Can a business survive if its economics depend on anticipated regulation? Mahir Sahin, General Partner of Cloudberry Ventures, argues it cannot — a lesson that shapes every deep-tech investment decision his firm makes, from quantum computing to hydrogen generation.

The conversation unpacks how early-stage investors navigate highly technical markets where product-market fit is measured not in downloads but in customer validation calls with industrial buyers who may take two years to pay. Sahin explains why his fund focuses on infrastructure-layer companies that can retrofit into existing production lines, why 80% of deep-tech exits happen through acquisition rather than IPO, and how decentralized on-site hydrogen generation sidesteps the transportation challenges that have plagued the hydrogen hype cycle. The discussion also reveals a counterintuitive portfolio construction strategy: three verticals — AI compute, industrial infrastructure, and financial infrastructure — deliberately chosen not because they correlate, but because they don't, allowing the fund to lean into whichever sector offers the best value when others overheat.

**Key discussion points:**

🔬 Why error-corrected qubits matter more than raw qubit count in quantum computing's path to commercialization

🏭 The hidden $4 trillion sitting idle in pre-funded cross-border bank accounts — and how stablecoin rails unlock it

🤖 How 4D photonic radar gives autonomous vehicles 360-degree vision through rain and fog, up to 500 meters

⚡ Why high-purity hydrogen's first killer app isn't cars but lab-grown diamonds

🌍 The arbitrage opportunity in European deep-tech valuations versus US equivalents doing identical work

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/WfmTuzLjgbU

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About Mahir Sahin [General Partner of Cloudberry Ventures]:General Partner of Cloudberry Ventures, a European deep-tech fund investing across industrial, financial, and compute infrastructure. He spent sixteen years at Google, including time at Google X where he advised Taara, Alphabet's laser-internet moonshot. A German-born economist from Bonn, he founded Cloudberry in 2025 and has since built a portfolio of roughly a dozen companies across quantum computing, hydrogen, stablecoin infrastructure, and physical AI.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/

Not every good business is a good investment — and for venture capital, the gap between the two can cost billions. Alexey Bulygin of Verb Ventures explains why intellectual honesty from founders matters more than polished pitch decks, and why his fund focuses on the unsexy, archaic backbone of global trade: a $33 trillion market still running on fax machines, Excel spreadsheets, and paper documents transported in buckets.

Verb Ventures invests in digital platforms that help businesses source, transact, move, and settle B2B trade deals. The thesis is simple: roughly five trillion dollars in annual leakage exists due to inefficiencies and fraud in global trade infrastructure. Disruption in this space is hard, boring, and capital-intensive — which is exactly why generalist VCs avoid it and why Verb sees opportunity. The conversation unpacks how tariffs and supply chain shocks create natural market pull for platforms, why Verb has maintained a 0% write-off rate to date while targeting concentrated 10–15x returns rather than chasing power-law home runs, and how the firm thinks about exits in a world where IPOs are statistically improbable.

🚢 Ofiniti is digitalizing maritime fuel trading — an industry where a bucket pushed on a rope between barge and ship remains standard practice

🔥 Installio tackles the UK's heat pump installation bottleneck, where the government mandates 600,000 installs per year but the market delivers 100,000

📉 Verb assumes roughly 30% write-offs in its portfolio model but has lost zero companies since its first 2020 deal

🎯 Saying "no" is 70–90% of the job, and founder honesty about problems beats sugarcoated hockey sticks

💼 M&A-driven exit environments in B2B infrastructure offer liquidity paths venture generalists overlook

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About Alexey Bulygin [Founding member at Verb Ventures]:Founding member at Verb Ventures, a London-based fund investing in supply chains and trade infrastructure with just over €30 million under management across two funds. The fund backs companies digitising sectors that have long relied on personal networks and paper-based processes, including maritime fuel delivery, cross-border notarisation, and heat pump installation. Prior to Verb Ventures, he studied economics in Moscow before moving into venture capital.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/

Can AI truly replace the weeks lawyers spend grinding through due diligence documents — or will it just reshape how legal value is delivered? As M&A dealmaking grows more complex, the manual work of reviewing thousands of contracts remains a massive bottleneck, and the answer may lie in workflow integration rather than raw automation.

Jorrit Willaert explains how Jurimesh tackles legal due diligence by embedding AI not as a standalone assistant, but as part of the entire DD workflow — from data room integration and gap analysis to automated issue spotting and Red Flag report generation. The company sells both to law firms seeking efficiency and private equity clients looking for preliminary DD at a fraction of traditional cost. Willaert discusses the technical challenge of building reliable AI in high-stakes contexts: moving legal reasoning into "rulebooks" authored by domain experts, rather than relying on LLMs prone to hallucination and silent assumptions. He also reflects on the broader market dynamics — why vertical solutions may outlast horizontal platforms in legal tech, how law firms are experimenting with AI-assisted pricing models, and why consolidation is likely as the space matures. The conversation touches on the practical realities of fundraising as a technical founder without legal background, the pivot from generic knowledge-base search to M&A-specific tooling, and the long-term vision of an end-to-end transaction operating system.

**Key Discussion Points:**

🔍 Jurimesh automates legal due diligence by integrating the full workflow — data room coupling, gap analysis, issue spotting, and report generation — rather than just offering a chatbot interface

⚖️ The system uses expert-authored "rulebooks" to handle legal reasoning, with LLMs only generating language, to avoid hallucination and non-determinism in high-stakes M&A contexts

💼 Both law firms and private equity clients are adopting the tool, with PE using it for preliminary DD and firms exploring AI-assisted pricing and vendor readiness offerings

🧩 Vertical solutions with deep workflow integration may prove more durable than broad horizontal platforms, especially where "good enough" AI creates liability risk

📈 The company raised €1.6M, grew from two to eleven people, and reached €500K ARR by obsessing over workflow fit and pitching vision over product

Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPWy-cJx21M

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About Jorrit Willaert [Co-founder of Jurimesh]:Co-founder of Jurimesh, a legal tech company that uses AI to automate contract analysis and due diligence for M&A transactions. He studied computer science and built side projects before founding the company, which has grown to serve clients across multiple European jurisdictions and raised funding from prominent Belgian tech operators.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/

Healthcare remains one of the least digitalized industries — still largely operating in the "dinosaur phase" with paper records and fragmented systems. Yet the sector is expected to grow at over 20% annually for the next decade, creating massive opportunities for investors who understand both the technical and regulatory complexity of healthcare innovation.

Christoph Kausch, Managing Partner of MTIP, explains how healthcare technology investing differs fundamentally from traditional software. Long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and heavy regulation mean that explosive growth requires proven business models and real market traction first. Once adoption happens, however, the stickiness is unmatched — MTIP recently exited two companies, one growing more than 100% annually above €100 million in revenue, the other growing 80% on a profitable basis. The conversation covers how MTIP evaluates AI-enabled healthcare companies, the importance of cybersecurity in clinical settings, and why identifying multiple exit routes before investing is non-negotiable. Kausch also details the Oviva case study: a digital diabetes management company where MTIP led the Series B, helped build a cost-efficient platform, and saw enterprise value increase more than 15x.

Key discussion points:

🏥 Why healthcare tech requires sector specialization — understanding fragmented European systems, reimbursement models, and regulatory pathways is essential

🔒 Cybersecurity as infrastructure — MTIP's investment in Cynerio, sold to Axonius, reflects how hospitals are increasingly vulnerable to data breaches

📊 The profitability-first approach — MTIP invests in companies with proven revenue, not just promising technology

🌍 The US expansion challenge — scaling across Europe is hard; entering the US typically requires acquisition rather than organic growth

🎯 Exit preparation as daily practice — identifying strategic acquirers and PE buyers upfront, never relying on IPO timing

Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU5JBvTlViA

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About Christoph Kausch [Managing Partner of MTIP]:Managing Partner of MTIP, a Basel-based healthcare investment fund that shifted from medical devices in Fund I to focus exclusively on healthcare software from Fund II onward. Previously worked as an engineer at BMW before transitioning into healthcare investing. Guest lecturer at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen, and recently joined as a panelist at LSI USA on the impact of GLP-1 drugs on medical devices.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/

Athletes writing cheques into European startups was once considered a red flag by VCs. Today, it's a legitimate asset class—but only if founders and investors understand what's actually on offer beyond the Instagram following.Arthur Bernard launched Athletico Venture to bridge Europe's top athletes with the tech ecosystem, following a model that had already matured in the US two decades earlier. The conversation unpacks why Europe lagged behind, how deal-by-deal syndicates evolved into a disciplined fund structure, and why Bernard spends as much time assessing the lead investor's rationale as he does the company itself. The discussion moves through practical mechanics: neither inbound deal flow nor athlete referrals have contributed a single investment across thirty-one completed deals, how a Formula 1 driver can unlock introductions to automotive CEOs in the paddock, and why a €100k–500k cheque at late seed or Series A creates asymmetric value when deployed correctly.**Key discussion points:**🏁 Why European athletes face structural barriers—academies isolate footballers early, VIP seating keeps worlds apart, and business elites remain siloed unlike their US counterparts🎯 The hidden value of competitive resilience and network access—not brand endorsement—and why textile recycling found traction through motorsport connections to automotive supply chains📊 Due diligence runs two directions: understanding why a lead partner personally backs a deal matters more than the firm's logo, especially when reserves are limited⚖️ Moving from syndicate to fund solved the Grand Slam problem—athletes racing or competing mid-close meant missed opportunities and overexposure to consumer betsWatch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNYF-R5kvWQSubscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.About Arthur Bernard [founder of Athletico Ventures]:Founder of Athletico Ventures, an athlete-backed investment platform focused on early-stage European startups. He began his career at French VC firm Alven, then moved to BetClic during a period of explosive growth before spending seven years at Lagardère Sports running corporate strategy and integrations for one of the top-three global sports agencies. He launched Athletico after identifying an opportunity to bring elite athletes into venture capital as strategic investors and partners to founders.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/

Early-stage venture capital is often romanticized as spotting the next unicorn, but the real edge lies in understanding when to hold and when to exit. Nicolas Debock, partner leading Eurazeo's early-stage fund, explains why the power law is not a bug but a feature of venture design — and why liquidity matters more than most founders realize.The conversation moves from the mechanics of building a €300-400 million pan-European seed and Series A fund to the hard truths about company failure. Debock walks through why running out of cash is the only reason companies die, and why market timing — not just product quality — determines survival. He also tackles the so-called "SaaS apocalypse," arguing that AI creates both existential risk and explosive demand, often for the same company. His investments in Gradium (Europe's largest AI seed round at $70 million) and GitGuardian (8x growth post-Series B) illustrate how technical depth and founder drive can outpace hype cycles. The discussion also touches on why being part of a multi-strategy platform now matters more than it did five years ago, especially as AI companies blur the line between software and services.Key discussion points:🎯 The power law is venture by design — less than 10% of investments drive 90% of returns, and accepting this is essential💰 Liquidity and DPI (distributed to paid-in) define fund success more than markups; exit timing can destroy or multiply value🤖 AI is expanding both software markets (voice, agents) and service markets (rollups with AI optimization)🔐 Cybersecurity demand is spiking because AI agents create "non-human identities" that leak secrets at scale🏗️ Multi-strategy platforms now offer a structural advantage: debt facilities, growth capital, and cross-stage expertise matter when seed rounds hit $70MWatch the full episode:    • Video  Subscribe to Aulium for more conversations on innovation and private capital.About Nicolas Debock [Partner - Eurazeo Ventures]:Partner at Eurazeo Ventures, where he invests in early-stage SaaS, marketplaces, and fintech companies across Europe. He spent five years at La Poste managing relationships with the startup ecosystem before transitioning into venture capital at XAnge, followed by roles at Balderton in London and now Eurazeo. His portfolio includes investments in GitGuardian, Gradium, Kota, and Alma, which he backed from its earliest financing rounds through to €114 million in ARR and profitability.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  

Why does Jean Schmitt feel physically ill every time someone mentions a unicorn? Because, as he puts it, no serious entrepreneur should want their company named after "a fake animal from fairy tales for girls." This isn't just rhetoric—it's a philosophy that shapes how Jolt Capital invests in European deep tech at the growth stage, targeting companies doing €10–20 million in revenue and transforming them into profitable, industrial-grade players.

The conversation unpacks Jolt's deceptively simple model: invest at €80 million post-money, grow revenue 5x to €100 million, and exit at €400 million for a 5x return. But execution is anything but simple. Schmitt describes the first 18 months as "intense re-engineering," where Jolt deploys three to four people nearly full-time per company to fix everything from customer support software (one company Jolt invested in claimed to use Jira but actually relied on Excel spreadsheets) to R&D roadmaps and M&A strategy. The firm takes controlling stakes not out of ego, but for speed—because when you're burning capital, you can't afford endless shareholder debates. Schmitt also challenges conventional wisdom on hardware versus software: hardware companies require less capital to reach IPO (€480 million vs. €1.2 billion for digital services) and deliver better exit multiples (16x vs. 11x). Yet Europe continues to bleed €200 billion annually in pension savings to the US, funding competitors while starving its own ecosystem.

🦏 Why "rhinos," not unicorns—and why Schmitt refuses to chase billion-dollar valuations

🏭 The square-cube law of scaling: how companies collapse without the right "scaffolding"

🤖 Jolt Ninja, the €10 million AI tool Schmitt gives away for free to build a deep tech community

🇪🇺 Why Europe has 11,000 high-quality deep tech companies (more than the US) but still loses the capital war

⚛️ The quantum computing hype check: why Schmitt questions qubit vendors but believes in quantum sensing

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/BVsMz71FJR0

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About Jean Schmitt [General Partner at Jolt Capital]:General Partner at Jolt Capital, a growth-stage deeptech investor that has backed European technology companies including advanced photonics firms Heptagon and NILT, which together exited for €2 billion. He began his career as a founder building AI companies in the 1990s, sold SLP InfoWare to Gemplus where he later ran a division, and served as Managing Partner at Sofinnova before founding Jolt. He also chairs the Baroque Orchestra La Chapelle Harmonique and holds a postgraduate degree in AI.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/

Deep tech ventures require years of patient capital, yet most of them reach Series B without any revenue at all. Matthias Winter explains why traditional metrics like monthly recurring revenue and churn rates simply don't apply when you're building quantum computers or photonic processors — and why that's exactly the point.

This conversation unpacks how Constructor Capital conducts due diligence when the technology is still in university labs and the market won't exist for another five years. Winter walks through the real bottlenecks: 90% of potential investments fail because the underlying research isn't distinctive enough, not because founders lack commercial drive. He describes why spending months validating scientific publications and consulting Nobel laureates matters more than projecting unit economics, and why companies like QuEra can raise $200 million before proving product-market fit in any conventional sense.

💡 Why revenue is often a distraction for deep tech founders in the early years — building the technology matters more than pilot contracts

🔬 How Constructor Capital validates breakthroughs: scientific reputation, publication history, and lab visits trump financial models

🌍 Why Europe's deep tech ecosystem has strong university spin-outs but still pushes founders to relocate to the US at scale

⚛️ What Google and NVIDIA's investments in quantum computing signal about which modalities might actually win

🎯 The surprising failure mode: brilliant scientists who can't handle operational complexity when the team grows past 30 people

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/PqFp4zdEC5o

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About Matthias Winter [General Partner of Constructor Capital]:General Partner at Constructor Capital, a science-first venture fund that closed its first fund at $110 million and invests across deep tech, AI-native software, and EdTech. He spent 26 years at McKinsey, where he advised over 100 organizations at board level across more than 20 countries and co-led McKinsey's Technology Council until 2023, focusing on the biggest telecom and tech companies in Europe before transitioning into venture capital.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/

If Europe wants resilience and sovereignty, it must stop treating green tech as a moral project and start treating it as the path to re-industrialization. Laurits Bach Soerensen argues that 92% of Europe's risk capital flows into software, fintech, and biotech—sectors designed to hit a profitability plateau—while the hard technologies needed to rebuild energy infrastructure, production systems, and supply chain independence remain starved of capital. The gap isn't ideological; it's structural. Traditional private equity can't handle the capex intensity and networking capital demands of industrial scaling, and venture capital lacks the operational discipline to navigate hyper-transformation.

The conversation unpacks why conventional investment models fail in green industrial contexts and what it takes to succeed: deep operational engagement, capital efficiency at early stages, and a systematic approach to managing the four forces of hyper-transformation—capex intensity, hypergrowth, value chain establishment, and regulatory dependencies. Soerensen explains why companies like Northvolt face exponential complexity when all four factors collide, and why pension funds crossing the chasm to play venture are making a category error. He also introduces the BCSA framework—better, cheaper, simpler, accessible—as the litmus test for whether a hard-tech company can survive the valley of death and achieve the conversion rates needed to scale capital-efficiently.

**Key points discussed:**

🔋 Why green tech must be framed as resilience strategy, not environmental stewardship, to unlock the capital Europe needs

⚙️ The hybrid transformation model required to scale capex-heavy industrial assets without running out of cash

🎯 How the BCSA framework determines whether a technology can convert 60–80% of prospects instead of 5%

🏭 Why Germany holds the deep industrial innovation Europe needs but receives only 10–15% of private equity flow

📉 What went wrong with Northvolt and why the J-curve was underestimated by orders of magnitude

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About Laurits Bach Soerensen [General Partner of Nordic Alpha Partners]:General Partner at Nordic Alpha Partners, a European growth-stage fund focused on industrial greentech. Before moving to the investment side, he spent 20 years as an operator, including growing a business from zero to $250 million in revenue across 27 countries at HP and taking Aastra Telecom Denmark from fourth to first in its market, overtaking Avaya, Cisco and Siemens. He led the raise of Nordic Alpha's €266 million Fund II in 2024 and has overseen 24 investments and 7 exits, including the sale of Spirii at 67 times annual recurring revenue.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/

Roland Dennert argues that European tech could grow one hundred-fold over the next twenty years—but only if the continent's pension funds and insurers shift from allocating roughly one percent of their assets to technology up to ten percent, matching their US counterparts. The capital exists; the problem is where it's directed.

Dennert explains how Cipio Partners operates in the growth equity segment between venture capital and traditional private equity, targeting companies with proven products, validated go-to-market strategies, and fifty to one hundred percent annual growth. At this stage, the firm no longer faces product or market risk—the focus shifts to execution risk and valuation. He discusses why cultural due diligence on founder teams matters more than technical audits, noting that when investments fail catastrophically, it's almost always a people issue, not a product problem. The conversation also covers Cipio's expansion into Central and Eastern Europe, where ambitious, well-trained founders face less competition for capital, and why the emergence of private equity buyers over the past decade has been a game-changer for European tech exits, creating competitive processes where previously only one or two strategic buyers might have been interested.

**Key discussion points:**

💰 Why European pension funds allocating ten percent to tech instead of one percent could unlock ten times more capital

🎯 The difference between venture risk (product/market uncertainty) and growth risk (execution/valuation)

🤝 Why people issues—not product failures—cause most catastrophic investment losses at growth stage

🇪🇺 How the absence of a deep, liquid European public market for large tech companies limits exit options

🚀 What makes Central and Eastern Europe an underestimated source of ambitious, well-trained technical talent

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About Roland Dennert [General Partner of Cipio Parters]:General Partner at Cipio Partners, a European growth equity firm investing at the intersection of venture capital and traditional private equity. He has led the firm for over twenty-one years, completing more than fifty trade sales and four IPOs across a portfolio spanning fifteen countries. Prior to Cipio, he worked at 3i, earned an MBA from MIT Sloan, and held roles in strategy consulting at Roland Berger and BCG following his start as a robotics engineer at Hitachi in Japan.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/