EUVC

Welcome back to the EUVC Corporate Podcast. This week, Jeppe sits down with Axel Deniz, CEO of Bosch Business Innovations and Head of Venture Building at Bosch.

Axel is building Bosch’s venture-building engine with a clear mandate: get Bosch technology out into the world, through founder-led spinouts, joint ventures, and seed rounds that can stand on their own with external investors. With ~80,000 active patents, 20 new patents per day, and 20,000 researchers globally, Bosch has the assets. Axel’s job is turning them into investible companies.

🎧 Here’s what’s covered:

• 02:30 Bosch’s unfair advantage: 80k patents, 20 patents/day, 20k researchers

• 04:10 Horizon 2/3: building for 2030–2035 where incumbents can’t reach

• 05:30 Hybrid execution: not all in-house, not all studio but a blended model

• 06:25 Problem definition: Bosch theses + founders bringing problems from outside

• 08:25 Stage gates: “get to no fast” + external validation early

• 09:05 Gate #1: attracting “triple-A founders” before anything else

• 10:35 Founder-led 80/20 vs joint ventures when tech risk is still high

• 13:10 Venture market fit: choosing where to build is a venture builder superpower

• 16:20 Founder acquisition: why mediocre pre-seed talent is the biggest risk

• 23:05 Working with scale-ups: co-create instead of buying or minority investing

• 24:15 University engine: 5–6 deep partnerships (Carnegie Mellon example)

• 27:15 Biggest surprises: founder scarcity and portfolio restructuring complexity

• 29:05 Axel’s advice to founders: don’t start deep tech from scratch

• 30:30 Axel’s advice to VCs: don’t underestimate corporates’ learning curve

• 32:00 Axel’s background: founder → Silicon Valley → PWC CVC → Bosch

• 35:15 Career advice: no cookie-cutter route and trust your gut sometimes

• 37:10 How founders can engage: programs + direct outreach on LinkedIn

In conversation with our very own Andreas Munk Holm, Christian Hernandez, founding GP of 2150 and Jan Hofmann of the Viessmann Generations Group, look at how climate investing is moving from narrative to industrial reality, where cities, energy, materials, and manufacturing become venture-scale markets, and execution matters more than slogans.

Today, 2150 officially launched its €210M second fund, bringing total assets under management to €500M and reinforcing its position as one of Europe’s leading investors backing the technologies shaping future cities and industrial systems.

Fund II reflects growing institutional conviction in 2150’s thesis: that cities generate around 80% of global prosperity, and that the next wave of venture-scale outcomes will come from making urbanisation and industrial activity sustainable at planetary scale. The fund attracted a diversified LP base across Europe, Asia, and North America, including Viessmann Generations Group, Novo Holdings, EIFO, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Carbon Equity, and Church Pension Group.

Momentum is already underway. 2150 Fund II has already invested into seven companies, including AtmosZero, GetMobil, Metycle, Mission Zero Technologies and three further unannounced deals. Across both funds, 2150’s 27 portfolio companies generate more than $1B in annual revenue, employ 4,500+ people globally, and deliver megatonne-scale climate impact.

Key takeaways:

• Urban and industrial systems are now venture-scale markets.
  Energy, cooling, industrial heat, mobility, materials, and circular economy solutions are no longer niche climate bets — they are core infrastructure categories with global demand.

• Impact and returns are converging.
  2150’s portfolio demonstrates that companies tackling planetary-scale problems can also generate outlier financial outcomes, measured in real revenues, jobs, and deployment at scale.

• Institutional capital is leaning into climate infrastructure.
  The breadth of Fund II’s LP base signals a shift: long-term institutions are increasingly backing strategies that combine sustainability with durable, industrial cash flows.

• Execution matters more than narratives.
  2150’s analytical, problem-first approach targeting the hardest bottlenecks in cities and industry is translating into faster scaling and earlier commercial traction across the portfolio.

• Europe can build global category leaders.
  With platforms spanning energy, materials, and urban systems, 2150’s portfolio shows that European-founded companies can scale globally without compromising ambition.

Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, 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 starts, as ever, with tech failing spectacularly, planes landing late, and VCs reminding each other they really should be doing deals. Then it gets serious.

From a billion-pound UK data center stopped in its tracks, to Davos and Mark Carney’s quietly devastating diagnosis of the global order, to Europe’s long-awaited 28th regime finally getting real momentum, this is a conversation about whether Europe can still act at scale or whether fragmentation will finish the job.

Along the way, the trio digs into China’s AI strategy, whether SaaS has quietly peaked, why defence IPOs are suddenly everywhere, and whether science in the US is really “collapsing” or just being reshuffled under Trump.

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

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What’s covered:

• 00:02 Mads back from the Gulf + Lomax in Nazaré

• 00:04 UK data centre blocked: what happened + why it matters

• 00:07 Fast-tracking data centres: national infrastructure vs EIAs

• 00:12 Davos standout: Mark Carney and the end of nostalgia economics

• 00:18 Middle powers and fragmentation: why Europe can’t go solo

• 00:24 AI and jobs: are entry-level roles really disappearing?

• 00:27 EU Inc / the 28th regime: momentum, labour law, and risk

• 00:34 Has China already won AI? redefining what “winning” means

• 00:43 SaaS, defence IPOs, and Europe’s capital reset

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

This week, Andreas Munk Holm is joined by Max Schertel, co-founder & CEO of finmid, and Tim Rehder, General Partner at Earlybird, to unpack the rise of embedded lending infrastructure for B2B platforms.

From food delivery and PSPs to ride-hailing and fleet platforms, finmid lets marketplaces offer financing directly to their merchants – with a single integration, across 30+ European markets. Together, they break down why embedded lending is often new capital, not just smoother UX; how better data lets you underwrite the “invisible” SME segment; and what it really takes to scale regulated infra across a fragmented Europe.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 01:03 – What finmid does: One integration for platforms to offer any financing product to business users across Europe

• 02:02 – Why embedded wins: Tim on data access, risk scoring, and turning platforms into “banks in all but the balance sheet”

• 04:05 – Owning infra, not capital: Regulation, operations and data engine vs outsourcing pure funding to institutions

• 06:43 – Economics & margins: Market size, 60%+ gross margins, and why net income beats headline spread

• 10:47 – Customer examples: How Wolt Cash works, proactive offers in the merchant dashboard, and +80% retention uplift

• 12:32 – Impact on the market: New capital for underserved SMEs vs just smoothing the bank journey

• 17:57 – Ticket sizes & duration: Typical loans of €10–20k, up to ~12 months, 85% renewal and the path to larger, longer credit
  21:15 – AI & risk: Using generative and agentic AI in ops (adverse media) and data science (millions of data points, daily model iteration)
  29:20 – Scaling to 30 countries: U27 + UK, CH, IS – regulation, payments rails and why “ugly detail work” is the real moat

• 40:17 – Partner alignment: Making financing core to platform metrics (GMV & retention) and hard-won lessons on incentives

Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures cut through the noise shaping tech, venture, and geopolitics in Europe and beyond.

This week starts lightly, as all good episodes do, with kids, illness paranoia, and the small joys of enforced medical naps. It escalates quickly.

From OpenAI’s new health-focused ChatGPT and the FDA’s sudden sprint toward deregulation to Trump’s Greenland fixation and what it really signals about European sovereignty, to Meta buying its way into the AI application layer, pension funds destroying value at scale, and Nvidia’s push into physical AI.

This is one of those episodes where everything connects.

The common thread is power. Who has it. Who’s losing it. And who’s still pretending nothing has changed.

This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the systems are breaking, and the optimism is… cautiously conditional.

What’s covered:

• 03:00 ChatGPT Health launches and why Europe is locked out

• 05:00 The FDA’s pivot to deregulation and what it means for health startups

• 10:00 Using multiple LLMs as a “second medical opinion”

• 13:00 Trump, Greenland, and the slow collapse of Pax Americana

• 18:00 Sovereignty, defence spending, and Europe’s strategic wake-up call

• 23:00 France moves to ban social media for under-15s

• 27:00 Meta buys its way into the AI application layer

• 30:00 Kraken spins out of Octopus at multi-billion scale

• 34:00 Revolut’s Turkey move and the march to 100 million users

• 37:00 UK pension funds, catastrophic underperformance, and broken incentives

• 45:00 Why venture returns matter more than fees

• 49:00 FTSE hits 10,000 and why it doesn’t mean what you think

• 56:00 CES, Nvidia’s autonomous ambitions, and physical AI

• 01:04:00 Grok’s $230B valuation and free speech trade-offs

• 01:07:00 Deals of the Week

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we go behind the craft of building and backing venture-scale companies in Europe.
Today, we’re joined by Sean Mullaney, Founder & CEO of Seapoint, and Will Prendergast, as the Founding Partner at Frontline Ventures.

Seapoint has just come out of stealth with a $3M pre-seed to rebuild the fragile and fragmented financial stack that European startups (and later: mid-market companies) rely on.

With a Stripe-forged team, AI-native development culture, and operators from Revolut, Tines & more on board, Seapoint wants to become the financial home for European startups.

This conversation dives deep into founder pain, broken tooling, AI-native product building, engineering culture, the changing shape of startup teams, syndicate-building, and why Frontline backed Sean with high conviction.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 01:07 The Mission: “The financial home for European startups”

• 03:32 Frontline’s conviction moment

• 06:24 The founder pain: 5 tools, 5 accounts, zero clarity

• 08:07 The invisible tax: fragmentation, reconciliation hell, no real-time view

• 10:14 Why this problem is structurally important

• 12:19 European vs US lens: why Seapoint is ahead

• 13:18 AI-native engineering: “We rebuild the stack from processes, not accounts”

• 15:19 AI agents allow senior engineers to ship full-stack features alone — compressing timelines that previously required 2–3× more engineers.

• 17:19 Rethinking teams: fewer people, more senior, more generalist

• 19:33 Productivity does NOT reduce funding needs — it increases ambition

• 21:27 Culture: curiosity, experimentation, and founder-led technical push

• 36:11 Syndicate design: Angels as a go-to-market weapon.

• 40:23 From startup financial home → to powering Europe’s mid-market backbone: lending, treasury, automation, embedded finance.

Welcome back to another episode of the EUVC Podcast. Today, Jeppe sits down with Emil Eifrem, founder & CEO of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database and a core infrastructure layer for AI applications used by all 20 of the top US banks, 9 of 10 global pharma giants, and every major automotive OEM.

Emil recently announced a $100M global startup program to back founders building the next generation of AI-native products on top of graph technology — from knowledge graphs to hallucination-free LLMs.

We delve into why graph thinking matters now, how Neo4j came of age during the Panama Papers investigation, and why Europe is better positioned than people think to compete in the AI platform shift.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 02:00 — The Panama Papers “Coming Out Party”
  How journalists used Neo4j to uncover 7-layer-deep financial relationships invisible to traditional databases — and why it triggered a wave of global adoption.

• 06:40 — Why Graphs Are the Missing Link for AI
  Knowledge, meaning, context, and relationships: why LLMs without structured knowledge graphs hallucinate.

• 08:50 — The $100M Startup Program
  Why Neo4j is returning to its roots to support AI-native founders — and why the packaging for startups had to change.

• 12:00 — What Founders Get
  Free Aura credits, dedicated graph engineers, joint GTM, and access to the world’s largest graph developer community.

• 14:30 — Early Traction: 300+ Startups in Weeks
  Why early demand is far ahead of expectations — and the kinds of companies applying.

• 16:10 — Community as a Strategic Moat
  500+ annual global events, deep developer love, and why skill availability is now a CIO-level buying criterion.

• 19:00 — Building Deep Tech in Europe
  Why Neo4j kept engineering in Europe, how the ecosystem matured, and what today’s founders can learn.

• 22:00 — Regulation & Competitiveness
  Will Europe overregulate itself out of the AI race? Emil’s perspective on models vs infrastructure vs applications.

• 23:40 — The Future of AI Infrastructure
  Why every company must rethink its stack — and why the biggest threat is assuming your business will survive without change.

In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm speaks with Oskar Hartmann, legendary operator turned super angel.

From Kazakhstan to Germany, Russia, Japan, and now Dubai and Silicon Valley, Oskar has built and exited more than 10 companies, invested in 150+ ventures (14 unicorns among them), and today is pioneering a new way to solve concentration risk for founders and angels: Accumulator, a share-pooling model unlocking liquidity and diversification.

They dive into Oskar’s “beast mode” founder philosophy, his candid battles with burnout, the importance of product–soul fit, and why Europe doesn’t just need more unicorns, it needs deca- and hectocorns.

Along the way, Oskar shares his learnings from India’s ecosystem, his obsession with avoiding adverse selection, and his belief that communities, not individuals, create enduring success.

Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where ⁠Dan Bowyer⁠,⁠ Mads Jensen⁠ of ⁠SuperSeed⁠ and ⁠Lomax Ward⁠ of ⁠Outsized Ventures⁠⁠⁠ cut through the noise shaping tech, venture, and geopolitics in Europe and beyond.

This week starts lightly, as all good episodes do, with kids, illness paranoia, and the small joys of enforced medical naps. It escalates quickly.

From OpenAI’s new health-focused ChatGPT and the FDA’s sudden sprint toward deregulation to Trump’s Greenland fixation and what it really signals about European sovereignty to Meta buying its way into the AI application layer, pension funds destroying value at scale, and Nvidia’s push into physical AI. This is one of those episodes where everything connects.

The common thread is power. Who has it? Who’s losing it? And who’s still pretending nothing has changed?

This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the systems are breaking, and the optimism is… cautiously conditional.

Share

What’s covered:

• 00:00 Intro: ChatGPT Health launch, privacy/encryption, “use with skepticism”

• 00:03 FDA shifts: deregulation + faster approvals for AI medical devices / wearables

• 00:09 Trump + Greenland + NATO: geopolitics, minerals, defense, European sovereignty

• 00:18 France proposing social media ban for under-15s; phones in schools; EU vs US regulation

• 00:23 Meta reportedly buying Manus (AI agents / applications layer)

• 00:25 Octopus Energy’s Kraken spin-out: valuation, contracted revenue, European “hidden champion”

• 00:27 Discord IPO chatter: nearing ~$1B ARR; monetization model

• 00:32 UK pensions: pressure to allocate to privates; constraints + risk/return tradeoffs

• 00:42 FTSE 100 hits 10,000; UK vs S&P; defense-driven rally; low tech weighting

• 00:50 CES: Nvidia autonomous driving + open sourcing; “physical AI” + Mercedes partnership

• 00:54 China & Nvidia H20 pressures; AMD vs Nvidia software gap; Intel relevance

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we connect and champion the people building European venture.
In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm sits down with two pillars of Italy’s modern tech ecosystem:

• Giovanni Daprà, CEO & co-founder of Moneyfarm, one of Europe’s leading digital wealth management platforms

• Paolo Gesess, co-founder & GP at United Ventures, one of Italy’s premier early-stage VC firms

Together, they unpack how Moneyfarm went from a Milan-founded startup to a pan-European fintech player; how Italy’s ecosystem has evolved; how United Ventures backed Giovanni through multiple strategic inflection points; why the shift from Blitzscaling to Default Alive made Moneyfarm stronger; and how European fintech is entering an era of consolidation and acquisition-led expansion.

This is an episode full of concrete frameworks, real founder–VC dynamics, and hard-earned lessons from building across Italy, the UK, and Europe.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 04:00 | Moneyfarm as a digital wealth manager built to make investing simple, guided + discretionary, now managing £6.5B across Italy & the UK

• 04:54 | Why United Ventures backed them: early conviction in a massive savings problem, founder clarity from day one, and a mission that remained unchanged for 13 years

• 06:31 | Building from Italy first: leveraging local regulatory fluency + talent cost advantages while keeping a pan-European vision from day zero

• 08:59 | Italy today vs. 2012 — more capital, more repeat founders, more international operators returning, and a dramatically deeper talent pool

• 13:21 | The “tipping point” moments — moments where the board must choose: buy back shares, bring in global investors, widen the model (e.g., B2B2C)

• 17:45 | Where Moneyfarm is now — strong in Italy + UK, product expansion complete (brokerage + pensions), and preparing for the next geographic phase

• 18:37 | Surviving the capital cycle: seeing interest rates spike in real-time, shifting from burn to profitability in 24 months, and reshaping the framework for Europe

• 19:50 | The Europe playbook: “default alive” — why blitzscaling never fit most of Europe, and how disciplined scaling becomes a competitive advantage

• 22:25 | Founders vs. VCs on growth vs. profit — debunking the myth: alignment, capital structure, and long-term value trump forcing hypergrowth

• 23:09 | Managing founder stress & incentives — secondaries, refreshed equity plans, changing founder roles, and adapting governance over a 10-year journey

• 25:41 | The cap table reality — Moneyfarm with VCs, PEs, and industrials: why no one could force a “burn it all” strategy even if they wanted to

• 27:41 | Building European-style VC — United Ventures’ thesis: European standards, European ambition, and preparing founders for international Series B/C investors

• 30:09 | The next frontier: pan-European expansion, from product expansion → to commercial optimization → to cross-border consolidation

• 34:13 | Growing into M&A as a founder — Moneyfarm’s three acquisitions, building the muscle, and using M&A as a growth lever when organic slows

• 36:11 | The M&A playbook — when to build vs. buy, why scale matters, and the founder’s job in orchestrating product-led acquisitions

• 37:40 | What founders often underestimate — M&A is expensive, cognitively draining, and requires dedicated people so you don’t destroy core execution

• 39:47 | The board’s role — independent perspectives, long-term value thinking, and helping the CEO avoid deal fever or tunnel vision

• 41:00 | The hard question: exits & fund cycles — how VCs manage tail-end holdings, DPI realities, continuation funds, and why selling is not betrayal

• 43:48 | DPI explained simply — why some funds need liquidity earlier, and why United didn’t (strong DPI → more patience → no forced exit)