Most companies obsess over acquiring the next customer while dramatically underinvesting in the ones they already have. But what if the best growth isn't found in new logos—it's sitting inside your existing customer base?

This conversation explores the often-overlooked economics of retention versus acquisition, the strategic mistakes embedded in long-term contracts, and why billing infrastructure is no longer back-office plumbing but a growth engine. The discussion unpacks the European fintech landscape, where fragmentation isn't a weakness but a competitive advantage, and where sovereignty means control over decisions and data—not just infrastructure. From navigating post-acquisition integration and cultural consolidation to the emerging role of AI in fraud detection, revenue prediction, and pricing optimization, the dialogue reveals what it takes to build durable, predictable growth in a market that rewards systems over ambition.

**Key Discussion Points:**

💶 Retention and expansion are chronically undermanaged—the next euro of growth often lives in your existing customer base, not your pipeline

🇪🇺 European sovereignty isn't about rejecting AWS or Salesforce; it's about transparency, control, and decision-making autonomy

📊 Pure consumption-based pricing creates CFO anxiety—hybrid models with predictable base costs and variable upside win trust

🔄 Post-M&A success depends on eliminating ambiguity fast: expose org charts, roles, and expectations before the deal closes

🎓 Education is dangerously slow to adapt—students graduating in five years will enter job markets transformed by AI they've never been taught to use

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About Gregory Herbert [CEO of Frisbii]:CEO of Frisbii, a European billing and subscription management platform assembled from four companies across Europe. He stepped into the role as the first CEO after the founder, taking over leadership of a company backed by growth-equity firm PSG. Under his leadership, Frisbii competes against larger, better-capitalised American platforms including Stripe Billing, Chargebee, and Zuora, and has focused on building what he describes as a sovereign European alternative in the subscription infrastructure space.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

AI has collapsed the vulnerability lifecycle — from discovery to mass exploitation — into a matter of hours, fundamentally disrupting how organizations must think about cybersecurity. What was once a 60-90 day patching window is now obsolete, and the barrier to finding critical vulnerabilities has dropped so low that anyone with access to AI can do it.

Marco Riccardi breaks down how geopolitics directly drives cyber attacks, often within hours of major political statements. When Germany pledged additional weapons funding for Ukraine at the Ankara NATO summit, Russian-affiliated hacktivist groups launched coordinated DDoS attacks against German public institutions almost immediately — a predictable pattern that threat intelligence can anticipate. The conversation explores how regulations like NIS2 are forcing mid-sized European companies to step up their security posture, why sovereignty in cybersecurity is becoming a procurement requirement in specific cases, and how the industry is shifting from purely tactical threat feeds to strategic, board-ready intelligence that informs budget allocation and risk prioritization.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🔐 The vulnerability lifecycle has been entirely disrupted — AI enables discovery, exploitation, and mass deployment in hours, not months

🌍 Geopolitical events directly trigger cyber attacks within hours; understanding governance and geopolitics is now inseparable from cyber defense

⚖️ NIS2 regulation shifts personal liability to management, making cybersecurity non-negotiable for European mid-market companies

🇪🇺 European sovereignty in cyber is growing as a procurement factor, though product quality and pricing still dominate most buying decisions

📊 Threat intelligence is evolving from technical feeds for SOC teams to strategic, accessible insights for boards and risk management

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About Marco Riccardi [Founder & CEO of QuoIntelligence]:Founder and CEO of QuoIntelligence, a European threat intelligence company focused on delivering finished intelligence to clients. Before founding the company, he served in a psychological warfare unit in the army, an experience that continues to shape his approach to threat analysis. He has led QuoIntelligence from its first private equity backing through a Series A round, building a team positioned to become what he describes as the intelligence provider of Europe.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

Companies don't get sold—they get acquired. That distinction, according to James Codling, defines the difference between a forced exit and a strategic one. For UK tech companies navigating the so-called "valley of death" between Series A and Series B, understanding who might acquire you isn't just helpful—it's essential to survival.

Codling argues that the UK's venture ecosystem suffers from a structural flaw: it excels at starting companies and funding early stages, but undercapitalizes them at Series A, leaving founders stranded when growth demands more runway than their existing investors can provide. The rigid "Seed-A-B-C" funding model exacerbates the problem, forcing companies into arbitrary stage definitions rather than matching capital to actual needs. Volution's strategy targets this gap, investing in companies generating £5–20 million in revenue—past product-market fit, but before traditional Series B investors arrive. The thesis: back businesses that have identified their ideal customer and go-to-market strategy, then fuel execution. Six exits from Fund I—to buyers including Moody's, Sage, and nCino—validate the approach. Most were acquired by US partners already embedded in the company's infrastructure.

🔹 The ABCDEFG funding model is "completely flawed" outside the US and creates artificial capital gaps

🔹 Blockchain infrastructure and tokenized assets are driving the next wave of productivity in financial markets—Ownera's repo-market product exemplifies instant settlement at scale

🔹 Government money funds 2/3 of UK early-stage VC, yet there's no coherent strategy to move companies from seed to scale

🔹 AI implementation requires clean data and robust systems—"garbage in, garbage billions of times worse out"

🔹 SBI's co-GP model opens APAC markets for portfolio companies; 90% of Volution's portfolio now operates in Asia

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About James Codling [Managing Partner at Volution VC]:Managing Partner at Volution VC, a mid-stage investor in financial-infrastructure software, where he leads investments in companies between Series A and B that have real revenue and track records. He began his career as an engineer before moving into banking during the dot-com bubble, financing 3G rollouts, and later spent years in private equity before transitioning to venture. Volution operates as a co-general-partner arrangement with SBI, one of Japan's largest financial groups, and he has built a decade-long track record backing UK fintech scale-ups.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

Electric trucks are fundamentally superior to diesel—simpler design, zero emissions, lower maintenance, cheaper fuel—yet Europe's transition lags while China hit 50% electric truck sales by the end of 2024. The bottleneck isn't the vehicles; it's the power infrastructure needed to charge commercial fleets at scale.

Casper Norden, co-founder of DECADE Energy, explains how his company solves the chicken-and-egg problem holding back fleet electrification. DECADE designs, deploys, and operates power infrastructure in logistics depots—the home base where trucks load, unload, and idle overnight. By upgrading grid connections now and coupling them with battery storage that generates revenue through grid services, DECADE enables depot owners to prepare for full electrification without waiting for perfect visibility on fleet adoption timelines. The model unlocks private infrastructure capital to finance the energy transition while making depots competitive in a market where access to power is becoming a scarce, strategic asset.

**Key discussion points:**

⚡ Why depot charging beats highway charging—80% of fleet electricity consumption will happen where trucks are parked overnight, not on the road

🔋 How battery storage bridges the gap—overcapacity on upgraded grid connections creates revenue through balancing services and arbitrage before trucks arrive

🇨🇳 What Europe can learn from China—once electric trucks hit cost parity with diesel on total cost of ownership, adoption accelerates from 15% to 50% in a single year

🏭 The infrastructure financing challenge—Europe's reluctance to back physical manufacturing has left the continent vulnerable as Chinese OEMs prepare European production facilities

🔌 Why grid access is the new competitive moat—securing power connections today creates a multi-year advantage in logistics areas where substations won't expand for years

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Recurring revenue may look stable on paper, but traditional banks either don't understand it or take ten months to lend against it. Float's Jannis Koehn explains why that gap exists—and how revenue-based financing is filling it for European tech companies that are too early for banks but don't want to dilute equity.

The conversation unpacks the mechanics of revenue-based lending: term loans sized as a percentage of ARR, underwritten on metrics like net retention and churn, and structured as flexible credit facilities rather than lump-sum drawdowns. Koehn contrasts this with venture debt (later-stage, warrant-heavy, slower) and traditional bank loans (cheap but restrictive, often blocked by Basel III capital requirements for loss-making businesses). He also reveals how Float tokenized its mezzanine tranche on-chain to solve a growth constraint when equity markets dried up in 2023.

Key discussion points:

🏦 Why banks can't finance recurring-revenue businesses: regulatory capital requirements make loss-making companies prohibitively expensive to underwrite, even when cash flows are predictable

📊 Revenue quality trumps revenue size: Float assesses net dollar retention, customer concentration, churn, and CAC payback to size credit lines at 30–40% of ARR

⚖️ The equity vs. debt trade-off: equity makes sense for winner-takes-all markets with huge TAMs; debt suits capital-efficient businesses where founders want to retain control and avoid liquidation preferences

🔗 Tokenized private debt as a capital solution: Float issued blockchain-based mezzanine notes through a Swiss bank to reduce its equity requirement from 18% to 5% per loan

🚫 When Float says no: businesses burning more than 50% of MRR per month are "still an equity case," regardless of product quality

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About Jannis Koehn [co-Founder of FLOAT]:Co-founder of FLOAT, a company that provides revenue-based financing to European software businesses as an alternative to traditional bank loans and equity raises. Before founding FLOAT, he ran a different kind of company, an experience that gave him firsthand insight into how banks fund growing software companies. He built FLOAT with a co-founder and has since scaled the business to fund companies across Europe, competing with players like Capchase and re:cap in a market where non-dilutive capital has grown from a niche idea into a category worth billions.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

Most corporate swag ends up in the bin or as pajamas — over 80% of branded gifts are thrown away or given away within months. Conor McKenna and his co-founder built Go Swag to fix that staggering waste by flipping the merchandising model on its head: premium quality, global logistics, and a tech layer that turns brand chaos into seamless gifting at scale.

The conversation traces Go Swag's journey from a 180-pound bootstrap in a Glasgow co-working cupboard to powering swag for Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and ElevenLabs. McKenna explains how fragmented suppliers, procurement bottlenecks, and terrible recipient experiences created a trillion-dollar sleeping giant that tech founders ignored because it felt unglamorous. Go Swag's answer: white-glove service powered by software, warehouses in three regions, and a design team that refuses stress balls. The company recently raised $5 million, doubled headcount projections, and launched an AI tool called Sonny to recommend the right product for the right moment — no catalogue overwhelm, no two-foot logos turning employees into billboards.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🎯 Premium doesn't scale — unless software does the heavy lifting across customs, taxes, branding, and global fulfilment

🧠 Early traction meant big companies bending procurement rules to pay a tiny startup because the industry couldn't match the service

🤖 AI is refining thousands of SKUs and branding methods into tight recommendations in seconds, not years of experience

🌍 Being Scottish-founded in a small economy forced immediate global expansion — a defensive advantage through volatility

📦 The "stress ball rule": Go Swag turns away requests for cheap plastic tat and pushes clients toward fewer, better, useful items

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About Conor McKenna [CEO and co-founder of GoSwag]:

Co-founder and CEO of GoSwag, a corporate gifting platform built from Glasgow that uses AI to manage sizing, product selection, and fulfilment for enterprise clients. Before starting GoSwag, he spent about a decade building software with his co-founder before walking into the corporate gifting industry as an outsider. He bootstrapped the company for years, growing it to a 30-person team, before raising outside funding and launching a major expansion into the US market.

About Aulium:

Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:

➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium

➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

AI agents are already managing ad budgets, optimizing campaigns in real time, and making split-second decisions worth thousands of dollars. The question isn't whether AI will transform digital marketing—it's whether humans will remain in the loop at all.

Vlad Zhovtenko unpacks the shift from operator-driven advertising to algorithmic and agentic media buying, where platforms like Meta and Google now handle targeting, creative selection, and budget pacing autonomously. As third-party cookies disappear and first-party data becomes the new currency, most marketers are left flying blind—relying on reports from ad platforms rather than owning the raw data behind their conversions. RedTrack solves this by giving media buyers a unified data layer, attribution on their own rules, and API access that powers both human decisions and AI co-pilots. Zhovtenko also explores the tension between automation and judgment: while AI excels at repetitive processing work, high-stakes decisions—like spiking a $50k daily budget during a brief window of inventory—still require human intuition and real-time oversight.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🎯 First-party data infrastructure is the new moat—platforms reward advertisers who feed better conversion signals back into their algorithms

🤖 Agentic media buying is already live, but humans must set guardrails; one wrong prompt can waste an entire budget

📊 Attribution clarity replaces guesswork—reconciling Meta, Google, and Shopify data on your own terms, not theirs

🧠 AI shifts work from processing to pure cognition, increasing mental load even as it removes manual tasks

🚫 Gen Z exhibits "AI blindness"—studies suggest younger users filter out AI-generated ads the way earlier generations ignored banners

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About Vlad Zhovtenko [CEO of RedTrack]:Co-founder and CEO of RedTrack, a tracking and attribution platform for small media buyers and DTC brands, with over 25 years of experience in digital marketing dating back to the era of banner ads and dial-up modems. Before founding RedTrack, he left a stable position at a large international firm around the year 2000 to join an internet startup, and later started multiple companies while holding full-time employment. He now leads a remote team of more than 40 people across around ten countries.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

What if the best returns in venture capital come not from picking winners, but from building a portfolio large enough to ensure at least some succeed? Gisle Østereng from StartupLab Ventures argues that even the most skilled and ambitious founders will fail — so success depends on volume, not prediction.

Norway's ecosystem faces structural challenges: a small home market of five million people, limited venture capital, tax policies that discourage founders, and a historically weak commercialisation culture. Yet StartupLab has achieved top-quartile fund performance by attracting ambitious technical talent and coaching them to think globally from day one. The conversation explores how Norwegian founders navigate these constraints, why most need to leave the country to scale, and what separates ventures destined for venture-backed growth from those better suited to bootstrapping or corporate acquisition. Østereng shares hard-won lessons from his own operator days — including why hiring from your university cohort is a mistake, and how asking customers who they'd want to buy from can unlock sales faster than any pitch deck.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🎯 Pre-seed death rates around 30% may signal insufficient risk-taking — power law returns come from the few that succeed big

🌍 Norwegian founders must go global immediately; Sweden offers 2x the home market, but Germany or the US often make more sense

🧠 The biggest mindset shift: hiring domain experts who know the customer beats assembling teams of brilliant generalists

💰 Secondary liquidity is critical for early funds with 10-12 year lifespans when follow-on investors have longer horizons

⚠️ Celebrate exits cautiously — preference stack structures mean sometimes only the last-round investors profit

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About Gisle Østereng [Head of Investments StartupLab Ventures]:Head of Investments at StartupLab Ventures, Norway's most active early-stage investor, where he writes some of the first cheques Norwegian companies ever take. Before investing, he spent fourteen years as a founder across three startups—two of which sold—giving him a commercial rather than technical background and firsthand experience of what founders face when raising capital. He studied at NTNU during a period when Norway produced strong technology but few lasting companies, an experience that continues to shape his approach to backing founders today.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

Climate tech is no longer a buzzword—and that may be the best thing that's happened to the sector. As geopolitical priorities shift and AI dominates venture headlines, climate founders are being forced to sell on fundamentals, not vibes.

Romain Diaz breaks down what this vibe shift means for early-stage climate investing across Europe and Africa. He explains why Satgana's 30-company portfolio still responds to real problems—even when the messaging pivots from decarbonization to energy sovereignty, fuel efficiency, or cost reduction. The conversation covers how climate solutions are being repositioned without losing impact, why blended finance is unlocking African innovation, and how AI creates both tailwinds and tension for the sector. Diaz also discusses deal sourcing, founder evaluation, and what it takes to generate top-decile returns while investing in companies that rebuild planetary systems.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🌍 African venture capital remains fragmented—expansion across the continent is not automatic; startups often scale to Brazil, India, or Europe instead of neighboring countries

⚡ Climate hardware companies like Estuaire are pivoting messaging from sustainability to fuel efficiency, solving the same problem but aligning with immediate economic pressures

🔋 The AI boom is driving massive energy demand, but the net climate benefit remains unclear—the focus should be on ensuring AI catalyzes real-economy upgrades, not just server farms

👥 Gender-balanced teams outperform male-only founding teams; Satgana writes balance clauses into term sheets when leading rounds to signal commitment, not just virtue

💰 Early-stage climate investors compete with generalists by offering sector expertise, hands-on support, and alignment with founders who want meaningful exits—not just unicorn-or-bust outcomes

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About Romain Diaz [Founder of Satgana]:Founder of Satgana, an early-stage climate fund investing across Europe and Africa. He spent a decade building companies in emerging markets, particularly in Africa, before shifting his focus entirely to climate investing. At Satgana, he backs pre-seed and seed-stage startups, writing some of the earliest cheques founders receive, and incorporates gender-balance clauses into term sheets to push for mixed founding teams.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/

True sovereignty in AI isn't about where your servers sit—it's about building something so good that customers have no choice but to come to you. That's the thesis driving Reson8, a European speech AI company betting that context, not just accuracy, is the missing piece in voice technology.

The conversation explores why moving from a healthcare product to a horizontal infrastructure platform required a complete restart, not just a pivot. Building contextual speech models for low-resource European languages means scraping aggressively for commercially licensed data and getting creative with architectures still up in the air. Unlike large language models, where parameter count dominates, speech AI remains in its grassroots phase—companies disagree fundamentally on how to architect models, leaving room for novel approaches. The discussion also tackles the economics of owning hardware versus renting cloud capacity, the surprising inefficiency of most AI token usage, and why Europe's real bottleneck isn't data center capacity but ambition.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🎯 Sovereignty is a weak proposition unless the product is genuinely best-in-class—location alone doesn't win deals

🔧 Owning hardware transforms economics: fixed CapEx and energy costs replace linear scaling with usage, enabling 90%+ gross margins at saturation

🗣️ For every 100 hours of English training data, there's roughly 1 hour of Dutch—making European language models a resourcefulness challenge

🚀 AI-native teams compress months of work into days using tools like Claude and Codex, fundamentally changing what small teams can execute

⚡ Most LLM usage is wasteful—companies use frontier models to uppercase text when simple logic would suffice

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About Thomas Kluiters [co-founder of Reson8]:Co-founder of Reson8, a European speech AI company building real-time transcription models that run on its own infrastructure in European datacenters. Previously co-founded a medical scribe company that was deployed across a large share of Dutch GP practices and recently joined forces with Tandem Health, and spent years working in high-frequency trading before moving into speech technology.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/