Well alright, alright, alright. This week Robin's quite literally underwater, taking a well-deserved few days off and, in his own words, "sipping cocktails poolside", so we've managed to rope in Molten Ventures' Marketing Director James Clark to get a VC fund marketers opinion on four stories that caught our eye this week.

🐄 First up, Hoxton Farms raised $22 million in its efforts to pack in the fat and up the taste of meat alternatives. Dan concludes that ultimately everything tastes like chicken, and James adds that it now also tastes like pork belly too.

✈️ While Quantum Systems raised $17.5 million, in part via Peter Thiel directly himself, J&D dissect not only what the company does, but where the heck the name came from and if a massive pivot and Schrödinger weren't involved.

🚀 As it turns out, James is a massive space nerd, and Dan can recall the nominal average value of standard gravity at Earth's surface (9.8 m/s2). The duo somehow manage to weave this into a discussion about Orbex's landing £40.4 million in a Series C funding round as it gears up for the first vertical launch from Scottish soil.

🏖️ And one more thing - after being hard hit by the pandemic, travel tech funding seems to be on the mend as Munich's Holidu housed north of €100 million in a Series E round led by 83North.

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!