Is Europe’s defense investment wave real, or is it simply venture capital wrapped in a Ukrainian flag?

That question framed one of the most direct and intellectually honest debates in European venture this year. Two experienced investors took opposing views on a subject that has shifted from taboo to strategic necessity in just a few years: how Europe should finance defense technology.

The debate featured Nicholas Nelson, General Partner at Archangel Ventures, and Sebastian von Ribbentrop, Founding Partner at Join Capital.

At stake is more than narrative. It is about capability, returns, sovereignty, and the structural future of European capital markets.

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Until recently, defense investing in Europe was controversial. Many institutional LPs avoided the sector entirely. ESG mandates were interpreted narrowly. Defense was often repackaged as “dual-use” to soften its optics.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed the landscape. Defense budgets increased. Political rhetoric shifted. Venture capital began flowing into European defense startups at unprecedented levels.

But the underlying question remains: is this a structural shift in capital allocation or a short-term momentum trade?

The debate crystallized around a central fault line: defense-first versus dual-use.

Nicholas argues that Europe’s reluctance to embrace defense-first investing is both strategically and financially misguided.

His position rests on several claims:

• Early-stage defense-only companies have historically outperformed dual-use peers by significant margins.

• Dual-use strategies often dilute focus by requiring two distinct go-to-market approaches.

• True capability development requires designing directly for the warfighter, not adapting commercial products for military applications.

• Europe lacks the cultural and capital conviction to back pure defense plays early and consistently.

The core argument is that building for defense from inception creates clearer product-market fit, stronger procurement alignment, and ultimately superior financial returns. Attempting to straddle both markets from day one can lead to compromised engineering and a bifurcated organizational focus.

In this view, dual-use in Europe often functions as a reputational hedge rather than a strategic one.

Sebastian offers a different perspective. From his vantage point, dual-use is not a cop-out; it is a risk management strategy.

His case emphasizes:

• Software and advanced technologies can serve both industrial and defense customers without duplicating entire teams.

• Diversifying revenue streams reduces customer concentration risk.

• Non-dilutive defense contracts can replace late-stage equity rounds.

• Europe’s comparative advantage lies in subsystem suppliers rather than vertically integrated primes.

The European industrial landscape is fragmented. Large, unified defense platforms comparable to US primes are rare. Instead, Europe has deep expertise in high-precision subsystems and specialized components. Dual-use companies can embed themselves across multiple value chains.

In this framework, defense-first may narrow the addressable market too early, particularly in a region with fragmented procurement regimes and uneven defense budgets.

Beyond product strategy lies a more difficult issue: growth capital.

Even where early-stage defense investment has improved, later-stage funding in Europe remains limited. Several of the most prominent European defense startups have relied heavily on US or Middle Eastern growth capital.

This raises uncomfortable questions:

• Can Europe build an independent defense champion without foreign growth capital?

• Will companies inevitably “pick a flag” as they scale?

• Is fragmentation across 30-plus procurement environments Europe’s structural disadvantage?

Without scale coordination, even strong early-stage ecosystems struggle to produce global champions.

Sovereignty Is a Supply Chain

Europe is not facing a crisis of ideas.

It is facing a crisis of industrial depth.

In this episode, Danijel Višević, Heidi Lindvall, Narina Mnatsakanian, Dr. Isabella Fandrych, Jordan Billiald, and Moritz explore what sovereignty actually means in 2025.

It is no longer about flags.

It is about semiconductors.
Rare earths.
Lithium.
Base load energy.
Grid orchestration.
Capital allocation.

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Danijel Višević opens with 1951.

Coal and steel were the backbone of war.

Europe integrated them.

That was radical innovation — political, economic, cultural.

And Europe has repeated this pattern:

After the Berlin Wall.
During COVID.
After Russian gas dependency.

Europe does not collapse under pressure.

It coordinates.

But coordination must now extend to capital and industry.

Because today’s sovereignty is industrial.

Europe produces less than 10% of the semiconductors it consumes.
Imports 98% of rare earths.
Raises dramatically less venture capital than the US.

Only 15% of European climate tech startups reach Series B.

The scale-up gap since 2015 amounts to billions annually.

Europe can invent.

It struggles to industrialize.

Heidi Lindvall reframes venture success.

Performance is necessary.

But performance alone is insufficient.

Capital shapes society.

Every check is a vote for what the future looks like.

Her framework:

Success = Performance × Trust

Trust includes:

Brand.
Values.
Impact.

Low performance kills funds.

High performance without trust produces one-cycle wonders.

Enduring firms compound both.

Venture does not just fund companies.

It allocates the future.

Nina reinforces the LP perspective:

Pension funds want returns.

But pensioners also want a livable planet.

Capital allocation is no longer purely financial.

It is systemic.

Dr. Isabella Fandrych introduces an overlooked truth:

The green transition depends on minerals.

Copper.
Lithium.
Nickel.
Manganese.

Current extraction methods are extractive, geopolitically concentrated, and environmentally destructive.

Biology offers alternatives:

• Microbes separating metal from rock

• Engineered proteins extracting minerals from waste streams

• Plants accumulating nickel for harvest

Industrial decarbonisation is not just energy.

It is chemistry.

Jordan Billiald makes a pragmatic case:

Europe has reduced domestic emissions largely by deindustrializing and outsourcing production.

If Europe wants

• Manufacturing

• AI data centres

• Electrified transport

• Economic resilience

It needs base load energy.

Renewables are intermittent.

Nuclear is dispatchable, dense, and sovereign.

The debate should not be ideological.

It should be practical:

Can we operate nuclear safely and at scale?

Because if Europe wants reindustrialization and net zero, nuclear remains one of the few scalable levers available.

Moritz shifts the discussion from generation to infrastructure.

Europe has built renewable capacity at an impressive speed.

The constraint is not energy production.

It is grid orchestration.

Europe is shifting from a centralized energy model to a decentralized one.

Distribution system operators were not designed to manage volatile, distributed flows.

The opportunity is software.

Orchestration.
Optimization.
Dynamic throughput management.

Energy sovereignty is not just generation.

It is system design.

Europe does not lack:

Talent.
Science.
Ambition.

It lacks:

Capital depth.
Industrial coordination.
Infrastructure velocity.

Sovereignty in 2025 is not a slogan.

It is an investment strategy.

Introduced by our very own Andreas Munk Holm, this EUVC Live at GoWest series spotlights the thought leadership of policymakers, institutional investors, GPs, corporates, and public capital leaders around one defining question:

How does Europe mobilise its own capital to secure its technological future?

Across the sessions, one theme emerges repeatedly:

Europe does not lack talent.
It does not lack innovation.
It does not lack savings.

It lacks coordination.

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In The Case for a United European LP Strategy, Philippe Tibi (The Tibi Initiative, French Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Recovery; Professor at École Polytechnique Paris) lays out the macroeconomic argument.

Europe holds over €35 trillion in household assets.

Yet European champions too often scale under foreign ownership with foreign upside.

The issue is not capital scarcity.

It is capital allocation.

Tibi’s prescription is direct:

Mobilise pension funds and insurers to treat venture and technology as core asset classes, not alternatives, but necessities.

For returns.
And for sovereignty.

In The Path to a United European LP Strategy, Chris Elphick (BVCA) and Philippe Tibi discuss how this mobilisation is playing out in practice.

The obstacles are structural:

• regulatory conservatism

• fragmented mandates

• cultural risk aversion

• limited cross-border coordination

Institutional allocations to venture remain near zero in many jurisdictions.

Reform is not optional.

If Europe wants to capture more of the value it creates, institutional capital must move.

Succeeding in Venture as a Long-Term Capital Investor shifts from policy to portfolio construction.

Christina Brinck (Volvo Group VC), Daniel Keiper-Knorr (Speedinvest), and Joe Schorge (Isomer) explore how to underwrite European venture in a fragmented but maturing ecosystem.

Recurring themes include:

• diversification across cycles

• power-law return dynamics

• patience as a structural advantage

• strategic alignment with industrial direction

From pension capital to corporate balance sheets, venture is positioned not as optional exposure.

But as essential infrastructure for participating in technological transformation.

The conversation then turns to public capital as ecosystem infrastructure. In The Role of Public Capital in European Venture Outcomes, Michiel Scheffer (European Innovation Council) explains how the EIC has funded hundreds of deep-tech companies and attracted private capital at scale.

The EIC has funded hundreds of deep-tech companies and attracted private capital at scale.

Public capital, he argues, is not distortion.

It is market completion.

Especially in:

• deep tech

• underserved geographies

• growth-stage financing gaps

When private markets hesitate, public capital can anchor.

Not to replace the market.

But to enable it.

In Catalyst or Competitor? Why the European Investment Fund Exists and How It Shapes Venture, Adem Yakisirer outlines how EIF has backed more than 1,600 fund managers and built a financing continuum from pre-seed to pre-IPO.

EIF operates as:

• anchor investor

• countercyclical stabiliser

• ecosystem architect

In the following fireside Q&A, in which Adem is joined by Mia Grosen (Venture Partner in Catalyst or Competitor, Superseed) and Andreas Munk Holm, the tone becomes candid.

Questions surface:

• Is Europe becoming too dependent on public anchors?

• Does institutional backing signal quality — or create complacency?

• How should sovereignty, defence, and deep tech priorities shape private capital behaviour?

EIF strengthens the ecosystem.

But it also becomes its gravitational centre.

Across all sessions, the conclusion converges.

Europe’s constraint is not innovation.

It is capital coordination.

From LP mobilisation to cross-border collaboration.
From private portfolio construction to public market-building.

If Europe wants technological sovereignty and long-term competitiveness, capital must move:

With intent.
With alignment.
With scale.

Welcome back to another episode of Upside where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures go behind the headlines shaping European tech, capital, and power.

This week is an AI-heavy sprint with a guest who’s right in the Gulf capital flow: Sam Marchant. Anthropic’s monster round is the headline, but the more interesting story is underneath: enterprise AI is becoming workflow-sticky, while OpenAI feels like it’s drifting toward consumer monetization experiments.

Then we get into the “AI productivity” paradox: why generative tools aren’t giving us leisure, they’re giving us more output… and more work. From there: Alphabet’s 100-year bond and what it says about tech becoming a utility, plus the uncomfortable European angle — our savings funding US hyperscalers while we debate sovereignty.

Finally, Europe sovereignty vibes: Mistral’s enterprise ramp, the 28th regime rhetoric, and whether political systems can actually execute. We close with space: Orbex collapsing, “data centers in orbit,” and why maybe civilization needs billionaires burning capital on high-variance cathedral projects.

This is Upside, where optimism is earned, not assumed.

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What’s covered:

• 00:21 Anthropic’s $30B: why the market can’t stop throwing money at enterprise AI

• 03:42 The real shift: OpenAI → consumer/ads vibes, Anthropic → coding + enterprise execution

• 04:50 Gulf capital dynamics: OpenAI relationships vs QIA showing up in Anthropic

• 07:21 Claude vs ChatGPT: switching costs are collapsing… until workflows become the moat

• 10:54 HBR’s “AI intensifies work”: why productivity becomes pressure, not leisure

• 12:19 Autonomy + mastery + dopamine: AI as the ultimate short feedback-loop machine

• 13:25 Practical use cases: research across languages, idea stress-testing, “AI as a first hire”

• 22:05 Alphabet’s 100-year bond: tech is now priced like infrastructure

• 24:51 The pension problem: Europe’s savings financing US scale while Europe underfunds Europe

• 32:44 Europe’s GDP gap is a tech gap: productivity isn’t the issue, tech scale is

• 39:51 Mistral’s enterprise ramp: sovereign AI or local services + transformation advantage?

• 45:37 The 28th regime: big words, hard execution — can Europe actually push reform through?

• 50:32 Space data centres: PR-on-steroids or physics-defying inevitability?

• 53:07 Orbex collapses: why “mid-sized countries” can’t win launch alone

• 55:20 Fusion/quantum: Europe’s deep R&D edge, blocked by capital markets structure

• 56:25 Deal of the week: Olex’s $1B+ moment and Europe’s chip-shaped ambition

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast, where we bring you the people and perspectives shaping European venture.

In this pitch episode, Andreas Munk Holm sits down with Pedro Ribeiro Santos, Partner at Armilar, to walk LPs through the story, strategy, and succession plan behind Armilar Fund IV — the firm’s new pan-European early-stage fund.

Armilar is one of Europe’s longest-standing independent tech VCs and Portugal's original venture firm. Born inside a bank 25 years ago, spun out almost a decade ago, and now a multi-generational partnership, the firm has backed some of Portugal’s most important tech companies and quietly built a track record of dragons (fund-returners), not just unicorns.

Fund IV doubles down on what the team knows best: early-stage, tech-intensive companies across data, digitalization, and connectivity, with a strong focus on Portugal & Spain and selective investments across the rest of Europe.

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Here’s what’s covered:

• 01:17 | What is “Armilar”?

• 02:30 | Origins & Spinout

• 03:40 | Why being based in Portugal with almost no local ecosystem

• 04:50 | From US to Europe, Then Back Home

• 07:22 | Fund IV in a Nutshell

• 09:44 | Geography & LP Backbone

• 11:41 | Track Record, DPI & Dragons

• 13:51 | Selected Portfolio & Staying Power

• 16:19 | Team & Generational Design

• 21:38 | Iberia’s State of Play (Portugal & Spain)

• 27:45 | Golden Visa & LP Angle

• 29:29 | Closing & What LPs Should Care About

Welcome to another episode of the EUVC Podcast! Today, we’re diving into How Corporates Might just be able Beat VCs in the AI Race. Or maybe more importantly, how we can collaborate.

Our guest is Alex Dang, co-author of the bestselling book The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth.

Alex is a seasoned technology executive and innovation advisor with over two decades of experience. He was a product leader at Amazon, where he launched new businesses across e-commerce, supply chain, and AI; a partner at McKinsey, helping Fortune 500 companies build digital ventures; and today advises corporate leaders and investors on AI strategies, venture building, and applying VC principles to large organizations.

In this conversation, Alex shares provocative insights on why the venture mindset is now non-negotiable for corporates in the AI era, where incumbents hold hidden advantages over VCs, and how to avoid “innovation theater” while turning data, distribution, and scale into real venture wins.

Let’s jump in!

Here’s what’s covered:

• 01:56 | The Venture Mindset in one frame with nine principles from 20 years of Stanford VC research: uncertainty → portfolios → outliers

• 03:44 | The post-book update Alex wishes he had added time compression: “days, not weeks,” and the rise of the “one slice team”

• 05:53 | Venture mindset applied to AI

• 07:34 | Why “adding AI” is the wrong framing; start customer-backward, not tech-backward

• 08:43 | “AI theater”, innovation theater and press release strategies vs real product value

• 11:19 | The European corporate trap: regulation, consensus, and downside protection as the enemy of transformation

• 11:56 | The right AI rollout sequence with start in back office to learn and protect trust, then go customer-facing at scale

• 15:21 | Why CVCs die after 3.7 years: incentives, leadership fear, and why corporate venturing fails structurally

• 17:24 | AI is now the world’s most democratized intelligence: everyone has the same tools; the gap is execution

• 18:47 | Where corporates fit in venture + startup ecosystems: strengths: data, distribution, enterprise scale

• 20:38 | When corporates should build in-house, when to partner, and why AI must become an internal muscle

• 25:24 | Incentives drive behavior: why executives won’t take venture-style risks unless failure is structurally safe

• 28:18 | AI-native teams and corporate reskilling among smaller, senior teams + digital workers replacing junior tasks

• 35:24 | What happens to the average corporate employee: tasks disappear, workflows evolve, but people still matter

• 38:50 | If Alex were CEO: how to move a workforce into an AI-safe future and target 25% profit uplift through AI

• 44:01 | Most counterintuitive venture principle — “drop bad ideas fast” and why persistence is sometimes the wrong discipline

• 46:05 | What top CEOs are doing right now: coding with Claude, learning by building, and staying close to users

• 49:00 | The compounding effect: “what was impossible 6 months ago is normal today” and why constant feedback loops win

Europe’s debate about gender equity in venture has moved beyond awareness and intention. The real question now is much sharper: how does capital actually move, where does it get stuck, and what genuinely changes outcomes for women building companies today?

In this episode, Andreas sits down with Debbie Wosskow, a serial founder, investor, and Chair of the UK’s Invest in Women Task Force, to discuss what she has learned from 25 years inside the system. This is a conversation about incentives, power, institutional capital, and why gender equity in venture is not a “nice to have” but a performance strategy.

We move from founder mindset to investor behavior to ecosystem and government-level levers and end with a clear-eyed reflection on DEI, ESG, and feminism. At a moment when many are retreating, but the case for backing women has never been stronger.

Context: the data doesn’t lie, and it isn’t improving fast enough

Welcome back to another episode of Upside where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures go behind the headlines shaping European tech, capital, and power.

This week is a high-velocity sprint through the AI model wars, hyperscaler capex, and the growing sense that SaaS is about to be structurally repriced by agents. Anthropic and OpenAI go toe-to-toe with flagship model releases just 20 minutes apart, while China quietly ships open models that are starting to look dangerously close to frontier performance at a fraction of the cost.

The panel also digs into the so-called SaaSpocalypse, the early signs of a European “uncoupling” from US big tech, and why Spain’s crackdown on social media is being reframed as a public health issue rather than a free speech fight.

And then there’s Muskanomics: the $1.5T SpaceX/xAI logic, the data-centers-in-space narrative, and whether any of it survives contact with physics.

What’s covered:

• 02:10 AI model arms race: Anthropic Opus 4.6 vs OpenAI GPT 5.3 (20 minutes apart)

• 10:45 China’s open-source push: Kimi K 2.5, Qwen3 Max, and swarm capabilities

• 14:05 Alphabet’s $180B capex signal and Wall Street’s “infraspend” panic

• 22:35 SaaSpocalypse: $300B wiped off software and the seat-based SaaS collapse narrative

• 30:05 US–EU uncoupling: France bans Zoom/Teams, Germany moves off Microsoft, sovereignty vibes

• 36:35 Spain’s social crackdown: CEO liability, under-16 bans, and the censorship slippery slope

• 43:30 Muskanomics: xAI + SpaceX, “data centers in space,” and why it feels like PR on steroids

• 56:30 Anthropic Super Bowl ads vs OpenAI: brand war and the ad-monetization fault line

• 59:25 Critical minerals: EU set to miss 2030 targets and China’s grip on rare earths

• 1:02:20 Deal of the week + Europe unicorn shout-outs + the new €1B growth fund

This episode starts with a surprising origin story: before building one of Europe’s most iconic on-demand companies, Sacha Michaud left home at 16 to become a professional racehorse jockey.

From there, we go deep into the operator playbook behind Glovo’s rise: launching fast, expanding internationally with limited capital, choosing battles ruthlessly, and pulling out of markets quickly when the data says the flywheel won’t spin.

This is a conversation about discipline, focus, and survival in one of the most brutal categories in venture—where network effects are real, fundraising can consume the CEO, and consolidation is always lurking.

Less theory. More real-world execution.

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What’s covered:

• 01:10 From racehorse jockey to startup founder: discipline, sacrifice, and the founder mindset

• 02:20 How Glovo started: meeting Oscar, shipping in 2.5 months, and rebuilding the MVP later

• 05:05 International scaling principles: why Europe isn’t enough and why speed mattered

• 06:25 Fundraising reality: the “lead investor” trap and why multi-stage funds can matter

• 08:05 Split-scaling and the growth-at-all-costs era: what the ecosystem learned (and didn’t)

• 10:15 Expansion playbooks: the launch team model and copying what Uber did right

• 13:25 Competition strategy: when to enter, when to avoid, and why capital constraints shape everything

• 15:25 Exiting markets fast: Brazil, iFood, and the moment you realize the playbook won’t work

• 17:35 Network effects in delivery: why the flywheel is more extreme than most marketplaces

• 19:05 Exclusivity vs multi-homing: how restaurants evolved from “threat” to “channel”

• 25:55 Emerging markets: Latin America → Eastern Europe → Africa and what changes operationally

• 33:00 Glovo Cares: why executives still deliver orders and what it teaches the org

• 34:30 Acquisition mindset: what founders get wrong about selling (and not selling)

• 43:20 YELLOW VC: building a disciplined pre-seed fund without losing operator sharpness

Welcome back!

In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm sits down with Simon Thomas, CEO of Paragraf, one of Europe’s rare hard-tech success stories, taking graphene from scientific breakthrough to industrial-scale electronics.

Graphene has been called the “wonder material” for two decades. The promise has always been clear: faster, better, and dramatically more energy-efficient electronics. The missing piece has been execution at scale. Simon and the Paragraf team are building that missing bridge, with the world’s first graphene electronics foundry in the UK, a growing portfolio of real commercial products, and a deep conviction that the next era of computing will require new materials, not just bigger data centers.

This is a conversation about what it truly takes to build venture-backed hardware in Europe.

• How you fund capex-heavy deep tech.

• How do you keep investors aligned when timelines are long.

• How you keep teams motivated through delays and national security reviews.

  
  

And why AI may accelerate materials discovery, but won’t replace the brutal, necessary work of turning atoms into real manufacturing.

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What’s covered:

• 01:27 What Paragraf is building and why graphene matters now

• 03:50 Graphene wafers and the world’s first graphene electronics foundry

• 04:23 What graphene changes for power consumption and device life

• 05:01 Why graphene isn’t already inside data centers

• 06:13 The future of “2D electronics” beyond graphene

• 08:02 Foundry versus product company: why Paragraf does both

• 09:40 Graphene’s 20-year journey from papers to real-world scale

• 13:15 When venture investors first showed up and what they needed to see

• 16:58 Sovereignty, British Patient Capital, and why “national backing” matters

• 24:08 The product-to-foundry loop and how you hook customers early

• 27:36 Capex, equity limits, and the painful mechanics of deep-tech financing

• 30:22 Surviving hard moments: people, pivots, and the NSI Act review

• 38:10 How to structure boards over time, from tactical to strategic

• 42:23 Keeping teams committed through uncertainty

• 46:10 Where Paragraf is today: headcount, geographies, and commercialization

• 49:16 AI in materials discovery and why manufacturing is still the bottleneck