EUVC

This special episode is an inside look at AI music from three very different vantage points: the builder, the investor, and the industry insider.

Andreas is joined by Sundar Arvind, CEO & Co-Founder at Mozart AI, building a collaborative generative audio workstation; Daniel Waterhouse, General Partner at Balderton Capital; and Ash Pournouri, Co-Founder of Belong, entrepreneur, producer, and former manager of Avicii.

Together, they unpack how AI is reshaping music creation, how serious investors underwrite risk in a litigious industry, why “one-click songs” miss the point, and whether AI expands creativity or commoditizes it.

If you want a grounded view of where the real fault lines are — rights, training data, authorship, collaboration, and the psychology of creativity — this is it.

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What’s covered:

• 00:40 Mozart AI’s vision: a collaborative generative audio workstation

• 05:10 DAWs, EDM, and why tech has always expanded music creation

• 06:35 Why “one-prompt songs” optimise for quantity, not craft

• 09:20 Underwriting AI music: how VCs think about billion-dollar incumbents

• 13:00 Is this a new instrument or a 100x larger market?

• 18:45 Are professional artists already using AI tools?

• 21:00 Copyright, training data, and legal diligence in AI music

• 25:15 Philosophically: what are “rights” when machines learn from music?

• 33:40 Diffusion models explained simply: how AI generates sound

• 36:30 The return of the band? Multiplayer music creation

• 40:00 Ash Pournouri joins: the industry’s instinct is protection

• 44:10 “You can’t stop development”: why demand always wins

• 48:50 Packaging matters: AI as tool vs AI as replacement

• 51:20 Lowering thresholds and democratization across decades

• 56:30 Five-year predictions? We’re on the vertical part of the curve

• 58:10 The “vibe coding” moment for music

Industrial systems are responsible for 75% of global emissions, yet only a quarter of climate-focused VC money flows into them. Not because investors don’t care — but because these systems are hard. They’re interconnected. Capital-intensive. Slow-moving. Technically dense. And deeply under-innovated.

Almanac Ventures is built to change that.

In this episode of the EUVC Podcast, Andreas Munk Holm sits down with Jo Slota-Newson and Marc Sabas, co-founders of Almanac Ventures — a new European seed and pre-seed deep tech fund laser-focused on unlocking decarbonisation in industrial systems through scientific breakthroughs and commercial discipline.

This is a pitch episode — a chance for the EUVC LP & GP community to hear directly what Almanac stands for, how they invest, and why the next decade of industrial innovation will be shaped by specialist deep tech funds with true scientific and financial edge.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 00:49 | What Almanac Ventures is — a European seed/pre-seed deep-tech fund backing scientific breakthroughs applied to industrial systems

• 01:31 | The founding team — Jo’s nanoscience PhD + 18 years commercialising deep tech, Marc’s finance → CVC → impact VC journey (and Jo’s 37km Channel swim)

• 03:52 | The complementary edge — technical rigor meets financial/commercial structuring, evidenced through 45 investments and a 2.3× MOIC track record

• 05:22 | The industrial innovation gap — 75% of emissions come from industry, yet only ~25% of climate VC targets it (because the systems are hard, complex, and interconnected)

• 06:11 | Why industry is ripe for deep-tech disruption — 20th-century inefficiencies, high value pools, and the need for performance + cost + decarb together

• 10:17 | “Deep tech works for venture—if you know where to look” — how to identify capex-efficient, scalable industrial technologies vs. science projects that need different capital

• 12:25 | Case study: Hot Green — a new compressor architecture enabling industrial heat pumps for 200–400°C processes (F&B, manufacturing) with electrification upside

• 13:49 | Case study: ReClinker — Cambridge spinout recycling cement inside steel arc furnaces, piggybacking heat, removing the CO₂-heavy chemistry step

• 15:19 | Do you need to be an operator to invest in deep tech? — why complementary experience (science + venture + corporate + some ops) beats any single “must-have”

• 18:35 | Investment strategy — first-check investor at TRL 4–7, pan-Europe, €300k–€1M tickets, aiming for a 25–30 company portfolio with follow-on capacity

Europe does not have a deep tech problem. It has a commercialisation problem.

The last European companies to reach €100B+ market caps were SAP and ASML, both founded 40–50 years ago. If Europe wants a new generation of deep tech champions, venture capital alone won’t get us there. Customers have to step in.

In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm is joined by Martin Schilling, former operator, investor, and founder of Deep Tech Momentum, to unpack why Europe excels at funding breakthroughs, but consistently fails to industrialise them.

This is a conversation about:

• why enterprise buyers are the missing link in European deep tech

• what corporates are doing wrong (and how they can fix it)

• how founders actually win large customers in complex, regulated markets

• and why courage — not grants — is Europe’s real constraint

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🎧 Here’s what’s covered:

• 01:15 Martin’s background: from N26 operator to deep tech ecosystem builder

• 01:52 What is Deep Tech Momentum (DTM)?

• 03:00 Why commercialisation — not capital — is the real bottleneck

• 04:19 The age gap: Europe’s top companies vs the US

• 06:26 Why US corporates acquire twice as many startups as Europe

• 06:54 The uncomfortable truth: Europe funds innovation others industrialise

• 08:54 Why corporates (not just VCs) must change behaviour

• 10:49 Neo-primes: the new system integrators Europe desperately needs

• 12:50 The four things corporates must fix to work with startups

• 15:06 Why startup collaboration must be CEO-owned

• 17:14 Buyers first: why conferences get this wrong

• 19:03 Money + customers: the only two things founders really need

• 21:27Trust, speed, and why procurement kills startups

• 23:25 Why trust starts inside the corporate, not with founders

• 27:03 Selling deep tech to enterprises & governments: what actually works

• 32:03 When CVCs help — and when they hurt

• 33:08 Enterprise sales mistakes founders keep making

• 38:28 Deep tech sales reality: defense, policy, and long cycles

• 44:57 Why DTM is not EU-funded — by design

• 49:07 The state’s real role: customer, not grant machine

• 49:23 Final takeaway: Europe needs courage, not more programs

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 felt less like a market update and more like a structural reset.Nvidia posts another blowout quarter — and the market barely reacts.Ukraine, four years into war, is quietly becoming Europe’s most important defence innovation engine.Anthropic adjusts its safety posture as AI labs collide with geopolitics and procurement reality.And beneath it all, questions around margins, sovereignty, and capital allocation are getting sharper.This isn’t just a tech cycle.It feels like a systems cycle.This is Upside, where optimism is earned, not assumed.What’s covered:03:30 Nvidia earnings: perfection priced in?09:40 Ukraine four years on: from aid recipient to defence capability supplier17:30 Europe’s defence spend: real budgets or slow procurement?23:30 AI safety becomes conditional: competitive pressure meets ethics31:00 Distillation at scale: China, IP leakage, and national security35:00 SaaSpocalypse vs SaaS redemption: systems of record vs systems of action40:30 OpenAI & Anthropic margins: the hidden constraint under the hype46:00 Chips & quantum: Europe’s deep tech wedge — if scale capital shows up54:30 Abundant intelligence: what breaks if intelligence gets cheap?#euvc #VC #VentureCapital #Investing #TheEuropeanVC #Podcast #Tech #Startup

What exactly are LPs buying when they allocate to venture today and do they still believe in it?

In this episode, Andreas sits down with Max Bray and Juliet Bailin, both Venture Partners at Kindred Capital VC to unpack what’s really happening beneath the fundraising headlines.

Max brings the raw perspective of trying to raise a first-time fund in 2025 with unicorn-founder GPs, strong angel track records, and still struggling to secure second meetings.

Juliet brings the sharper counterpoint: LP frustration isn’t always ignorance. Sometimes it’s a rational response to how venture has been practiced, especially around transparency, liquidity discipline, and the unrealistic expectation that a GP should be world-class at everything.

This is a conversation about:

• LP behavior in uncertain cycles

• The myth of the “full-stack investor”

• Why solo GP economics are brutal

• Whether software still needs venture

• And why the fund model is splitting at the extremes

Not hot takes. Not doom.
Just honest mechanics.

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What’s Covered:

• 01:04 Max’s 2025 fundraising reality: even strong “on-paper” stories struggle to get second calls

• 03:46 LP rotation: capital moving toward liquidity, security, and shorter-duration bets

• 05:08 LP frustration: transparency gaps + liquidity decision-making

• 07:09 LPACs as sparring partners, not governance theatre

• 09:31 Europe’s structural issue: too few LPs and GPs have lived full cycles

• 12:47 The “full-stack investor” myth: investing + fund management + compliance + IR

• 14:46 Solo GP economics: why 2/20 breaks at the small end

• 26:08 The barbell thesis: platforms on one end, specialists on the other

• 27:56 Software defensibility compression in the AI era

• 30:24 Will AI decentralize outcomes — or centralize them further?

• 33:10 The rise of AI roll-ups and alternative capital models

• 35:19 The “middle-market squeeze” — real or overhyped?

• 39:34 What founders actually care about when choosing a fund

Climate isn’t “over.” But building in climate has entered a new chapter, defined by shifting regulation, politicized narratives, buyer confusion, and a market that funded dozens of overlapping platforms.

In this episode, Andreas and co-host Carmel Rafaeli, Founding Partner at The Table, sit down with Lubomila Jordanova, Co-founder & CEO of Plan A, just weeks after Plan Ajoined forces with Diginex, the NASDAQ-listed sustainability technology company, at the end of 2025.

The conversation is part of Leaders Shaping a Resilient Planet, a series spotlighting exceptional founders in climate tech who happen to be women. The focus is not identity as a theme, but execution as a discipline. These are operators building in some of the most complex and capital-intensive parts of the real economy.

This is not an acquisition recap. It is a clear-eyed discussion about what it takes to build and responsibly exit a climate tech company in a market that is maturing quickly.

What’s covered:

• 00:52 The Table: co-investing community + the Foundation’s recoverable grants model

• 02:05 Introducing Lubomila Jordanova and Plan A

• 02:45 The acquisition: why Plan A chose to lead consolidation

• 04:35 Fundraising logic → acquisition logic: what changed

• 06:40 Founder outcome vs VC outcome: how alignment works in an exit

• 11:30 “The truth is where the real economy sits”: what carbon software actually sells

• 13:30 The uncomfortable line: “glorified consulting with a digital angle”

• 15:05 What VC portfolios get wrong in climate: return distribution, capital stack, secondaries

• 16:55 Why “climate” can’t be one bucket: hardware vs SaaS vs reporting

• 20:00 Managing investor perception: visibility, bias, and boardroom baggage

• 23:15 The broader financial pyramid: VC vs public markets vs real-economy signals

• 27:35 Post-exit reality: why a public-company KPI lens changes the conversation

• 31:10 Three founder learnings (humility, ecosystem, real-world problems)

• 33:55 A rare founder truth: pregnancy during the exit + building with “more hats than one”

In a market where “AI fund” can mean almost anything, Lumo Labs is unusually specific: digital deep tech, deployed early, and anchored in one of Europe’s densest innovation clusters—Eindhoven, home of Philips’ legacy and the High Tech Campus (“smartest square kilometer” energy).

In this EUVC pitch episode, Andreas sits down with Andy Lurling, founder & GP of Lumo Labs, to unpack how an entrepreneur-turned-investor built a fund that’s deliberately more than money: a structured support program, deep technical selection, and a thesis shaped by real-world constraints, health systems under pressure, and cities as the source of most emissions and pollution.

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What’s covered:

• 00:59 Why “Labs” and why Eindhoven: origin story + Philips legacy

• 02:31 Andy’s founder journey: EyeOpener, ESA as first investor, and the exit

• 06:15 From angel tickets to a fund: two cornerstone LPs pull them into fund building

• 08:26 Fund I recap: €20m, 23 pre-seed/seed investments

• 08:58 Fund II status: just over €40m raised, targeting €100m final size

• 10:34 The actual thesis: AI + digital deep tech (security, IoT, AR)

• 13:12 SDG focus: health, education, sustainable cities + climate action (urban)

• 15:31 Why these sectors: prevention over curing, and cities as the “source problem”

• 19:22 Where they invest: Netherlands/Belgium/Germany core; Spain/Portugal + Nordics via scouts

• 20:30 “Smart capital” in practice: leadership, market fit, storytelling, follow-on readiness

• 23:30 Track record snapshot: 30 companies; 3 dead; 9 (soon 11) moving into scale-up territory

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

This week we’re joined by Eyal Malinger, co-founder of Resurge Growth Partners, to unpack a genuinely strange week in global tech.

China unveils humanoid robots that look disturbingly battlefield-ready. Anthropic tries to draw moral lines in defence AI. Peter Steinberger leaves Europe almost as fast as he went viral. Munich becomes less “security conference” and more “Europe, wake up.” And in the background, billion-dollar AI seed rounds and quantum mega-funds quietly signal that the frontier is accelerating again.

This isn’t just a tech cycle.

It feels like a systems cycle.

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

What’s covered:

• 02:10 China’s humanoid robot moment: hardware dominance meets AI brains

• 06:20 Battlefield AI and the ethics problem Anthropic can’t avoid

• 14:00 Raspberry Pi, edge AI, and Europe’s accidental meme stock

• 20:30 Anthropic vs Palantir: moral lines vs deterrence logic

• 25:10 Peter Steinberger leaves Europe — ecosystem gravity in action

• 31:00 AI inside venture: workflow automation vs real alpha

• 43:00 Munich Security Conference: defence budgets, sovereignty, and Stark vs Thiel

• 52:10 Psychedelics and glucose monitors: Europe’s quiet biotech strength

• 55:30 Quantum funds and Europe’s billion-dollar AI seed round

In this EUVC Live at GoWest episode, Olivier Tonneau, Founding Partner Quantonation, Jeppe Høier, Co-Host at EUVC Corporate, Paolo Pio, Co-founder and General Partner at Exceptional Ventures, Fergus Bell, Founder and Managing Partner at The Players Fund, and Prashant Agarwal, Chairman and Managing Director at Scandian xplore one defining question:

How does Europe turn frontier innovation into global scale?

Across quantum, corporate capital, longevity, and sport, the same pattern emerges: Europe doesn’t lack talent or research. It lacks the capital and market architecture required to scale strategic industries fast enough to stay independent.

Olivier opens with Europe’s quantum paradox. Europe supplies a meaningful share of deployed quantum computers globally, with strong startup and research clusters across the Nordics, France, Germany, and the UK. The science is world-class — but the financing is breaking. Over the last 12 months, the funding ratio between Europe and the US has shifted from roughly 1:2 to nearly 1:7, accelerating US scale-up, public listings, and acquisition pressure. Europe has 12–24 months to respond — not to avoid failure, but to avoid becoming the lab while others become the market.

Jeppe shifts the lens to corporates. Corporate venture capital represents roughly 25% of global VC volume, yet the average lifespan of a CVC unit is only 3.7 years. His argument is blunt: most corporates launch venture arms believing they are “doing VC,” when they are actually building a strategic instrument without the operating system required to sustain it. Without durable governance — and a clear Build, Buy, Partner model — corporate venture becomes fragile instead of strategic.

Paolo reframes health and longevity as deep tech moving at software speed. Genome sequencing has collapsed from decades to hours. mRNA proved that biology timelines can compress dramatically. With AI now embedded in diagnostics and discovery, health is entering an exponential era — and venture is being pulled with it.

The session closes with a thesis most investors still underestimate. Fergus and Prashant argue sport is no longer entertainment — it is venture infrastructure. Athletes and rights holders are becoming capital allocators and distribution rails. Elite sport has evolved into a real-world deployment environment for deep tech, health tech, AI, and performance systems — where validation happens under pressure and at global scale.

The takeaway across all five perspectives is clear:

Europe invents early.
But scale requires architecture.
Late-stage capital depth.
Liquidity.
Corporate integration.
Coordination.

What’s covered:

00:30 Europe’s scale question — five lenses on one problem
02:00 Quantum’s paradox — Europe leads in science, not in financing
05:00 The 1:7 funding gap — why the next 12–24 months matter
07:00 What Europe can do — capital architecture, procurement, scale funds
11:30 Corporate venture — 25% of global VC, but structurally fragile
13:30 Why CVCs fail — the 3-year vs 6-year test and governance gaps
16:30 Longevity as deep tech — health moving at software speed
21:30 AI in health — diagnostics, discovery, and exponential biology
27:30 Sport as venture infrastructure — athletes and rights holders as rails
34:30 Deep tech in sport — validation, performance systems, adoption under pressure
40:00 Final takeaway — Europe has innovation; it needs scale architecture

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

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.

Until recently, defense investing in Europe was controversial. Many institutional LPs avoided the sector. ESG mandates were interpreted narrowly. Defense was often softened under the label “dual-use.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed the landscape. Defense budgets rose. Political rhetoric shifted. Venture capital began flowing into the sector at unprecedented levels.

But the central question remains:

Is this a structural capital reallocation — or a short-term momentum trade?

The debate crystallizes around one fault line: defense-first vs dual-use.

Nicholas argues Europe’s hesitation to embrace defense-first investing is both strategically and financially misguided. Defense-only startups, he contends, have historically outperformed. Dual-use often dilutes focus by forcing two distinct go-to-market motions. Real capability requires designing directly for the warfighter — not adapting commercial products later. In his view, dual-use in Europe often functions as a reputational hedge rather than a strategy.

Sebastian counters that dual-use is not compromise — it is risk management. Advanced technologies can serve both industrial and defense customers without duplicating entire teams. Diversified revenue reduces concentration risk. Non-dilutive defense contracts can substitute late-stage equity rounds in a region where growth capital remains thin. And Europe’s comparative advantage may lie less in building vertically integrated primes — and more in dominating high-precision subsystems.

As the conversation escalates, it moves beyond product strategy into a deeper structural issue: scale capital. Even where early-stage defense investment has improved, later-stage funding remains limited. Several leading European defense startups have relied heavily on US or Middle Eastern growth capital.

Which raises uncomfortable questions:

Can Europe build independent defense champions without foreign growth capital?
Will its strongest companies inevitably “pick a flag” as they scale?
Is fragmentation across 30+ procurement regimes Europe’s structural disadvantage?

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

What’s covered:

00:30 Framing the question — structural shift or narrative trade?
02:00 From taboo to trend — ESG optics and the Ukraine inflection point
04:15 Defense-first vs dual-use — the core strategic divide
07:30 The defense-first case — focus, procurement alignment, and capability building
11:00 The dual-use counterargument — diversification and risk management
14:30 Subsystems vs primes — where Europe’s advantage may lie
18:00 The growth capital gap — reliance on US and Middle Eastern funding
21:00 “Picking a flag” — sovereignty vs scale
23:30 Procurement fragmentation — 30+ regimes and scaling friction
26:00 Final takeaway — Europe’s defense future depends on capital conviction and coordination