EUVC

China is moving quickly in physical AI and humanoid robotics. For Europe, the bigger question is not simply whether it can match Chinese hardware, but whether it should try to compete on the same terms at all.

In this episode of This Week in European Tech, Dan Bowyer⁠ and ⁠Mads Jensen⁠ of ⁠SuperSeed discuss what China’s progress in robotics means for European companies, where Europe may still have an edge and why the most valuable opportunity could sit in the software, intelligence and systems built around the hardware.

They also explore whether humanoid robots are really the right form factor for many industrial applications. In some cases, the better answer may be to embed intelligence directly into the machine itself and focus on solving the full business problem.

Other highlights

• Nvidia’s growing role in financing the AI infrastructure boom
• The cybersecurity risks emerging from increasingly capable AI agents
• Why reverse acquihires could become more common in Europe
• Cambridge Aerospace and the gap in Europe’s defence manufacturing capacity

Staffan Helgesson takes the stage following Creandum being named Firm of the Year 2025 (>€200M AUM) at the EUVC Summit & Awards Show 2026.

The award goes beyond returns, recognising how a VC performs across the full stack: portfolio outcomes, founder support, LP value creation and contribution to the ecosystem, from backing emerging sectors to setting standards on transparency, diversity and fairness.

Staffan founded Creandum in 2003 and is now a Partner based in Stockholm. His work has focused largely on SaaS, alongside leading the firm’s climate practice with a particular focus on electrification.

In the discussion, he reflects on how Creandum has evolved over more than two decades, why the firm treats venture as a team sport and how it thinks about fund size, performance and Europe’s changing venture ecosystem.

He also returns to a principle Creandum has carried with it: “the price always increases”. What was enough to win a deal, recruit someone or build a firm last year will not be enough next year, especially as AI reshapes venture.

The EUVC Summit & Awards Show returns in 2027. Find out more and secure your spot here.

Camilla Dolan, General Partner at Eka Ventures, joins a conversation following Eka being named Impact Leader of the Year 2025 at the EUVC Summit & Awards Show 2026.

The award recognises exceptional positive impact alongside strong financial performance, with impact intention, measurement and reporting integrated throughout the investment process.

The recognition follows the close of Eka’ $107 million second fund, focused on health, wellbeing and sustainability as long-term drivers of value.

In the conversation, Camilla explains Eka’s shared value thesis and why the firm believes impact investing can drive outlier returns while bringing more commercial capital into the market.

In Fund I, she says every pound invested by Eka has been followed by roughly £10 of additional capital, much of it from commercial investors.

She also explains how Eka assesses founders, looking for people who learn at an exceptional rate, show high intentionality and have evidence of outlier achievement.

Camilla connects that approach to investments including Runna, which Eka backed in 2022 before its acquisition by Strava.

The discussion explores what it looks like to treat impact as part of the investment discipline itself, rather than something separate from commercial performance.

The EUVC Summit & Awards Show returns in 2027. Find out more and secure your spot here.

What happens when AI agents begin doing more than following instructions and start actively deceiving the people around them?

In the latest episode of This Week in European Tech, Dan Bowyer and Mads Jensen of SuperSeed are joined by Sion Evans, Managing Director at VenCap, to discuss a new AI security test where models created fake identities, tried to manipulate an open-source maintainer and attempted to hide what they had done when challenged.

They look at what this means for cybersecurity, why increasingly autonomous systems create new attack vectors and how AI itself may become part of the defence.

The episode also covers the wider shifts shaping European tech and venture this week.

Highlights

• AI agents, deception and the next cybersecurity challenge
• Google DeepMind’s shift from research towards execution
• Why venture returns remain dominated by a handful of outliers
• Europe’s growth capital challenge and who should manage it
• Why US investors are finding more opportunities in European tech
• This week’s notable deals in AI chips and energy storage

Sonali De Rycker, Partner at Accel, is inducted into the EUVC Hall of Fame 2025 in this awards presentation from the EUVC Summit & Awards Show 2026.

The award recognises individuals who have shaped European venture over more than a decade through the founders they backed, the firms they helped build and the ideas they advanced.

Sonali joined Accel in 2008 and invests across consumer internet, software and fintech. Her investments include Spotify, one of the companies that helped establish what a globally significant European technology business could look like.

In her acceptance remarks, she reflects on choosing Europe at a time when the ecosystem was fragmented and widely considered far behind Silicon Valley.

What she saw instead were founders building without much infrastructure or support, often far beyond the continent’s established technology hubs.

She also discusses how Europe has strengthened as founders recycle talent, experience and capital into new companies, and why AI gives the continent another opportunity to build global leaders.

Throughout, she returns to the belief that has shaped her career: exceptional European founders can build companies with global impact.

The EUVC Summit & Awards Show returns in 2027. Find out more.

AI infrastructure investment continues to accelerate, but the gap between technical progress and sustainable returns is becoming harder to ignore.

In the latest episode of This Week in European Tech, Dan Bowyer and Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures and Andrew J Scott of 7percent Ventures, discuss volatile tech markets, the economics behind data centre expansion and why stronger AI models do not always translate into meaningful automation.

Highlights

• Why AI and tech stocks are experiencing sharper volatility than the wider market
• Whether today’s infrastructure spending can produce sustainable returns
• Nvidia’s expanding role in financing the AI ecosystem
• Why engineering, not model capability, may now be the main bottleneck
• What AI is revealing about post-quantum security
• How sovereignty is reshaping technology supply chains
• This week’s standout deals across nuclear energy, robotics, defence and quantum computing

When software can be built and copied faster than ever, what still makes a consumer product stand out?

Episode #4 of Consumer Tech Napkin, produced in partnership with True, explores how strong teams create an edge through user love, distribution, experimentation, learning loops and human judgement.

Host Andreas Munk Holm is joined by Neil Tanna, Co-Founder and CEO of Howbout, Graham Paterson, Co-Founder and CEO of Jitty and an angel investor in Howbout, and Mike Martin of True, a consumer and retail-focused investor and an investor in Jitty.

Howbout is the shared calendar app for keeping up with friends and has grown to more than seven million users across 125 countries. Jitty is the search engine for finding your next home.

They discuss why features rarely create lasting defensibility, what separates a genuine experiment from simply shipping and hoping, how teams balance data with product taste and how AI is changing the speed of product development.

Highlights

• Building great products when features are easy to copy
• Distribution, user love and learning loops
• Ideas versus execution
• What makes a genuine product experiment
• Incremental improvements versus bigger bets
• How Howbout tests higher-risk changes
• Where human judgement remains essential

Timestamps

• (01:00) Building great products when software is easy to copy
• (04:00) Does a unique founding insight still matter?
• (08:00) Ideas versus execution
• (11:00) The rising bar for consumer startups
• (13:00) Distribution as a moat
• (17:00) Why learning loops create an advantage
• (19:00) What makes an experiment?
• (20:00) Hypothesis-led product development
• (22:00) Product bets and building for remarkability
• (25:00) Where to test risky ideas
• (28:00) How Howbout runs experiments at scale
• (32:00) Lessons from Deliveroo’s logistics experiments
• (34:00) How AI accelerates shipping and analysis
• (37:00) Can AI run experiments autonomously?
• (39:00) Why human taste still matters
• (43:00) How audience size compounds learning
• (45:00) Closing thoughts

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Many talented professionals never realise there are investors willing to back them to buy and run an established small business, even if they have never been a CEO or worked in that sector before.

In this episode of Unsung, host ⁠Will Maunder-Taylor⁠ speaks with ⁠Pascal Wittet⁠ and ⁠Sandy Farmer⁠, Co-Founders of ⁠Orca Equity Partners⁠, the UK’s first and most active fund of search funds. 

They explain how Orca backs first-time CEOs across Europe, what they look for in aspiring business owners and why stable, cash-generative and often “boring” companies can offer compelling acquisition opportunities and large returns.

They also explore what happens after a deal, from building the management team and introducing better systems to professionalising the business for its next stage of growth. Pascal shares the story of Water Direct, which grew from roughly £3 million to around £10 million in EBITDA and delivered a return of more than five times invested capital in under three years.

Highlights

• Why investors back first-time CEOs with no sector experience

• How the search fund model works

• What Orca looks for in aspiring business owners

• Why stable, cash-generative and “boring” businesses can be attractive

• How succession creates opportunities to acquire strong companies

• What new CEOs should prioritise after taking over

• Why empathy and humility matter when buying from a founder

• How Water Direct delivered a return of more than 5x

For more on entrepreneurship through acquisition, small business ownership and Unsung events, ⁠subscribe to the Unsung newsletter⁠⁠.

Timestamps

• (01:22) Introducing Orca Equity Partners
• (02:16) How Sandy moved from private equity into search funds
• (06:32) Why backing first-time CEOs can work
• (10:07) Search fund returns and CEO incentives
• (13:42) What makes a strong acquisition target
• (17:40) How searchers find overlooked small businesses
• (21:07) Using technology and professionalising acquired companies
• (29:28) What Orca looks for in future CEOs
• (36:14) The Water Direct story
• (42:23) Adam Johnson’s first year as CEO
• (46:13) Building the right management team
• (51:51) Water Direct’s growth and liquidity event
• (58:23) What the story means for aspiring business owners
• (59:22) Leadership, humility and lessons from the military
• (1:07:23) Closing thoughts

What would it take to get the UK economy moving again without losing ground in AI and technology?

In this episode of This Week in European Tech, Mads Jensen and Dan Bowyer of SuperSeed are joined by Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures to discuss what the UK’s new government should prioritise, from lowering industrial energy costs and reforming planning to cutting regulation and encouraging more pension capital to back productive UK assets.

They also examine possible US restrictions on Chinese open-source AI models, the Hugging Face breach, Alphabet’s rising AI infrastructure spending and Tesla’s bets on Robotaxi and Optimus.

In addition, the conversation covers capital concentration in European venture, PayPal acquisition rumours, Travis Kalanick’s Atoms and the week’s major deals, including CuspAI, Arrakis and Delivery Hero.

Highlights

• What the UK’s new government should do to restore growth
• How regulation, planning and energy costs are holding back investment
• Whether pension capital should be encouraged to back more UK assets
• Possible US restrictions on Chinese open-source AI
• What the Hugging Face breach shows about AI and cybersecurity
• Alphabet’s growing AI infrastructure spend
• Tesla’s Robotaxi and Optimus strategies
• Why venture funding is becoming more concentrated
• The week’s major deals, including CuspAI, Arrakis and Delivery Hero

In the 100th episode of This Week in European Tech,Mads Jensen and Dan Bowyer of SuperSeed are joined by Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures and Andrew J. Scott of 7percent Ventures.

Two years after the show began, they reflect on how much the technology and venture landscape has shifted. They compare the surge in AI funding, hyperscaler investment and trillion-dollar technology companies in the US with Europe’s progress in company creation, venture activity and strategic technologies.

The conversation also explores where Europe continues to lag, from pension capital and scale-up funding to energy, defence and access to space, and whether the continent can reduce its reliance on the US while building globally competitive companies.

They then turn to 2028, sharing their views on the next phase of AI, robotics, smart glasses, quantum computing, sovereign technology and the infrastructure needed to support them.

Key highlights

• How European venture has evolved over the past two years
• Why Europe is creating more unicorns and decacorns while its global funding share remains under pressure
• The increasing concentration of capital around AI and the largest US technology companies
• Whether Europe can unlock more pension and institutional capital for venture
• Why every AI strategy is increasingly becoming an energy strategy
• Europe’s position in defence, sovereign technology and space infrastructure
• The next wave of robotics, autonomous vehicles and physical AI
• Predictions for AGI, quantum computing, smart glasses and the companies that could shape 2028

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Love Tomorrow Summit - July 23, 2026, Tomorrowland, Belgium

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