Ontora — a startup from Germany which just won YC backing — is building an AI agent designed to interview every employee in a company, surface hidden knowledge, and turn that into process maps, operational insight and context that AI tools can use. Pathfounder’s Mike Butcher spoke to the founders about the tool and their YC / Bay Area experience during today’s AI boom.

Venture capital talks like it is borderless, but the reality is often far messier, especially when the flow is between Europe and the US. In this episode of the Pathfounders Podcast, Editor Mike Butcher speaks to Patrick Ryan, cofounder of Odin, about the firm’s launch of its Delaware vehicle for global investors, and how it plans to take the fight back to AngelList, Carta and Sydecar.

After 16 years, the Hungarian people have ended Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian domination of society and the economy. What will this mean for its tech startup ecosystem? Pathfounders spoke to Ferenc Huszár, Founder of Reasonable (and Professor of Machine Learning, University of Cambridge), and Csongor Biás, Managing Director of Startup Hungary, to get the lowdown.

Europe isn’t short of capital, but what it lacks is coordination. That was the conclusion of Mario Draghi’s report for the EU, which highlighted an €800 billion annual innovation gap, or eight times less invested into technology than the US. So that opportunity for coordination is the motivation behind the new Renaissance Summit: a deliberately small, invitation-only gathering bringing together Europe’s top family offices, venture investors, founders and policymakers, not just to talk about Europe’s future, but to try and coordinate it. Ludolf von Schöning spoke to Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher about how this will be a long-term initiative, not just a one-off event.Europe isn’t short of capital, but what it lacks is coordination. That was the conclusion of Mario Draghi’s report for the EU, which highlighted an €800 billion annual innovation gap, or eight times less invested into technology than the US. So that opportunity for coordination is the motivation behind the new Renaissance Summit: a deliberately small, invitation-only gathering bringing together Europe’s top family offices, venture investors, founders and policymakers, not just to talk about Europe’s future, but to try and coordinate it. Ludolf von Schöning spoke to Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher about how this will be a long-term initiative, not just a one-off event.

W is a soon-to-launch European social media platform built around a simple but radical premise: no foreign ownership, and full alignment with what they describe as European values on privacy, identity, and data control.

It’s led by Anna Zeiter, formerly Chief Privacy Officer and VP for Data & AI at eBay — and it arrives at a moment when trust in platforms like X is fracturing. Mike Butcher, Pathfounders Editor, dug into what her plans are for the platform.

We were told AI would make work faster and more productive. But a recent survey of 1,000 executives found corporates employees having to spend too much time checking AI outputs, leading to anxiety, and “AI burnout”. Pathfounders spokes to William Tunstall-Pedoe, founder and CEO of UnlikelyAI, which commissioned the survey, to unpack what might be going on, and where we go next.

So-called ‘corporate reputation’ can account for as much as 30% of its market value in large public companies but the systems used to monitor and protect that are hugely fragmented. Omniscient, is a Paris-based startup that has built an AI-driven platform to asses that value, something the the big consultancies normally charge millions for. Co-founder and CEO Arnaud d'Estienne spoke to Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher.

With both the rise of AI and, of course, a potential oil crisis looming as a result of the war in the Middle East, energy is now the defining battleground of this half of the decade. Could power from space be the answer? TerraSpark has just raised over €5 million in pre-seed funding. Pathfounders' Mike Butcher spoke to co-founder and CEO Jasper Deprez about both the sheer logistics, but also the potential for the new form of energy.

Granola started out as a note-taking app for meetings, but like all great startup Trojan Horses, it’s becoming a full-blown enterprise platform. After raising a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation this week, Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher caught up with co-founder Sam Stephenson to find out what its next moves are.

For the last few years, AI has often been about one model to understand language, another to generate images, another to handle video. To tackle this, Luma AI has just launched Uni-1: what it calls a “unified intelligence model.” The idea, says the company is to be not just another image generator, and in fact, might be posed to power Hollywood. Speaking to Pathfounders' Mike Butcher, Jason Day, head of EMEA for Luma AI, unpacked the where he thinks AI for creatives is heading next.