EUVC

Europe is not facing a crisis of ideas — it is facing a crisis of industrial depth.

In this EUVC episode, Danijel Višević (Co-Founder & General Partner, World Fund), Heidi Lindvall (Founder & General Partner, Pale Blue Dot), Narina Mnatsakanian (Partner & Chief Impact Officer at Regeneration VC), Dr. Isabella Fandrych (Co-Founder and General Partner at Nucleus Capital), and Moritz Jungmann (GP at Future Energy Ventures) confront one of the defining questions of 2025:

What does sovereignty actually mean?

Danijel opens with history. In 1951, coal and steel powered conflict — so Europe integrated them. That integration was not symbolic. It was structural coordination under pressure. Europe repeated this reflex after the Berlin Wall, during COVID, and following the Russian gas shock. Europe does not collapse under pressure. It coordinates. But today, coordination must extend beyond policy — into capital markets and industrial systems.

The structural gaps are stark. Europe produces less than 10% of the semiconductors it consumes. It imports the vast majority of rare earth materials. It raises significantly less venture capital than the United States. Only a fraction of European climate tech startups reach Series B. Europe can invent. It struggles to industrialize.

Heidi reframes venture capital itself. Performance is necessary, but insufficient. Her equation is clear: Success = Performance × Trust. Trust — expressed through brand, values, and measurable impact — acts as a multiplier. Venture does not simply fund companies. It allocates the future. Narina reinforces the LP perspective: pension funds seek returns, but pensioners also seek stability, sustainability, and systemic resilience. Capital allocation is no longer purely financial. It is strategic.

Dr. Isabella Fandrych shifts the conversation to materials. The energy transition is not just about electrons — it is about minerals: copper, lithium, nickel, manganese. Extraction today is geopolitically concentrated and environmentally destructive. Biology offers alternatives: microbes separating metals from rock, engineered proteins extracting minerals from waste streams, plants accumulating metals for harvest. Industrial decarbonisation is chemistry as much as energy policy.

Jordan makes the case for baseload energy. Europe has reduced emissions partly through deindustrialization and outsourcing production. If Europe wants manufacturing, AI data centres, electrified transport, and economic resilience, it needs dense, dispatchable power. Renewables are essential — but intermittent. Nuclear remains one of the few proven zero-carbon baseload sources operating at scale. The debate, he argues, should be practical — not ideological.

Moritz closes on infrastructure. Europe has built renewable capacity quickly. The constraint is no longer generation. It is grid orchestration. As energy systems decentralize, operators must manage volatile, distributed flows. The opportunity lies in software: orchestration, optimization, dynamic throughput management. Energy sovereignty is not just about producing electrons. It is about system design.

Sovereignty in 2025 is not a slogan.

It is an investment strategy.

What’s covered:

00:30 Sovereignty redefined — from symbols to supply chains
03:00 Europe under pressure — integration as a structural reflex
06:00 The industrial gap — semiconductors, rare earths, and scale-up capital
10:30 Venture as allocator — Success = Performance × Trust
15:00 The LP lens — systemic capital and long-term responsibility
19:00 The materials bottleneck — why decarbonisation is mineral-intensive
23:00 Biology as infrastructure — new extraction paradigms
27:00 Baseload power — nuclear as industrial policy
32:00 The grid constraint — orchestration, optimization, software-defined systems
38:00 Sovereignty as coordinated capital and industrial depth

Introduced by our very own Andreas Munk Holm, this EUVC Live at GoWest session brings together 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 every session, one theme emerges repeatedly: Europe does not lack talent. It does not lack innovation. It does not lack savings. It lacks coordination.

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 macro argument. Europe holds more than €35 trillion in household assets, yet its top companies often scale under foreign ownership. The problem is not capital scarcity — it is capital allocation. Pension funds and insurers must treat venture and technology as core asset classes — for returns and sovereignty.

In The Path to a United European LP Strategy, Chris Elphick (BVCA) and Philippe Tibi explore why mobilisation is slow: regulatory conservatism, fragmented mandates, cultural risk aversion, and weak cross-border coordination. Institutional allocations to venture remain near zero in many countries. Reform is structural, not optional.

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) examine how to underwrite European venture in a fragmented but maturing ecosystem. Themes include diversification across cycles, power-law return dynamics, patience as structural advantage, and strategic alignment with industrial direction. Venture is positioned not as optional exposure — but as infrastructure for technological transformation.

Public capital enters the equation in The Role of Public Capital in European Venture Outcomes, where Michiel Scheffer (European Innovation Council) explains how the EIC funds deep tech, underserved geographies, and growth-stage gaps. Public capital, he argues, is not distortion — it is market completion.

In Catalyst or Competitor? Adem Yakisirer (European Investment Fund) outlines how EIF has backed more than 1,600 fund managers, building a financing continuum from pre-seed to pre-IPO. In a candid exchange with Mia Grosen (Venture Partner, SuperSeed) moderated by Andreas, the tension surfaces: Is Europe becoming too dependent on public anchors? Does institutional backing signal quality or complacency?

From LP mobilisation to cross-border collaboration, one message is clear:

If Europe wants technological sovereignty and long-term competitiveness, capital must move with intent, alignment, and scale.

What’s covered:

02:30 Europe’s savings paradox — why the issue is allocation, not scarcity
05:00 Philippe Tibi — €35T in household assets and the case for a united European LP strategy
10:30 Venture as sovereignty infrastructure — why pensions and insurers must move
15:30 Chris Elphick + Tibi — the real blockers: regulation, mandates, culture, coordination
22:30 Why allocations stay near zero — institutional inertia across Europe
27:30 Christina Brinck — underwriting venture across cycles
33:00 Daniel Keiper-Knorr — power-law returns, patience, and portfolio construction
38:00 Joe Schorge — long-term capital behaviour and strategic alignment
43:00 Michiel Scheffer — the EIC as market completion in deep tech and underserved geographies
49:00 Growth-stage gaps — why public capital anchors where private markets hesitate
53:30 Adem Yakışırer — EIF’s role: 1,600+ managers backed from pre-seed to pre-IPO
58:30 Mia Grosen — dependency vs signal: when public anchoring becomes a crutch
1:02:30 Final takeaway — Europe’s challenge is coordination: capital must move with scale and intent

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

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’s episode opens, as always, with light deal banter, closing jokes, and a reminder that fourth-time founders are still the most bankable asset in venture.

From Saudi Arabia’s surprisingly coherent Vision 2030 to Europe’s chronic inability to articulate a shared mission, this is a wide-ranging conversation about strategy, scale, and what actually forces societies to act.

Along the way, the panel digs into autonomous AI agents that can negotiate car purchases and manage your inbox, the $100B arms race between OpenAI and Anthropic, ASML’s signal on the durability of the AI buildout, and why defence spending is becoming Europe’s most structurally important tech opportunity.

The episode also tackles the uncomfortable questions: whether Europe only moves under pressure, whether the United States of Europe is real or pure projection, and whether social media bans and AI retraining schemes are genuine policy or just optics.

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