Tariff Timelines

• July 9 tariff decision
• Potential EU-US mini deal to avoid Trump’s punitive tariffs
• Pharmaceuticals next

⏱️ [32:00] – IPO Boom in the US 

• Chime, Circle, CoreWeave IPOs—massive post-IPO pops 
• Klarna leads EU pipeline

⏱️ [34:04] – IPO vs Private Capital

• Bill Gurley’s hatred of bankers
• Private markets still offering better valuations
• SPACs are back!

⏱️ [36:25] – Surgical Robots and CMR Surgical

• CMR (Cambridge Medical Robotics)
• Raised $1B, now eyeing $4B exit
• Premature exit
• CMR’s potential lost
• Scale homegrown tech more aggressively

⏱️ [44:45] – Deed of the Week

• Daniel Ek’s €600M into Helsing
• Paris-based Nabla raises $70M Series C
• Scale AI deal closes in one week
• Fastest capital deployment of its kind; no FTC review needed

⏱️ [49:05] – Founders in Government

• Alex Depledge named UK entrepreneurship advisor
• Praise for founders like Matt Clifford shaping UK tech policy

⏱️ [51:10] – Meta’s AI Talent War

• Meta’s aggressive poaching of OpenAI talent
• AI job market likened to football transfer season
• Pay off or backfire?

This week Mads, Lomax and I discuss: AI cybercrime, UK govt investing in tech/AI, cheap energy (nuclear isn't), Tesla’s RoboFail, 996 and founder work-life balance, AI growth but is the revenue good? and the shock flip between private vs. public markets.

• 01:24 – Cyber-Security: Rising Threats
  43 % of UK businesses hit by cyber-crime last year; avg. of 2,000 attacks/week in Q1 2025. 
• 02:07 – AI-Enabled Attacks & Geopolitical Impact
  AI tools lower the barrier for sophisticated attacks by state-sponsored or rogue actors - new front in modern warfare by economic disruption.
• 04:12 – Kinetic vs. Cyber Warfare
  The mix of traditional (kinetic) and cyber fronts.
• 07:20 – Government Spending Review: Big Picture
  Rachel Reeves’s 3-year spending framework amid a weak UK economy: £120bn on infrastructure; £43bn for science & innovation; £2bn AI Action Plan.
• 16:50 – Energy Landscape & Nuclear
  The UK’s high industrial energy costs (6× US); sovereignty & intermittency issues; nuclear offers clean baseload and sovereignty but at what cost?
• 19:21 – Fusion & Long-Term Energy Tech
  Recent fusion advances (Tokamak West’s 22 min plasma) and Proxima Fusion’s €130 m Series A, but 20 yr horizon remains.
• 25:51 – Tesla’s Robotaxi Roll-Out
  Tesla’s delayed Austin launch (moved from June 12→22); cost comparison vs. Waymo.
• 28:34 – Europe’s AV Landscape: The Brexit Dividend
  Wayve’s UK partnerships (Nissan, Uber, spring 2026 trial at L4 autonomy) versus EU’s slower L2/3 regs.
• 32:26 – Founder Work Ethic Debate
  Heated talk around “996” & extreme hustle: Lomax quotes Paul Graham on youth vs. age advantages.
• 37:00 – AI Revenue Growth & Sustainability
  LLM businesses doubling revenue every 2 months; examples: Anysphere’s $500m ARR, Lovable’s €61m ARR; concerns around gross margins, churn & long-term profitability.
• 46:14 – Private vs. Public Market Performance
  First time in 25 yrs that private markets underperform public across 1/3/5/10 yr horizons (State Street report): “Magnificent 7” driving public returns. A shake-out & opportunity ahead as private seeks its illiquidity premium.
• 52:00 – Notable Deals
  • Multiverse (ES) – €189m Series B for LLM compression tech (95 % size reduction)
  • Oxford Ionics → IonQ – $1bn+ acquisition of UK trapped-ion quantum spin-out
• 55:47 – Closing & Condolences
  Dan sends thoughts to those affected by the Air India crash, and wraps up with thanks and next-week teasers.

The real news behind the headlines affecting European Venture.

ECB interest rate cuts, IPO market divergence, AI copyright tension, UK Strategic Defence Review, and the NHS starts liquid biopsies.

00:58 – ECB Rate Cuts: So what for Europe and Startups?
8 rate cuts in 12 months signals easing. EU’s sub-2% inflation vs. US’s higher inflation + deficit (~7% of GDP).Fiscal strength = leverage for defence and energy investment.

04:34 – Capital Flows & Sentiment
Will a weaker euro drive more capital to riskier assets?

05:27 – Contrasting the US Volatility vs. EU Stability
Volatility in the US makes EU relatively attractive, but low EU growth remains a concern. Lower rates long-term can push capital into startups and infrastructure.

07:21 – IPO Markets: A Tale of Two Cities
US IPO market is booming (+80%), UK (-80%). 143 US IPOs vs. 5 UK IPOs YTD. $13B raised in US vs. ummm £75M in UK?!

09:11 – Why is the UK IPO Scene Lagging?
US market cap ~17x that of UK; daily trading 50x more.

12:35 – Pisces Liquidity Schemes: Public vs. Private Market Debate
Pisces—a new semi-liquid scheme for startup equity. Private markets aren’t built for public-style trading. Carta tried—failed.

15:11 – Systemic Decline of London’s Public Market
From ~1/3 the size of S&P 500 in 2007 to 1/17 today. Staggering numbers.

21:49 – UK Defence Review: Investment & Opportunity
New £87B plan over 10 years. Will it benefit startups? Still heavily physical (~80%), but £400M earmarked for innovation.

28:24 – Sovereign Tech & Europe's Defence Role
Is £400M enough? Contextualised vs. Anduril’s $2.5B raise.

37:08 – AI Infrastructure in Europe
Links defence with economic growth. EU's €20B AI Superfactory plans underway; Germany’s first data cluster. Huge challenge: power costs & permitting.

40:19 – NHS Liquid Biopsies: Tech Meets Real-World Healthcare
NHS rolling out liquid biopsy for lung/breast cancer patients. Huge potential.

45:54 – The Case for Healthcare Tech Efficiency
NHS productivity is down despite 14% spending increase since 2019.

46:12 – Deals of the Week
MUBI: UK-based streaming platform raises $100M from Sequoia.
Beckley Psytech & Atai merger: A pivotal moment for psychedelics + mental health.
Grammarly: $1B non-dilutive raise led by General Catalyst; Ukrainian roots, US-led round.

Until next week fine people...

With Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen & Lomax Ward

00:00 – Intro: The Need to Talk Tariffs

• Dan kicks off the episode with a reminder: No groans, we need to talk tariffs.
• Taco tariffs, international trade deals, and looming US-EU trade tensions.

00:29 – Federal Judges, EU-US Trade, and Startup Impacts

• The EU-US trade deal cajoled activity: what does it mean for investors, startups, and Europe?

00:59 – Lomax’s Context: The Behemoth US-EU Trade Relationship

• $1.5 trillion annual trade; US-EU dwarfs US-China.
• Why has there never been a formal trade deal? Regulatory misalignments and subsidy wars (Airbus-Boeing).
• Harmonisation of standards as a critical issue—hardware startups especially at risk.

02:12 – Regulatory Divergence and Why It Matters

• EU’s precautionary principle vs. US’s risk-based model.
• Trade deals aren't just tariffs—harmonising standards can unlock growth.

03:50 – Hardware Startups & the Tariff Threat

• 10% of EU startups are hardware—“they will struggle if tariffs hit 50%.”

04:28 – The China & Russia Factor in Trade Rebalancing

• Trump’s chaotic policies, stock markets up despite tariff shocks.

06:01 – Inflation, Deficits, and Market Volatility

• Residual tariffs could push US inflation by .5-1%.
• “Congress looking to add $3-4 trillion over 10 years.”
• The importance of EU sophistication in trade negotiations

08:55 – Direct vs. Indirect Impact on Startups

• Tariffs affect hardware directly; inflation and interest rates indirectly.
• Interest rates impact M&A, liquidity, DPI, and venture capital flows.

11:27 – Markets’ Schism: Bond Traders vs. Equity Investors

• Bond traders panic over risk; equity investors bet on AI’s promise.

12:09 – Trump’s Amplifier Effect: Deregulation vs. Chaos

• The paradox of Trump’s anti-regulation stance fuelling optimism vs. destabilisation.

13:42 – EU’s Startup & Scale-Up Strategy: Will It Work?

• €10B blended fund, blue carpet initiative for talent, regulatory simplification.

17:23 – The Slow Pace of EU Policy: 2026-27 Timelines

• Lomax: “28th regime sounds like a Robert Harris novel—big thanks to Andreas Klinger for pushing it.”

19:50 – Employee Stock Options: Europe’s Broken System

• The need for harmonisation—“It’s key to unlocking talent.”

21:49 – Big Tech Announcements: AI’s Velocity

• Google I/O, Microsoft Build, Nvidia’s blowout quarter.
• AI’s exponential growth—“50x increase in token processing in a year.”

27:30 – The Application Layer: Opportunities and Disruptions

• AI’s impact on startup building: velocity of product cycles, risk of obsolescence.
• Dan: “Will SaaS die as AI tools empower in-house builds?”

36:54 – OpenAI + Johnny Ive: Hardware, Form Factors, and Speculation

• A $6.5B stock deal, secretive hardware project—pendant? Phone? Glasses? A new paradigm?
• “I hope it’s not a pendant!”

39:10 – The Race for the Next Form Factor

• Apple’s stagnation; OpenAI’s ambition to dethrone them.

41:10 – Wrap-Up: EU Urgency, Munich’s Tech Momentum, and the Week Ahead

• Munich as a growing hub: TSMC, Apple, Quantum Systems.
• Lomax: “Bright Flag’s $425M exit is a big deal for the European ecosystem.”

This week Mads, Lomax, Andrew and I are all out and about at various conferences and events speaking with European LPs and GPs about our ecosystem - themes and trends for 2025 and beyond, how we grow, how we go toe-to-toe. The pitfalls, the breaks and beyond.

Interviews with:

Jone Vaituleviciute from First Pick
Francesco Perticarari from siliconroundabout.ventures
Charlotte Palmer from Integra Global Advisors
Mike Sigal from Sigal ventures
Dan Smith from Repeat Ventures
Antonio Miguel from Maze Impact
Ozge Oz from QNBEYOND Ventures
Philipp Herkelmann from EU Inc
Andreas Klinger from EU Inc and Prototype

Timestamps:

00:00 Introducing Dragons with Andrew Scott
07:40 Lomax goes toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley
13:05 Jone from First Pick and her Lithuanian adventures
15:15 Francesco from SiliconValley Ventures on 2025 deep tech opportunities
16:36 Oz from QNB and his one big ask
17:12 Charlotte from Integra - what to look for in emerging managers
19:50 Mike Sigal breaks down the European capital challenge
24:20 Dan from Repeat on renewed LP positivity
25:22 Antonio from Maze on Trump crushing Impact - or is he?
26:35 Mads with EU Inc founders Andreas and Philip - Why Europe why now

Host: Dan Bowyer
Guest: Jo Living, Founder of ACES High

Jo Living joins Dan to explore the high-stakes parallels between poker and the business world. From her upbringing around cards to founding a FemTech startup and launching ACES High, Jo unpacks how poker has helped her navigate negotiations, raise capital, build teams—and teach others to perform under pressure.

01:07 – Jo’s Career Journey
From investment banking to FemTech founder to poker circuit regular, Jo traces the experiences that led to ACES High.

03:29 – The Trigger Moment
A trip to Morocco, winning a poker tournament while pregnant, and launching informal poker nights back home.

05:19 – Skills Poker Builds for Business
Jo outlines the key transferable skills: deep listening, risk management, performance under pressure, and reading the room.

05:59 – Poker & Gender Imbalance
Despite the male-dominated scene, Jo shares how the environment is evolving and why inclusivity—not 50/50 parity—is the goal.

07:44 – Lessons for Startup Teams
Jo compares limited data in poker and startups, bankroll/runway management, and the importance of making high-quality decisions consistently.

09:49 – Playing the Long Game
Resilience, persistence, and strategic decision-making.

10:29 – Aura Fertility & Negotiating as a Founder
Jo shares how she raised £600k for her FemTech startup and used poker instincts to navigate valuation and investor conversations.

13:55 – Negotiation Mistakes: The "All-In" Fallacy
Jo unpacks why some founders or investors go "all in"—and what they’re really signaling about negotiation ability and ego.

14:37 – Executive Presence & Investor Psychology
Playing not just the cards, but the perceptions. Jo explains how table presence mirrors founder confidence in boardrooms.

15:10 – Poker Misconceptions
Debunking myths: poker isn’t all bluffing. Jo explains the difference between bluff-based games and Texas Hold'em.

16:20 – Why Texas Hold’em is a Business Masterclass
Community cards mean shared data, emphasising logic, negotiation, and risk evaluation—not deception.

17:22 – Should All Founders Learn Poker?
Jo makes a strong case for poker as a self-awareness tool—revealing how we handle stress, risk, and conflict.

20:56 – Biggest Founder Lesson from Poker
Avoiding "tilt" after a setback and how to bounce back with focus and discipline.

21:45 – Bankroll Strategy & Knowing Your Levers
Jo explains why you need "enough chips to do damage"—and how that applies to leverage in business negotiation.

23:16 – Poker as a Hiring Tool?
Jo suggests poker simulations may outperform psychometric tests in surfacing resilience, strategy, and interpersonal savvy.

24:56 – Duplicate Bridge & Gamified Hiring
A thought-provoking take on creating controlled poker challenges to assess talent and founder potential.

26:07 – Poker is Not Just for the Bros
Jo highlights how beginner women often outperform overconfident players through disciplined, strategic play.

27:15 – Final Thoughts: A Tool for Strategic Insight
Poker as a lens for understanding investment decisions, founder mindset, and long-term success.

• Website: aceshighlondon.com
• Instagram: @aceshighlondon
• LinkedIn: Jo Living

In this episode of Upside, Dan is joined by Lomax from Outsized, Andrew from 7%, and Mads from SuperSeed to explore how public markets intersect with private markets—and why it matters for VCs and founders alike.

Key Topics Covered:

• [00:01] Welcome & Intros:
  • Dan welcomes guests and sets the scene for a deep dive into public vs. private markets.
• [02:00] Ørsted’s Offshore Wind Cancellation:
  • Mads unpacks the Hornsea phase four cancellation.
  • Energy security, interest rates, and the geopolitical chessboard.
• [07:20] The UK’s Future of Compute:
  • Lomax highlights Albion VC’s report on UK deep tech and compute.
  • What went wrong with Graphcore and what’s next for quantum players like Riverlane and Quantum Motion.
• [10:45] Healthcare IT & NHS Modernisation:
  • Andrew revisits the NHS’s tech failures and weighs the new £21B upgrade plan.
  • The case for agile, smaller tech firms in public procurement.
• [16:30] DoorDash-Deliveroo Deal & EIF Market Pulse:
  • Dan covers DoorDash’s acquisition of Deliveroo and what it says about European tech exits.
  • EIF’s barometer survey: what’s top of mind for VCs and PE in Europe right now.
• [18:38] UK-EU Youth Mobility & Trade Talks:
  • Mads outlines the potential for a youth mobility deal post-Brexit.
  • Lomax emphasizes the enduring importance of EU-UK trade vs. US-UK hype.
• [20:55] Public Markets’ Role in VC:
  • Dan kicks off a new segment: why public markets matter even if you're a private investor.
  • Surprising stats on IPO sizes, US investor involvement, and cross-border exits.
• [29:17] Lightspeed’s RIA Move Explained:
  • Lomax explains why Lightspeed and other big VCs are becoming RIAs.
  • What it means for fund structures, founders, and the evolving investment landscape.
• [50:20] Secondaries Deep Dive:
  • The group discusses the booming role of secondaries in venture.
  • Liquidity, DPI, and how VCs are adapting to a world of longer-hold private assets.
• [59:37] AI Corner:
  • Mads updates on Google’s new AI milestone overtaking Anthropic’s Claude 3.7.
  • OpenAI’s nonprofit drama and its funding round headaches.
• [1:01:30] Deal of the Week:
  • Spotlight on two European drone unicorns: TechEver (Portugal) and Quantum Systems (Germany).
  • The rise of defence-tech in Europe and implications for global security.
• [1:06:10] Marrakesh & EU VC Meetups:
  • Dragon Chasers VC retreat in Marrakesh—paragliding and power networking.
  • EU VC crew gathering in London to strengthen European venture ties.

If you're a founder, investor, or just passionate about startups and venture capital, Upside is your go-to source for deep dives into the trends shaping Europe’s tech scene.

If you're into startups, VC investing, European Venture, or anything startup-ecosystem and business - this podcast is for you.

Host: Dan Bowyer (SuperSeed)
Guests: Lomax (Outsized), Mads (SuperSeed), Chris Elphick (BVCA)

00:00 — Introduction
Dan welcomes listeners to Upside, introducing co-hosts Lomax and Mads. Special guest Chris Elphick, Head of Venture Capital at the British Venture Capital Association (BVCA), joins to unpack the European venture scene.

🏛️ BVCA, Government, and the Venture Landscape

00:41 — Chris Elphick: Inside the BVCA
Chris shares BVCA’s role as the voice of UK VC, its upcoming conference, and engagement with government and industry leaders like Peter Kyle (UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology).

01:30 — AI, MPs, and Government Tools
Discussion on the use of AI in government, freedom of information requests, and whether MPs should be criticised or encouraged for experimenting with tools like ChatGPT.

⚙️ Politics, Elections & Economic Backdrop

05:00 — UK Local Elections & Reform’s Rise
Chris and the team unpack local election results, the rise of Reform UK, and parallels with Trump-era political trends.

06:50 — US-China Trade War & Global Impact
Mads breaks down the effect of US-China tariffs on global trade, the likelihood of recession, and inflationary pressures.

✈️ Aerospace & European Tech Ecosystem

10:00 — Heart Aerospace Moves to the US
The team explores why Swedish startup Heart Aerospace is relocating to LA,  touching on the US-Europe funding gap and the challenges of raising large growth rounds in Europe.

13:00 — UK VC Fundraising Trends
Chris shares new BVCA data: venture fundraising doubled from £2.3B (2023) to £4B (2024), with notable increases in US LP participation, but highlights the persistent absence of UK pension capital.

💰 Pension Reform & the Scale-Up Gap

25:00 — EIS, VCT, & British Business Bank Programmes
Explaining the importance of Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), Venture Capital Trusts (VCT), and the British Business Bank in seeding UK funds.

35:00 — Mansion House Compact & Pensions
Deep dive into the push to unlock UK pension capital for VC:

• Charge cap changes
• LTAFs (Long-Term Asset Funds) are here
• The Nova initiative (inspired by France’s Tibi scheme)
• Challenges: fees, liquidity, education, performance

🌍 European Comparisons

56:00 — Who’s Doing Pension Release Well?
Discussion of successful pension-backed VC models in Sweden, the Netherlands, France (Tibi), and lessons for the UK.

🤖 AI Corner & Deal of the Week

58:00 — AI: Changing the Game
Mads highlights that ~30% of Microsoft and Google code is now AI-generated; Cursor hits 1B lines/day.

59:00 — Defence & Geopolitics
Lomax points to a Series A defence deal led by Index Ventures. Mads reviews the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal as geopolitical chess.

Hosts: Dan Bowyer (SuperSeed), Andrew J Scott (7Percent), Mads Jensen (SuperSeed)

🔥 Episode Highlights

This week, Dan, Andrew, and Mads tackle the latest trends shaping Europe’s startup and tech ecosystem, including:

• Cash Inflows into Europe:
  Massive cash movements into European funds – but how meaningful is this trend? Could instability in the US be Europe's gain?
• Drone Regulations and the Future of Delivery:
  With new UK drone regulations expected by 2026, Andrew explores whether drone grocery delivery is realistic – and where it makes the most sense.
• Wayve’s Breakthrough in Japan:
  Mads shares insights on Wayve’s strategic entry into Japan with Nissan, how it's setting a global stage for autonomous driving, and why Europe must compete.
• Tesla’s Shifting Focus:
  Dan highlights Tesla’s Q1 struggles, Musk stepping back from DOGE, and what that could mean for Tesla’s full self-driving ambitions.
• Early Stage VC Trends:
  Key findings from Dealroom’s Q1 report: healthtech dominance, foreign capital influx, and the evolving pre-seed landscape.
• Is Europe’s Surge in Investment Patriotism or Pragmatism?
  The team debates whether Europe's increasing inflows are a flash in the pan or a sign of a long-term shift.

🥩 FoodTech & Future Farming

• Lab-Grown Meat Breakthroughs:
  Exciting developments from the University of Tokyo, Meatly, Miriam Eats, and 3DBT are pushing lab-grown meat closer to supermarket shelves. The panel discusses why cost remains the main hurdle and why agriculture as we know it could radically change within 20–30 years.
• Space-Grown Food:
  Space agencies are exploring cultivated food in low-gravity environments. Can startups tap into this cosmic opportunity?

🔍 OpenAI's Big Moves & Antitrust Drama

• OpenAI Eyeing Google’s Chrome?
  The DOJ’s antitrust actions could force Google to sell Chrome – and OpenAI is reportedly interested. Is this good for competition, or are regulators overreaching?
• The Future of Foundational Models:
  Should OpenAI stay focused on core models or build an AI-driven app store? The team unpacks what’s next for AI’s leading players.

🏥 Deal of the Week

• Skin Analytics' £15M Raise:
  Dan spotlights Skin Analytics' Series B success to advance AI-driven skin cancer diagnostics — a meaningful healthtech leap for the UK.

🛠️ Policy & Regulation Corner

• Deregulation Win:
  Mads celebrates new EU legislation easing sustainability reporting requirements — expected to save businesses €4–6 billion in administrative burden.

🌟 Bonus: Cool Startups & What's Next

• Niobolt's Ultra-Fast Charging Tech:
  Andrew showcases a Cambridge spinout promising EV battery charging in under 6 minutes — a game-changer if it scales.

Thanks for listening to Upside – where we make sense of the chaos behind Europe's venture scene.

👉 Subscribe, rate, and share if you enjoy the show!

Hosts: Dan (SuperSeed), Lomax (Outsized), Andrew (7%),
Guest: Dilek Dayinlarli (Scalex Ventures)

⏪ In This Episode

This week on Upside, the gang is joined by the brilliant Dilek Dayinlarli, founder and managing partner at Scalex Ventures. Together, they unpack the latest headlines, industry trends, and ecosystem insights — with a deep dive into the fast-emerging Turkish tech scene.

🔥 What We Cover

⚡ Rapid-fire News Roundup

• Murati raises $2B at $10B valuation — with talent from OpenAI and the Albanian PM cheering her on
• Synthesia hits $100M ARR and partners with Adobe — a UK generative AI success story
• Controversy as EIF refuses to back weapons/defence startups, even as Europe ramps defence spending
• ASML's Q1: Strong results but order volumes down — signs of tariff jitters?
• Figma confidentially files for IPO, bucking the trend
• Hugging Face acquires a French humanoid robotics startup
• Dollar drops: good for European stocks, not so good for US VC-backed markups
• UK's bid for a piece of the $500B Stargate AI data centre project
• New Finnish startup hub Maria 01 scaling up to 70K sq ft — the Paris Station F playbook

📈 Reports & Market Trends

• Dealroom x HSBC Q1 Report: UK startups raised $4.2B in Q1 2024 - led by healthtech, with outsized deals like Isomorphic ($600M) and Vediva ($400M)
• Concerns over UK IPO pipeline - will LSE stage a comeback?
• The "founder flywheel" is spinning: UK seeing post-exit talent build new ventures
• Big players still dominate fundraising: EIF, British Business Bank, British Patient Capital lead LP activity

💬 Big Conversations

• Liquidity crisis in European VC: money going in, but exits not keeping pace
• Why mid-sized exits matter more than ever
• Capital efficiency in emerging markets vs. “go big or go home” mentality
• Can European VCs stomach the high-stakes bets their founders need?
• Secondary markets & the art of managing the “middle third” of your portfolio

🌍 Spotlight on Turkey Dilek brings us into the fast-growing Turkish tech ecosystem:

• From $10M invested in 2012 to $2.6B+ in 2023
• Gaming, fintech, defence tech, and B2B software leading the charge
• Massive spillover effects: Peak Games and Getir have spawned 100+ startups
• Entry valuations 60% lower than the US, and capital efficiency is key
• Series B gap remains a challenge — but momentum is building
• Turkey’s global diaspora plays a crucial role in scaling internationally

🏆 Deals of the Week

• Dilek: Incident.io raises $62M Series B — another evolution in incident management
• Lomax: Strava acquires Runna, a top 3 UK fitness app — a quick win, or premature exit?

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Dealroom x HSBC UK Innovation Update (Q1 2024)
• PitchBook European VC Report (2024 Roundup)
• Maria 01 Startup Hub - Helsinki

00:30 – Klarna’s IPO Pulled & BNPL Under Pressure
Lomax reflects on Klarna pulling its IPO, amid turbulent markets and declining peers like Affirm. Is the buy-now-pay-later model starting to creak under macro pressure?

02:15 – Wave AI x Nissan: A Mega Auto Deal from Cambridge
A highlight for the UK: Wave AI’s $1.2B-backed AV tech lands a landmark partnership with Nissan for post-2027 production.

03:30 – Shopify's CEO Goes AI-First
Dan and Andrew react to a leaked Shopify memo urging teams to prove a task can’t be done by AI before requesting headcount.

05:05 – AI Futures Project: Black Mirror Vibes
A fascinating, speculative look at global AI scenarios via ai-2027.com — think Asimov meets geopolitics.

06:45 – Tariff Talk: Trump, Trust & Europe’s Wake-Up Call
Dan shares his eight theories on Trump's new tariff push, what it means for global trust, and Europe’s potential silver linings — including brain drain reversals and safe haven appeal.

10:45 – What Founders Should (and Shouldn’t) Do
Lomax: “Head down and build” remains the advice — though hardware startups at Series A/B should evaluate manufacturing strategy. Dan and Andrew agree: short-term panic isn’t the play.

14:45 – Hardware & Biotech: Sector-Specific Risk
How US-origin requirements, reshoring costs, and future pharma tariffs could force hard decisions on supply chains and capex.

17:45 – Market Reactions, Investment Shifts & “VC Panic”
From "RIP Good Times"-style memos to portfolio rebalancing — VCs are reacting in varied (and sometimes dramatic) ways.

22:15 – Report Review: State of Venture (CB Insights Q1 2025)

• Global VC hit $121B — highest since Q2 2022
• AI dominated with $40B for OpenAI alone
• CVC activity dropped sharply, particularly in Europe & Asia
• UK VC funding hit a 5-year low; Nordics and France on the rise
• Fewer deals, bigger rounds, and a record 12 $1B+ M&A deals

27:15 – AI Bubble or Boom?
Dan & Lomax debate how long the mega-investments in gen AI can last. Andrew points to foundational tech (chips, infra, cyber) as the safer long-term bets.

32:30 – The Data Center Power Squeeze
Power scarcity is slowing new data center builds — particularly in Europe. Efficiency, not just scale, may be the next AI gold rush.

34:30 – Report Review: UK AI Sector (Tech Nation)

• 2,300 AI startups worth $230B
• $1B raised in Q1 2025
• 76% of CEOs report positive impact
• Growth capital & talent cited as top challenges
• Policy still biased toward risk-aversion, not growth

38:45 – “The UK Thinks Small”
Lomax reads Barney Hussey-Yeo’s powerful critique of UK scale-up culture — a call for bigger ambition, smarter regulation, and less fear.

41:45 – What Needs to Change?
Andrew: “We don’t need more government-run funds — we need to unwind bad policies.” Immigration, pensions, and tax reforms are the real levers for growth.

44:15 – Deals of the Week 🚀

• Polamist: European maritime defense tech
• Green Jets: $7M electric jet engine raise
• Jensen AI: Open-source distributed AI infra
• Isomorphic Labs: $600M mega-raise led by US capital

46:45 – Final Thoughts
Despite the gloom around tariffs, IPO slowdowns, and policy inertia, Q1 shows Europe's tech scene still has major moves to make — especially if founders stay focused and regulators get out of the way.

🧵 Topics Covered

• Liberation Day (US):
  What does Trump’s tariff agenda mean for European startups? Is it just noise, or should we be worried about supply chain shock and retaliatory regulation?
• European Defence Tech Boom:
  Germany’s lifted debt ceiling, tanks from Volkswagen, and defence ETFs surging 70-170%. Is this the economic unlock Europe’s been waiting for? Will the flood of money fuel true innovation, or just line the pockets of the usual suspects?
• The Dual-Use Dilemma:
  AI startups becoming “peace tech” and the sudden defence pivot — are we heading for a repeat of the blockchain hype cycle? What does real opportunity look like in this space?
• The AI Opportunity – or Not?
  Inspired by Nicolas Colin’s Drift Signal piece, the gang debates: Can Europe play a Japan-in-the-‘80s role in the AI era by winning at the application layer? Or is that wishful thinking?
• Pension Power in VC:
  UK’s Mansion House Compact and the potential influx of pension capital into venture. Will it finally trickle down to true innovation?
• TikTok Shop & Bezos’ Moves:
  What’s Amazon doing cozying up to Trump? Is TikTok’s forced sale the ultimate VC party round?

📊 Data Points

• 0.007%: UK pension allocation to VC
• 5%: Targeted allocation by 2030 under the Mansion House Compact
• 25,000 parts: Average number in a modern car — a tariff tangle waiting to happen
• Up to 170%: Growth in defence ETF performance
• 400M: Capital raised by ISAR for its (exploding) rocket launch
• 30 AI avatars: H&M replaces human models in new campaign
• 50%+: US consumer share of GDP — explains the political calculus behind tariffs

📝 Show Notes Extras

• 📖 Recommended Read: Nicolas Colin's “Who Will Be the Japan of the AI Era?” on Drift Signal
• 📈 Theororm’s Report: Resilience sector is up 30% in Europe while overall VC is down 45%
• 🧠 Trivia: The UK launched a satellite into orbit before the EU ever did… back in 1971. RIP Black Arrow.

🎙️ Upside: The Real Stories Behind The Headlines Affecting European Venture

Hosts:

• Dan (SuperSeed VC)
• Lomax (Outsized)
• Andrew (7%)
   (Mads is away enjoying cherry blossoms in Japan 🌸)

🎧 In This Episode

Join Dan, Lomax, and Mads, with special guest Alex Macdonald (founder of Sequel and investor), for an opinion-packed episode exploring:

🔦 Project Europe: Can It Save European Founders?

• Alex shares his insider take as an LP in Project Europe — why he committed in 11 minutes, what makes it different, and how it's supporting founders before they become credentialed.
• A passionate discussion around access, age, credentials, and whether early-stage capital is the bottleneck (spoiler: it isn’t).
• Addressing the diversity backlash: Is it fair or misguided?
• The million-euro question: How do we keep the next Revolut or Stripe in Europe?

💊 23andMe’s Collapse: The Business Model That Wasn’t

• What went wrong with one of the most high-potential datasets in history?
• Can health tech ever monetize patient data responsibly — and is “collecting data” a real strategy?

🧬 Data, DNA & Deletion Regret

• Dan and Alex reflect on being early 23andMe users, deleting their data, and what happens when personal info is hacked.
• Plus: A warning for startups assuming data is always monetisable.

📉 Spring Statement Reactions: A Missed Moment for Growth?

• Rachel Reeves delivers... not much.
• The group unpacks why cutting towards breakeven might not be the answer, and why we need fiscal stimulus, not fiddling.
• Why “holding patterns” in policy could hurt more than they help.

🤖 AI Corner: DeepSeek vs. Gemini vs. Reve

• OpenAI’s rumoured $40B raise (led by SoftBank)
• DeepSeek’s new V3: small model, big results
• Gemini finally feels usable — is Google back in the race?
• Reve: The MidJourney killer?
• Plus: The growing copyright vs. innovation battle in training data.

🚨 Startup Scandals & Fraud Watch

• Builder.ai’s CEO steps down amid audit concerns
• 11X under fire: Churn, fake logos, inflated ARR — or just messy scaling?
• Where’s the line between "founder storytelling" and straight-up Theranos?
• Dan dubs it: “The Orange Jumpsuit List” (aka Forbes 30 Under 30)

🇺🇸 US Brand Damage: Does It Matter in Europe?

• From Trump to Tesla, has America’s “brand” hit long-term trouble?
• Emotional vs. structural consequences
• What defence tech buyers and governments are really worried about
• Should Europe decouple — and can it?

💥 Deal of the Week

• Marvel Fusion (Germany) raises €112M Series B/C for nuclear fusion tech
• A rare bright spot for European deep tech growth capital

📌 Highlights

• “Europe doesn't lack founders. It lacks belief.” — Alex Macdonald
• “23andMe had 15 million people's DNA and still couldn’t build a business.” — Lomax
• “Rachel Reeves is doing the startup equivalent of multiple shallow layoffs.” — Dan
• “Failure is a feature, not a bug. Let a thousand flowers bloom.” — Mads
• “Consumers might forget. Governments won’t.” — Lomax on US brand damage
• “Where is the money? Still a good question.” — All

02:04 – Europe’s Biggest Company Is… SAP?
03:25 – 23andMe Files for Bankruptcy
07:33 – Project Europe Deep Dive
25:08 – Spring Statement Reactions
34:29 – AI Corner - deep seek, Gemini and Reve
42:15 – Startup Scandals
48:52 – Brand Damage
58:52 – Deal of the Week

🔍 This Week on Upside:

We’re going full spectrum this week: markets moving, EVs charging faster than ever, biblical-level AI revelations, Google splashing the cash, and even MI5 making a guest appearance (kind of). The crew breaks down what’s really happening in European tech and beyond.

💸 Markets Corner

• Klarna Files for IPO – Targeting $15B valuation, down from $45B in 2021 but still a major move for European fintech.
• CoreWeave’s Massive Leap – From $16M to $1.9B revenue in 2 years and acquiring Weights & Biases for $1.7B. IPO incoming.
• Google x Wiz – Google’s record $23B acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz. Massive exit, but will the FTC let it slide?

⚡ EV Watch

• BYD’s Battery Breakthrough – 5-minute charge for 470km? Game-changing for the industry. Tesla and Mercedes scrambling to keep up.
• Tesla Recall Woes – Cybertrucks recalled due to panels potentially peeling off mid-highway. Not ideal.

🍽️ Food, Forever?

• Bryan Johnson’s “Foodome” Vision – Sequencing the American diet like the human genome. Lofty or legit?
• ZOE’s churn problem – Are personalized nutrition startups sticky enough?
• UPF, Sugar Taxes, and Regulation – The gang debates whether real change comes from startups… or governments.

🧠 AI Corner

• AI Jesus Speaks (a.k.a. Jensen Huang) – Nvidia’s GTC: new chips (Blackwell Ultra, Vera Rubin, Feynman) and bullish takes on reasoning + agentic AI.
• Stargate vs. AIP – OpenAI’s mega-scale GPU buildout vs. Elon Musk’s counterplay with Microsoft, UAE, and BlackRock.
• Europe Reacts – Macron’s €100B+ bet on sovereign AI and the case for Mistral leading Europe’s AI frontier.

🇪🇺 Europe in Focus

• Data centers are consuming up to 30% of Ireland’s electricity
• European VCs (hello Index Ventures 👋) are behind some of the biggest tech exits ever
• Does Europe need its own AI stack? The guys debate strategic autonomy vs. commoditized smarts

🔐 Startup Espionage Files

• Rippling vs. Deel, Flexport vs. FreightMate – Dirty tactics, source code theft, and lawsuits flying.
• Dan's MI5 Story – An underground bunker, bugs from the CCP, and a face-to-face with British intelligence.
• Lessons from the frontlines – Where does know-how end and IP theft begin? What happens when founders cross lines?

💤 Longevity, Sleep & 7PM Bryan

• Bryan Johnson’s hyperbaric adventures, shocking news (literally), and… nighttime erections?
• Why “7PM Bryan” is the biggest threat to longevity
• Can Europe’s emerging “longevity clinic” wave go mainstream?

🎧 Memorable Quotes

“At some point, we’re going to wake up and realise the food system was as damaging as cigarettes.” – Lomax
 “We should invent our own future, not copy the US.” – Andrew J. Scott
 “20% of Ireland’s electricity goes to data centres — heading to 30%.” – Lomax
 “Only the paranoid survive.” – Dan

This week on Upside, Dan Bowyer (SuperSeed VC) is joined by Lomax (Outsized) and Peter Ward (Humanity) to dive into two major themes dominating European venture: defence and health tech. With Mads away running up hills in Spain with fellow VCs and LPs, the trio take a no-holds-barred approach to dissecting the latest developments shaping investment, technology, and geopolitics.

1. Welcome & Introductions (00:12)

2. Defence & European Venture (02:22)

• The geopolitical impact of US halting aid to Ukraine: What does it mean for European defence startups?
• The rise of defence ETFs and their influence on VC investment.
• Trump, NATO, and the potential ripple effects on European security.
• The growing relevance of Turkey in European defence strategies.
• Europe’s defence budgets are growing, but how fast can startups access the market?
• The challenge of military procurement and its implications for defence tech startups.

3. Private Capital & Defence Innovation (06:32)

• The role of dual-use technology in military applications.
• The ethical dilemmas of investing in defence technology.
• Drone warfare: The boom in anti-drone and drone swarm tech.
• Lomax’s insights on the procurement challenge and opportunities for startups.
• Dan’s first-hand experience in Ukraine delivering medical supplies.

4. Trumponomics & European Startups (22:37)

• Trump's proposed tariffs on the EU and potential supply chain shocks.
• How this could drive inflation, stagflation, and impact fundraising for startups.
• The anti-American sentiment in Europe and its impact on consumer and business purchasing decisions.
• Opportunities for EU startups to capitalise on this shift.
• Will founders move to the US earlier to escape potential trade barriers?

5. The Future of Health Tech in Europe (30:37)

• A new breakthrough in immune system research: Could it revolutionise antibiotics?
• The rise of AI in drug discovery and early diagnostics.
• Humanity’s work with Imperial College London: Predicting disease and biological age with just four blood markers.
• Personalized medicine: How it will transform healthcare systems.
• The booming investment landscape: $7B invested in health tech in Europe last year vs. $23B in the US.
• Neko Health, Function Health, and the billion-dollar Series A from Retro Biosciences.

6. Deals of the Week (44:31)

• Alpine Eagle ($10M seed, UK): Drone blocking and attacking tech.
• CloudSmith (Series B, Belfast): Cloud software security startup.
• Quintexa ($175M Series F, UK): AI-powered anti-money laundering and fraud detection.

As normal we dig behind the headlines to discuss the real stories affecting European venture. With Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, Andrew Scott and Karin Nielsen.

The State of European Tech vs. the U.S.

• Karin’s reflections on her trip to San Francisco and the stark contrast in optimism between the U.S. and the UK.
• The resurgence of hustle culture in the U.S. and what Europe can learn from it.

Funding Gaps & European Venture Trends

• Stripe’s annual letter highlights European productivity challenges and regulatory barriers.
• The need for European capital market reforms to boost startup funding.
• Discussion on whether Europe should adopt a ‘Buy European’ strategy.

AI Advancements & Enterprise Adoption

• The launch of Claude 3.7 by Anthropic and GPT-4.5 by OpenAI: Are these models delivering real breakthroughs?
• China’s AI strategy and the impact of DeepSeek’s pricing strategy on global AI competition.
• The challenges enterprises face in adopting AI, from legacy systems to regulatory concerns.

The Future of Work & The ‘Grind’ Debate

• Sergey Brin’s push to bring Googlers back to the office: Should startups embrace remote work or office culture?
• The debate over whether European startups work hard enough and whether remote work fosters or hinders hustle.
• Insights from Karin on how remote-first startups can thrive with the right culture and tools.

AI’s Impact on Venture Capital

• Will AI-driven deal sourcing make VCs obsolete, or will brand and relationships matter more than ever?
• The shift towards hyper-personalised outreach and the rise of X (formerly Twitter) as a key VC-founder networking tool.
• Why AI-powered investing will still require human intuition to identify outlier founders.

Deal of the Week: Lovable

• The meteoric rise of Lovable, Europe’s fastest-growing startup.
• From launch to $17M ARR in 18 months: What’s behind its explosive growth?
• The future of AI-powered no-code solutions and their impact on SaaS.

Grok 3 
Grok 3 is out, speed and benchmarks vs Claude and GPT 4.5.

Fusion
France’s CEA West Tokamak reactor sets a new record with 22 minutes of continuous fusion, limitless clean energy, realistic timelines for commercial fusion.

Startup Funding Dynamics - Go big early?
Peter Walker’s Carta report:
Theory 1: AI reduces startup costs, meaning less = more.
Theory 2: AI increases competition, making capital more crucial for scaling.
= Seed Strapping

Asteroid Mining 
Spotlight on Karman Plus, autonomous asteroid mining. Government funding in space.

The Rise of Political Discontent - Young'uns want us to be like China
- 52% of Gen Z in the UK favouring dictatorship – a reflection of frustration or a dangerous trend?
- Elon Musk’s AFD rally appearance in Germany – should we be worried?
- The broader implications of political shifts on global investment and innovation.

The team close reflecting on the balance of optimism vs. realism in European tech and investment. What they're up to this week and to be more.... Merrricaan!

Thanks for tuning in! See you next week.

06:00 The Role of Startups in Defence
12:00 Pension Reforms and Investment Opportunities
18:10 AI and Innovation in Government Spending
38:24 The Urgency of AI Implementation
46:12 The Implications of DeepSeek's Innovations
57:10 Funding Trends in European AI Startups
01:02:32 Gen Z's Political Sentiments and Future Outlook