EUVC

Uncertainty is uncomfortable, but Marc Thom, Head of Henkel Ventures, argues that it can also create the conditions for new businesses, technologies and growth.

Marc describes resilience as a muscle: not simply surviving disruption, but learning how to turn challenges into commercial opportunities.

He connects that idea to sustainability, resource dependency and demographic change, and explains why he believes material science can play a major role in reducing emissions and reshaping industries.

He also explores how AI could accelerate innovation by helping companies and researchers work with vast amounts of knowledge and data, and why Europe may be better positioned than it often assumes.

From established corporates and universities to scientific expertise, venture capital and entrepreneurial talent, Marc argues that many of the ingredients are already here.

The bigger question is whether Europe can use those strengths with enough optimism, long-term thinking and willingness to act.

Highlights

• Why resilience is about turning challenges into opportunities
• How sustainability can become a source of growth
• Why material science could have an outsized climate impact
• How AI can support innovation in materials and formulations
• Why Europe may be more competitive than it thinks
• What startups can teach established companies about responding to uncertainty
• Why optimism only matters if it leads to action

This session was recorded at the Love Tomorrow Summit, where EUVC curated the investor-focused programme.

Timestamps

• (00:00) Intro
• (01:00) Why startups make Marc optimistic
• (02:00) Finding opportunity in uncertainty
• (03:55) Why resilience is a muscle
• (04:20) Sustainability and material science as growth opportunities
• (05:05) How AI could accelerate material innovation
• (06:05) Why Europe is more competitive than it thinks
• (06:35) How startups turn long-term trends into businesses
• (07:25) Turning challenges into opportunities

A CVC can stay active on paper while becoming increasingly irrelevant to the company that owns it.

That was the situation Hans Söhngen stepped into at KPN Ventures. After years of early-stage investing, the fund lacked strong internal anchoring and had too little evidence of the value it was creating for KPN.

In this conversation, Andreas Munk Holm and Jeppe Høier speak with Hans Söhngen, Managing Director at KPN Ventures, about how he helped turn the fund around. The new approach starts with a simple test: why does this investment make sense for KPN?

Hans explains how that question reshaped the portfolio, the companies KPN Ventures backs and the way the team works with business units across KPN.

He also reflects on what he would change about the legacy portfolio, why internal sponsors need to genuinely want a partnership and how strategic relevance can be tested through real commercial activity.

The financial side still matters. Hans discusses how KPN Ventures looks for companies that can contribute strategically while remaining strong investments in their own right.

Portfolio partnerships generated more than €20 million in revenue for KPN last year, and Hans says that figure could nearly double this year.

Highlights

• Why KPN Ventures needed to rethink its original model
• How Hans rebuilt the fund around value for KPN
• The logic every new investment needs to pass
• What he learned from managing the legacy portfolio
• Why commercial revenue is an important measure of strategic impact
• How KPN balances strategic and financial returns
• Why internal sponsors need to pull opportunities into the business
• What made KPN relevant to ElevenLabs
• Why fewer, higher-impact partnerships can create more value

Timestamps

• (00:00) Intro
• (02:20) Why KPN Ventures was created
• (05:40) Where the original CVC model stopped working
• (09:20) Rebuilding the fund around value for KPN
• (12:15) The logic every new investment needs to pass
• (14:45) What Hans would change about the legacy portfolio
• (21:10) Building the new KPN Ventures strategy
• (24:50) How KPN measures strategic value
• (26:30) Why KPN invested in ElevenLabs
• (31:45) Balancing strategic value with financial returns
• (38:00) Moving faster and giving founders a clear answer
• (40:15) Why every deal needs an internal sponsor
• (41:50) Why KPN reduced innovation noise and focused on fewer deals

For climate hardware, technical performance is only the start. Commercial viability depends on risk-averse buyers trusting the product, industry recommenders backing it and manufacturers being able to reproduce it reliably at scale.

Blue Frontier’s journey from pilot units to commercial deployments shows how much of that work happens outside the lab.

More than 90,000 hours of field operation and the training of over 1,000 sales engineers have helped build confidence in the company’s cooling technology, while its manufacturing strategy relies on established partners rather than building its own gigafactory.

In this EUVC episode, Blue Frontier Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Betts and Executive Chair Christian Hernandez Gallardo discuss what it takes to move beyond pilots, scale manufacturing and turn cooling into grid infrastructure.

They also explore how energy storage changes the economics of air conditioning and whether Europe could leapfrog conventional cooling technology.

Highlights

• Why HVAC sales partners and contractors shape adoption
• How field deployments turn performance into market trust
• Why hardware companies risk “death by a thousand pilots”
• When engineering teams need to freeze a production version
• How outsourced manufacturing can reduce the capital needed to scale
• Why cooling and energy storage could free up grid capacity
• What Europe would need to leapfrog conventional cooling

Recording note: This episode was recorded before the public announcement that Christian would step back from his role at 2150 to become Executive Chair of Blue Frontier. He remains an investor across the firm’s funds.

Join us for Luxembourg Venture Days on October 14–15 at Luxexpo The Box. Explore the agenda and register here.

Timestamps

• (00:00) Intro
• (02:35) What changes for Blue Frontier now
• (03:15) How Blue Frontier’s cooling technology works
• (05:05) Why cooling is a grid capacity problem
• (09:15) What building owners are actually buying
• (15:10) From science and engineering to sales and service
• (19:25) Winning trust in a risk-averse HVAC market
• (23:20) Moving from prototypes to scalable manufacturing
• (27:35) Why Blue Frontier does not need its own gigafactory
• (31:10) When hardware founders need to stop tinkering
• (32:17) Why air conditioning can be a venture-scale business
• (33:17) Scaling supply, financing and commercial growth
• (36:17) Can Europe leapfrog conventional cooling?

Europe’s venture ecosystem has grown, but how durable is the capital supporting it? Government and sovereign funding remain significant while European pension fund participation is still limited.

In this episode, Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen and Priyanka Savjani of SuperSeed examine what Europe’s reliance on public capital means for the long-term strength of its venture market.

They also share their takeaways from the All-In Summit, discuss why Langdock reversed its Delaware structure, assess how higher rates could affect AI infrastructure spending and explore Europe’s role in physical AI and advanced manufacturing.

Highlights

• Why public funding can leave European venture politically vulnerable
• What limited pension fund participation means for long-term capital
• Why Langdock moved its corporate structure back to Europe
• Whether independent evaluation can address AI safety concerns
• How rising rates could reshape the AI infrastructure boom
• OpenAI’s advertising opportunity and the economics of conversational AI
• European technology’s role in physical AI and manufacturing
• The companies and technologies worth watching this week

Timestamps

• (00:00) Cold open
• (01:13) Introduction
• (02:39) Inside the All-In Summit
• (15:00) Closer ties between Canada and the EU
• (17:59) Why LangDock moved its corporate structure to Europe
• (20:38) Who funds European venture?
• (23:44) AI safety: Slow down or audit the models?
• (35:53) How higher rates could affect AI infrastructure spending
• (42:45) OpenAI’s advertising and monetisation opportunity
• (46:39) European IPOs and the OpenAI–Anthropic model race
• (49:41) Physical AI, humanoid robots and industrial software
• (55:37) Deals and companies of the week
• (58:48) The week ahead

What changes when an investor encounters a founder who expands their sense of what is possible?

Krishna Visvanathan, Co-Founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners, reflects on meeting James Dacombe in 2019.

At 19, James was proposing a non-invasive brain sensor inspired by the experiences of two grandparents with dementia.

Krishna could not yet know whether the technology behind CoMind would work, but he believed James had the qualities to build more than one consequential company.

Crane backed that potential. Several years later, the firm became the only institutional investor in the first round of James’s second company, now OLIX.

In this conversation, recorded during the EUVC Summit & Awards Show in April 2026, Krishna shares how working with James sharpened Crane’s approach to identifying outlier founders.

He explains why the firm considers whether every investment could return half or all of a fund and why a founder’s humility, self-awareness and capacity to learn can matter as much as the initial idea.

The discussion also explores how exceptional founders attract people with deeper specialist expertise, why Crane continues to increase its appetite for ambitious technical bets and what investors should search for when the next outlier will not resemble the last one.

Highlights

• Why Krishna backed James before he could assess whether CoMind’s technology was achievable
• How James changed Crane’s expectations of founders and potential outcomes
• Why Crane underwrites investments for fund-returning potential
• The qualities that suggest a founder can keep learning and developing
• Why searching for another version of a past success can obscure the next outlier
• How founders without conventional credentials can assemble world-class technical teams
• What gave Crane the conviction to back James’s second company

Timestamps

• (00:00) Intro
• (01:29) Meeting James Dacombe and backing CoMind
• (04:05) Betting on the founder before the product
• (05:42) How James raised Crane’s investment bar
• (07:23) Why Crane refuses to hedge
• (08:55) What another outlier founder looks like
• (10:03) Humility, self-awareness and maturity
• (11:46) The founder at the back of the room

Europe can invest heavily in AI, but without enough cheap, reliable electricity, its ambitions will eventually hit a physical limit.

Data centres, industry and digital infrastructure all need power, making Europe’s energy system an increasingly important part of its technology strategy.

Alex Bakir, General Partner at Norrsken Evolve, argues that electricity is becoming a question of competitiveness, resilience and sovereignty, not only climate.

Alex traces how Europe became dependent on imported energy and why electrification now requires changes to grids, costs and supply chains.

He also explains why Europe may already have the technology and capital it needs, if it can overcome fragmentation and build enough momentum to act.

Highlights

• Why Europe’s AI ambitions depend on electricity
• How energy became a competitiveness and sovereignty issue
• Why grid infrastructure is becoming a bottleneck
• The risk of swapping one dependency for another
• Why Alex believes Europe already has the technology and capital to act

This session was recorded at the Love Tomorrow Summit, where EUVC curated the investor-focused programme.

Timestamps

• (01:00) Why Europe should run on cheap, clean electricity
• (02:00) How Europe’s postwar model shaped its energy system
• (03:00) From industrial power to dependence on imported energy
• (04:00) Why this is bigger than climate change
• (05:00) Energy, geopolitics and economic power
• (06:00) Europe’s vulnerability to energy price shocks
• (07:00) Why AI raises the stakes for Europe’s electricity system
• (08:00) Grid bottlenecks, high costs and new dependencies
• (09:00) Why Europe already has the technology and capital to act
• (10:00) The case for a more electrified Europe

What Europe lacks is not necessarily talent. The bigger challenge is keeping ambitious founders here, financing them at scale and capturing more of the value created by European technology.

In this episode of This Week in European Tech, Dan Bowyer and Priyanka Savjani of SuperSeed are joined by Andrew J Scott of 7percent Ventures to discuss what needs to change if Europe wants to build and retain more global technology leaders.

They cover EU Inc., European pension capital, AI sovereignty and access to frontier models, as well as Europe’s space ambitions and the wider economic impact of AI.

The conversation also looks at what happens if AI shifts more value from labour towards capital, and whether Europe is positioned to benefit from that shift.

Highlights

• Why Europe’s talent may not be the real constraint
• Whether EU Inc. can reduce fragmentation
• Why domestic capital matters for European tech
• What AI sovereignty really means
• Why access to frontier models could become a strategic risk
• What Europe needs to unlock in space
• How AI could reshape the balance between labour and capital
• Deals of the week across AI and space

What does it really mean to be AI-native when hiring or backing a leadership team?

Chris Preston, CEO at ZEREN, a global technology recruitment firm, and Rishabh Kaul, Venture Partner at Hoxton Ventures, discuss how AI is changing the signals that matter in senior talent, from curiosity and hands-on experimentation to judgement and functional expertise.

Recorded at the EUVC Summit & Awards Show in April 2026, they explore the trade-off between proven experience and AI-native thinking, how founders can rethink hiring and how investors can better assess and support leadership teams as expectations evolve.

Highlights

• What AI-native leadership looks like in practice
• How founders and investors can assess AI capability
• Why curiosity and experimentation matter alongside experience
• When deep domain expertise still matters more
• Why interim executives can help shape evolving roles
• Why early-stage teams should focus on standout strengths rather than perfection

Timestamps

• (00:00) Intro
• (02:00) How AI is changing leadership hiring
• (04:00) Why experienced leaders need to stay close to how AI is being used
• (06:00) How to test for genuinely AI-native thinking
• (07:00) Balancing proven experience with AI curiosity
• (09:00) The investor perspective on AI adoption across portfolio companies
• (11:00) When deep domain expertise still matters more
• (12:00) Using interim leaders when roles are still evolving
• (13:00) Why founders should hire for standout strengths, not perfection

Responsible innovation works best when it creates products people genuinely prefer, not when it asks them to accept a compromise.

Rokas Peciulaitis, Founder and Managing Partner at Contrarian Ventures, argues that better products, longer lifecycles and stronger customer loyalty can make responsibility a competitive advantage.

Using examples from Vinted, Patagonia and Mako, Rokas explores how founders can build companies around durability, reuse and purpose, and why he believes every euro spent is effectively a vote for the kind of future we want to create.

Highlights

• Why “climate change” may be the wrong framing
• Why responsible innovation has to win on product
• What Vinted, Patagonia and Mako get right
• How purpose can become a long-term moat
• Why every euro spent is a vote

Timestamps

• (01:00) The Titanic metaphor and why climate action is too slow
• (03:00) Why “climate change” may be the wrong framing
• (05:00) Why builders matter more than waiting for policy
• (07:00) Mako: giving materials another life
• (08:00) Vinted and making secondhand mainstream
• (09:20) Patagonia and killing a bestselling product
• (11:00) What responsible companies have in common
• (12:00) Why every euro spent is a vote
• (12:40) The climate worsens by default, but gets better by choice

This session was recorded at the Love Tomorrow Summit, where EUVC curated the investor-focused programme.

Apple’s decision to rent rather than build its core AI model raises a wider question for Europe: where should companies own the technology, and where does it make more sense to build on top of the best models available?

That is one of the themes in this episode of This Week in European Tech, featuring Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen and Priyanka Savjani of SuperSeed, alongside Andrew J Scott of 7percent Ventures.

They also discuss where Mistral and Wayve can compete, why business data is becoming more valuable and how the AI infrastructure boom is starting to reshape capital markets.

Highlights

• Why Apple may have made “renting AI” more respectable
• Where Mistral could find an advantage beyond the frontier-model race
• Why business data is becoming one of AI’s most valuable assets
• Why governments should act as customers, not just grant providers
• How AI infrastructure spending is moving into debt markets
• Why new forms of AI reasoning are raising questions around observability and safety

Timestamps

• (00:00) Intro
• (03:00) Broadcom and the AI chip race
• (06:00) Matt Clifford, Anthropic and where AI power sits
• (08:00) Apple rents AI: build or buy?
• (12:00) nScale and the numbers behind its AI infrastructure story
• (14:00) Wayve, Waymo and the autonomous driving race
• (17:00) Why governments should become startup customers
• (18:00) Europe, capital flows and the AI kill switch debate
• (21:00) Thinking Machines, Mistral and the open-source AI race
• (25:00) Meta’s AI pricing bet and the value of business data
• (31:00) Why bond markets suddenly matter to tech
• (37:00) AI financing moves from equity into debt
• (41:00) Oracle’s leveraged bet on OpenAI
• (43:00) What happens when AI models reason in their own language?
• (47:00) Deals of the week
• (50:00) What to watch next week