No one wants to pay indirect tax. It is added to the sale price, collected from customers, and then businesses must file returns monthly just to hand it over to tax authorities. For companies selling internationally, the complexity multiplies across jurisdictions, each with different rates, thresholds, and filing deadlines.Gareth Kobrin is Co-Founder and CEO of Yonda Tax, a compliance platform for businesses trading across borders. He spent 15 years in tax before starting Yonda, working at Merrill Lynch and VAT Global. He bootstrapped the company for three years before raising a €15m Series A from Kennet Partners in late 2024. In this clip, Gareth explains what Yonda does, why he chose tax as a career, and the decision to leave a senior role to build something from scratch. The conversation covers product strategy, growth mechanics, bootstrapping versus institutional capital, and how AI is reshaping the tax compliance stack.📊 What Yonda actually solves for eCommerce and SaaS companies🧠 Why tax-first beats tech-first when building compliance tools💰 How they grew from zero to 400 clients without outbound sales🤖 Where AI agents already automate filing and where humans still matter🚀 The case for delaying venture capital as long as possibleSubscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.About Gareth Kobrin [co-founder of Yondatax]:Gareth Kobrin is Co-Founder and CEO of Yonda Tax, a tax compliance platform for eCommerce and fintech companies. He spent his career at Merrill Lynch, VAT IT, and Vatglobal before leaving a senior director role to start Yonda, which he bootstrapped for over three years before raising institutional capital from Kennet Partners.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn:   / aulium  ➡ Thomas Viguier:   / tviguier  

AI valuations have reached levels that Thomas Bigagli from Plug and Play calls totally insane. But not for the reasons you might think. According to Bigagli, the race is justified — because we are literally building the companies that will shape the next decades.

Thomas Bigagli is a Partner at Plug and Play, one of the world's most active venture capital platforms, managing EMEA operations. He joined Plug and Play nearly a decade ago after launching his first ventures before age 18, and has since helped the firm invest in over 35 unicorns at pre-seed or seed stage. Plug and Play invests in more than 200 startups annually through a family office and 11 external funds, while running open innovation programs with over 550 Fortune 500 corporations.

🧠 Why current AI valuations reflect a talent war, not a bubble

⚡ How the AI mega-round playbook differs from traditional early-stage VC

🚀 Why Bigagli believes deep tech is now entering its best moment in decades

🔍 What investors betting on companies like OpenAI at $100B+ are actually thinking

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

About Thomas Bigagli [Partner at Plug and Play Ventures]:Thomas Bigagli is a Partner at Plug and Play, where he leads EMEA operations for one of the world's most active venture capital platforms. He joined the firm nearly a decade ago after starting his first entrepreneurial ventures before turning 18, and has since helped Plug and Play invest in over 35 unicorns at pre-seed or seed stage while supporting open innovation programs with more than 550 Fortune 500 corporations.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 startups vanish when they fail. But crypto tokens? They live forever at a fraction of a cent, visible to anyone, impossible to put into insolvency. Christopher May, Co-Founder and CEO of Finoa, explains why this fundamental difference makes crypto failure more visible than traditional startup death — and what that means for how investors should think about the space.

Christopher brings a rare perspective to institutional crypto. After four years at McKinsey advising banks and insurance companies, he left to solve a personal problem: managing 80+ tokens across 30 different wallets during the 2017 ICO boom. That chaos — including losing €8,000 to a forgotten private key — led him to co-found Finoa in 2019. Today, the company is building onchain banking infrastructure for institutions, pivoting from pure custody toward stablecoin payments and treasury services as blockchain evolves from an asset class into financial rails.

In this clip, he addresses a fundamental question about crypto valuation. Like startups, 95% of crypto projects fail within five to seven years. But unlike startups, failed tokens never disappear — they persist onchain, trading at fractions of a cent, as long as a single node runs. It's a visibility problem unique to tokenized ventures, and it shapes how the market perceives risk and survival in ways traditional finance never had to confront.

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

About Christopher May [CEO of Finoa]:Christopher May is Co-Founder and CEO of Finoa, a digital asset custody and financial services platform for institutions. He previously spent four years at McKinsey after completing a banking apprenticeship in Frankfurt, and co-founded Finoa in 2018 alongside Henrik Gebbing after experiencing the challenges of managing crypto assets firsthand.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 entrepreneurs obsess over building the perfect product — and ignore the numbers that actually keep their business alive. Sevan Marian, Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet, explains why focusing on margin and cash flow from day one is the difference between scaling to €100M and shutting down after three months.

Sevan built Fleet from €5,000 to a €100M valuation without raising VC, using an asset-light financial model inspired by Amazon's playbook: cash flow positive, zero inventory, and contracts sold to banks upfront. He shares how most first-time founders make the fatal mistake of chasing product-market fit while their financials quietly bleed out — and why understanding the difference between profitability and cash flow matters more than most realize.

💡 The fatal mistake first-time founders make with cash flow

📊 How Fleet scaled with €5K — no VC, no inventory, no debt on the balance sheet

🔄 Why being cash flow positive beats being EBITDA profitable

⚙️ The Amazon-inspired model: collect early, pay late, stay asset-light

🚀 What changed after the €100M LBO with ISAI — and what didn't

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

About Sevan Marian [Co-founder of Fleet]:Sevan Marian is Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet, a €100M-valued IT management platform serving companies across Europe and the US. He previously worked at Rocket Internet's Jumia, where he launched and scaled e-commerce operations across North Africa. Sevan bootstrapped Fleet to €35M ARR with fewer than 40 employees before completing a growth LBO with ISAI in 2024.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier and Markus Perkumas.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/➡ Markus Perkumas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markusperkumas/

Being smart and hardworking isn't enough to build a successful startup. Timing, co-founders, networking, and sheer luck all play a role—and most entrepreneurs don't realize that until they've lost everything.

Bogdan Ochiana is the Founder and CEO of Orbotix, a Poland-based defense technology company building autonomous drone swarms designed to operate in GPS-denied, radio-jammed environments. A serial entrepreneur from Romania, Bogdan studied at ETH Zurich, worked across five European countries as a management consultant, built and exited a €20M IT services company, and personally invested €3M to launch Orbotix in response to the war in Ukraine. The company raised €6.5M led by US national security VC BVVC, operates R&D in Romania and Spain, and is now fielding battle-tested systems for NATO allies and critical infrastructure clients across Europe.

💡 He explains why his first Paris-based startup failed despite having experience, funding, and multilingual skills

📉 Why timing, co-founders, and the right idea matter more than effort alone

🎯 How losing everything at 32 became the MBA that shaped his next moves

🔄 Why networking, luck, and market conditions can't be replaced by grit

🚀 What he learned from failure that success could never teach

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

About Bogdan Ochiana [Founder and CEO of Orbotix]:Bogdan Ochiana is the Founder and CEO of Orbotix, a defense technology company building autonomous drone swarm systems for European militaries. Born and raised in Romania near the Ukrainian border, Bogdan studied at ETH Zurich, worked as a management consultant across Europe, and built a successful €20M IT services company before founding Orbotix in response to the war in Ukraine. Today, Orbotix operates across Poland, Romania, Spain, Ukraine, and Estonia with 43 employees and two production facilities.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier and Markus Perkumas.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/➡ Markus Perkumas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markusperkumas/

Contact centers are broken — not because humans don't want to help, but because they lack the capacity. PolyAI CTO Shawn Wen explains why AI automation isn't about replacement, but about augmentation: picking up calls instantly, handling routine tasks, and escalating only the critical moments to human agents.

Shawn Wen is the Co-Founder and CTO of PolyAI, a voice AI platform valued at over $750M and backed by Nvidia, Khosla Ventures, and Point72. He holds a PhD from Cambridge, where he studied conversational AI under renowned speech recognition expert Steve Young. PolyAI now handles nearly one million conversations per day for enterprise clients including Marriott, FedEx, and major healthcare providers.

In this clip, Shawn breaks down the systemic issues plaguing customer service — from rising labor costs to negative customer lifetime value — and why AI is the only scalable solution. He argues that we're at the very beginning of a journey where automation restores the capacity contact centers should have had all along, not eliminating human service, but redefining it as a premium offering for complex, high-stakes interactions.

🔹 Why contact centers are financially unsustainable without automation

🔹 How AI restores capacity rather than replacing empathy

🔹 The future of human service as a premium, not a default

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

About Shawn Wen [Co-Founder and CTO of PolyAI]:Shawn Wen is the co-founder and CTO of PolyAI, an enterprise voice AI company valued at over $750 million with backing from Nvidia, Khosla Ventures, and other leading investors. He earned his PhD from the Cambridge Dialogue Systems Group, where he specialized in conversational AI and speech recognition. Under his technical leadership, PolyAI now handles nearly one million customer conversations daily for over 100 enterprise clients including Marriott, FedEx, and major healthcare and financial institutions.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier and Markus Perkumas.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/➡ Markus Perkumas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markusperkumas/

Buyers are now willing to hand over their most private CRM data to start a free trial—without ever talking to sales. That shift reveals just how much control modern B2B buyers expect over their own journey, and companies that resist this trend risk losing deals.Nick Turner is the CEO of Dreamdata, a B2B marketing attribution platform that raised a $55M Series B in 2024. Based in the U.S., Turner leads a Danish-founded company with 65 employees across 28 nationalities. Before joining Dreamdata, he spent 15 years in go-to-market roles and previously led U.S. expansion for European SaaS companies including Botify. In this clip, he explains why trust frameworks, open APIs, and interactive demos have made self-service adoption faster than ever—even for complex, data-sensitive products.🔍 Why 10,000+ employee companies now start free trials on their own🔐 How GDPR, SOC 2, and data ownership frameworks enable buyer confidence🚀 The role of open APIs in accelerating product-led growth⚡ Why fighting buyer preferences is a losing strategy🛠️ What this shift means for sales-led vs. self-service motionsSubscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.About Nick Turner [CEO of Dreamdata]:Nick Turner is the CEO of Dreamdata, a B2B marketing attribution and activation platform serving mid-market and enterprise software companies. He transitioned from Chief Revenue Officer to CEO in early 2024 and led the company's $55 million Series B fundraise. Prior to Dreamdata, Turner spent 15 years in go-to-market roles and twice led U.S. expansion efforts for European SaaS companies, including Botify.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier and Markus Perkumas.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/➡ Markus Perkumas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markusperkumas/

AI doesn't fix broken engineering practices—it accelerates the damage. When you strap AI onto a disorganized product organization, everything gets much worse, much faster.

Daniel Jung is the CEO of TechMiners, a tech due diligence firm that has analyzed hundreds of software companies across Europe. With a background that spans Lehman Brothers during the 2008 crisis, mountain infantry service, and multiple tech startups, he now leads one of the most data-driven technical assessment firms in the market. TechMiners combines proprietary tooling with experienced CTOs to deliver deep, objective tech due diligence in just 10 business days—analyzing everything from source code to licensing to AI implementation.

In this clip, Daniel reveals a counterintuitive truth about AI adoption: mature businesses with disciplined processes before AI are far more likely to succeed than AI-native startups. The firms that lack foundational software development practices accumulate higher tech debt, face security vulnerabilities faster, and struggle with maintainability when AI enters the mix.

🔍 Why AI native companies often have more tech debt than legacy businesses

⚠️ How poor development practices get amplified, not solved, by AI

🛠️ What separates companies that scale AI successfully from those that collapse under it

📊 The hidden cost of introducing AI without disciplined engineering foundations

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

About Daniel Jung [CEO of Techminers]:Daniel Jung is the CEO of TechMiners, a specialized technical due diligence firm serving investors across Europe. Before leading TechMiners, he worked at Lehman Brothers during the 2008 financial crisis, served as an officer in the Mountain Infantry, and founded ventures in medtech, logistics tech, and proptech. He brings a business-focused perspective to tech assessment, having held C-level roles in multiple startups.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier and Markus Perkumas.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aulium➡ Thomas Viguier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tviguier/➡ Markus Perkumas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markusperkumas/

What separates a promising pitch from a founder worth backing? Bruno Febvret, who runs Aonia Ventures and the Rise family office for Mantu's founder, doesn't look at decks—he looks at the person behind the idea. In this clip, he explains the one question that tells him everything he needs to know about an entrepreneur's conviction.

Bruno oversees venture and private equity investments at Rise, the family office of Olivier Brourhant, founder of Mantu, a €1 billion consulting group. He's backed over 70 startups across Europe and the U.S., including names like SpaceX and Alan, with ticket sizes between €100k–€250k at seed and Series A. His approach is unconventional: he invests like a super business angel, not a fund, spending just 1–2 hours with founders before committing.

In this conversation, Bruno reveals why he prefers to ask "Who are you?" instead of "What's your pitch?", how he assesses founder dynamics without a rehearsed presentation, and why the best investment decisions come from understanding the "madness" that drives someone to leave stability and build a company.

🔹 Why Bruno invests in people, not pitches

🔹 The one question that reveals a founder's true conviction

🔹 How to spot co-founder tension before it destroys a startup

🔹 What most VCs miss by focusing on decks instead of backgrounds

🔹 The philosophy behind treating venture like recruiting, not gambling

Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.

Is the obsession with entrepreneurship putting unhealthy pressure on young people? Stephan Moraes, General Partner at Indico Capital Partners, challenges the narrative that everyone needs to be a CEO at 25—and explains why learning with other people's money is often the smarter path.Stephan is co-founder of Indico Capital Partners, a Southern Europe–focused VC firm managing €240M+ across six funds. He has backed eight unicorns, including Farfetch, Talkdesk, and Anchorage Digital, and co-invests with top-tier global funds. A Harvard MBA and former dot-com founder, he brings decades of operational and investment experience across B2B SaaS, marketplaces, and deep tech.In this clip, Stephan discusses:🎯 Why the pressure to become an entrepreneur at 21 is misplaced—and sometimes harmful💼 The value of learning on someone else's dime before solving real problems🧠 How resilience and curiosity matter more than school grades in the age of AI🚀 Why today is both the best and easiest time to be a founder—with caveatsSubscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.About Stephan de Moraes [General Partner at Indico Capital Partners]:Stephan de Moraes is General Partner and co-founder of Indico Capital Partners, a Lisbon-based venture capital firm focused on Southern Europe. Since founding Indico in 2017 with Cristina Fonseca (founder of Talkdesk) and Ricardo Marvão, he has backed eight unicorns and managed €240M+ across six funds. A Harvard MBA and former dot-com entrepreneur, Stephan previously served on the board of Caixa Capital, where he invested in many of Portugal's most successful tech companies between 2013 and 2017.About Aulium:Aulium is a video show exploring Innovation and Private Capital, hosted by Thomas Viguier and Markus Perkumas.Connect with us:➡ Aulium on LinkedIn:   / aulium  ➡ Thomas Viguier:   / tviguier  ➡ Markus Perkumas:   / markusperkumas