Upside: European Tech & VC Weekly

Upside is a weekly show that connects the dots behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. 

The Big Boring Budget, Anthropic Goes Public & Are VCs Dangerous? Mads is back from Milan. Dan last went 30 years ago and mostly saw the industrial estate.

01:20 The Budget
Expectations were set so low that "not terrible" got a standing ovation. Founders' Relief brings back 10% CGT on up to £10m, for roughly 400 companies a year, and it's paid for by halving BADR. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. The British Business Bank gets £5bn. Small beans next to the US. Mads says we're spending like drunken sailors. Dan borrows a tax policy from Jimmy Carr. Please don't punch him on the nose.

15:20 Anthropic Files to List
The IPO we've banged on about all year is finally happening. It comes with an operating profit, a $66bn paper loss, and 900% net revenue retention. Enjoy that while it lasts. Mads backs into a $2tn valuation on an envelope. Verdict: not completely crazy.

23:00 Are Cloud Margins Holding?
Revenue up, share prices down. Markets gonna market. Plus rumours that Google is tweaking its ad auctions to squeeze the lemon, and Oracle's dream gets better while its credit rating doesn't.

29:40 Living in a Trustless World
Alibaba's Qwen tries to phone home to Beijing, once in 100,000 runs. Businesses run 10m a week. Do the maths. Portfolio company Hirundo finds Qwen writes leakier code when the client is a Western government. Charming. Anduril builds an all-American laptop, Mads reminds us Europe made PCs once (expensive, rubbish), and Mistral drops Large 4. Would Germany use a French model? Mads: we're family, stop being fussy.

39:45 Are VCs Dangerous?
Nik Storonsky says investors without operating experience are. He's since launched his own VC fund. Surprise, surprise. Mads on the power law paper: like getting cross about gravity. Dan proposes a fund where nobody wins. LPs, form an orderly queue.

46:15 Deal of the Week
Enact Intelligence, Zurich. A $30m pre-seed (yes, pre-seed) for robots that feel force, not just see. A mill doesn't buy many robots these days.

48:10 Week Ahead
Apple (Dan predicts an AI story, just not yet), the US midterms, AMD and Arm, the Bank of England, then the Anthropic roadshow. Dun dun dun.

Every week on Upside we look behind the headlines and connect the dots that will shape European venture.

This week Dan and Mads are joined by Karim Palant, Director of External Affairs at UK Private Capital (formerly the BVCA). He ran policy at LinkedIn, Facebook and in the Shadow Chancellor's office.

01:40 - Tesla Q3: when the numbers run out, sell the narrative
03:24 - Jackdaw approved: energy security or pre-Budget politics?
08:58 - Anthropic and Elon start giving away shares
11:21 - UK Budget: do no harm, or actual carrots?
17:24 - Scale-up reinvestment relief and a bigger British Business Bank
21:16 - Mads: fix the deficit, everything else is tinkering
27:54 - Dan rules it "pub territory" and drags everyone back
28:47 - Where should British tech's money come from?
32:56 - £13bn from foreign pensions, a sixteenth of that from UK firms
36:56 - Mandate the pensions, or fix the market?
40:14 - How Britain built a pension system that exports its capital
44:33 - AI build-out: wall hit - hiccup or speed bump?
49:11 - The PHP hack: AI agents, $50 break-ins and self-funding circular cybercrime
57:35 - Prediction: personal AI agents get financially mugged in 2027
58:05 - Deals of the week: Photon Bridge, and a Budget already at the OBR
1:00:42 - Week ahead: Big Tech cloud earnings and Budget Wednesday

Thanks to Karim for the backroom intel. 

The Budget lands Wednesday, and we'll find out together whether "boring" was a promise or a threat.

Every week, we look behind the headlines and connect the dots across European venture, investing and startups. 

Record quarters everywhere, share prices down anyway. Dan, Mads and Priyanka on what the AI wobble means for European founders, why EU Inc is being quietly filleted, and who really owns the data for physical AI.

• 00:41 — The week in numbers: Anthropic's $16.8bn quarter, ASML, TSMC's sixth record in a row, US inflation, UK GDP (up 0.1%, hold the applause)
• 01:50 — Project Europe's founding team hands over. Is the brain drain still real, or just better PR?
• 04:00 — EU Inc gets watered down: central register gone, insolvency fast-track gone, stock options in limbo. Worth passing anyway?
• 08:11 — Starling trains an AI model on UK sovereign cloud. Near-frontier capability lands in the application layer
• 10:03 — European startups raise ~€16bn in September. Five times August, if you ignore that August is August. Plus SAP buys TechWolf
• 11:16 — IMF's stability report, and the EU-China hybrid cap: fewer Chinese cars, or just Chinese factories in Hungary?
• 13:52 — Jensen in London. Nvidia as investor, supplier and your competitor's investor
• 18:41 — The AI capex wobble: Asian memory stocks tank, Gartner says 80% of neoclouds are gone by 2030, and "adjusted profit" - bwahaha
• 26:22 — Everyone builds the whole stack: Meta's Wonder, Gemini 4 Argon (road-tested), Microsoft's Maia 300, Nvidia circling Reflection AI
• 32:00 — Physical AI: Atomic Machines out of stealth, Agility goes public via SPAC. Who owns the data owns the moat
• 34:45 — China in the supply chain: would a 40% tariff end your business?
• 40:51 — Can anyone IPO right now?
• 44:23 — Deal of the Week: Extend Robotics (Pri), Rabot Energy (Dan)
• 45:20 — Week ahead: Tesla Q3, China GDP, UK inflation before the Budget

The latest news behind the European venture headlines - let's connect the dots.

Dan, Mads and Pri follow the AI money and find it in your pension, your next laptop and a $40bn SpaceX bond. Plus: Mistral's trillion-parameter cat, DeepSeek discovers that "cheap" costs $12bn, and Britain and Europe make eyes at each other across a crowded room.

02:12 Firmus pulls its $5.5bn Sydney IPO: $10bn valuation in August, $30bn ask in October, 95% of capacity still on paper.
04:33 Isomorphic eyes $40–50bn, at least double May's price, zero drugs in the clinic. The asset is Demis.
07:19 RIP Margaret Hamilton, 90, who landed Apollo 11 back when software "wasn't engineering".
08:25 Tesla: ~$4bn operating profit, $1tn+ valuation, 90%+ of it priced on robots and robotaxis.
10:53 UK–Germany tech corridor: the Kensington Treaty finds a pulse
11:48 Revolut ($115bn, Europe's 7th most valuable bank) will list in the US. London may get seconds.
13:09 The AI build-out: who's actually paying?
14:14 Samsung: ~$80bn operating profit in one quarter = 20 years of Tesla profit. Memory is the new oil.
16:35 TSMC revenue +51%; Alphabet capex ~$45bn, free cash flow –$5.9bn
18:02 SpaceX's $40bn debt raise; Oracle CDS at 244bps, SpaceX 194bps. Junk-adjacent chic.
20:56 Claude Haiku 5.5 tops 8 of our 30 test workloads
25:02 Mistral Large 4 "Le Chonk": 1tn parameters, trained in Europe, 47x the cost for a slightly better ticket sort.
26:44 UK told to use cheaper AI. Cheapest options: Chinese or American. Sovereignty sold separately.
28:05 Germany's sovereign AI champion launches Kolibri, now as part of a Canadian company.
31:58 DeepSeek raises ~$12bn, 4x Europe's record round, for the "cheap" lab.
33:19 Anthropic's IPO sets the price tag for the whole sector.
35:08 UK & EU: Burnham in Berlin, the Tories go full Thatcher-core.
42:03 Deals of the week: Vocca AI ($20m Series A) and Universal Quantum ($100m Series A, 10 miles from Dan's sofa)
44:19 Week ahead: Anthropic investor day, ASML Q3, US CPI, UK GDP.

Not investment advice. If it were, we'd charge 2 and 20.

#VentureCapital #EuropeanTech #DeepTech

Every week, we look behind the headlines affecting European venture. 

Oura had a book covered four times over and still walked. Micron is printing money. Bailey says everyone's priced to be a winner. Burnham wants to take us back to the 1970s, but with free VAT on your electricity bill. 

Dan, Mads and Pri unpack the week.

 01:15 Oura pulls its IPO: $3bn, then $2.2bn, then nothing
 04:43 Micron's monster quarter, and Europe's last memory maker
 06:50 Bailey: "everybody is priced to be a winner"
 09:07 Burnham's speech: 0% VAT on household power, nothing for industry
 12:04 AI safety: OpenAI cancels a model, an agent escapes, the FTC moves in
 20:37 Anthropic's leaked S-1: 12x revenue, $2tn ambitions, half a trillion in compute bills
 26:41 UK venture: BBB returns, Monzo, ElevenLabs at $22bn, Nscale
 29:57 AMD buys World Labs for $8.2bn: chipmakers want world models
 33:24 Personal agents everywhere, except Europe
 39:02 Buy British: Burnham, Healey and the ghost of the Austin Allegro
 47:30 Deals of the Week
 50:39 Week Ahead

🚀 Deals of the Week

• Morphotonics (Veldhoven): €40m Series B. It makes the factory machines behind the tiny optical parts that put displays inside smart glasses.
• Terasi (Stockholm): €11m seed. Jam-resistant millimetre-wave military radios, backed by the NATO Innovation Fund, Join Capital and In-Q-Tel.
• Zenithon (London): $10m seed. AI models for extreme physics: fusion, rockets, chips.

📅 Week Ahead: Tesla Q3 deliveries, the Conservative conference, London Tech Week, Deep Tech Week, and Dan at WSAI in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

Dan, Mads and a lurgy-stricken Andrew dig behind the week's headlines that will affect European venture. Andrew sounds like Barry White. Mads has somehow become the pessimist. Nobody knows who's playing whom anymore.

02:23 Europe has minted 43 unicorns this year, more than '24 and '25 combined. NatWest backs its first-ever VC fund (Phoenix Court). Andrew is "not knocking it"

05:09 Bonds over 5%, Brent over $100, diesel drivers weeping quietly

05:53 Germany: 15 years of dodged reform, Merz's inheritance, and the AfD surge

09:52 Trump meets Xi, plus an AI "hotline." Dan predicts a foldable red iPhone

18:55 Rare earths: not rare, just outsourced to someone else's backyard

23:12 Trump's autonomous robotics ban. Your Roomba is now a geopolitical issue

26:23 AI price war: Opus 5.5 is 40% cheaper, Sol and Luna are half price, and open source keeps eating lunch

35:46 Jev: a classifier model at 1/50th the cost of Sonnet, named after Jevons, because of course it is

38:02 Dan predicts an Anthropic IPO in October. It was pushed to November yesterday. 

39:00 Is the AI money window narrowing? SB Energy delayed, nScale as the litmus test, Nvidia's "cheap" forward multiple

43:12 Agents loose in the hoose: Amazon blocks Meta's Muse. Walled gardens get walls

47:12 22 countries want an IAEA for AI. The two that matter don't. Plus the Australian breach and EU product liability landing on 9 December (lawyers rejoice)

54:33 Deals of the Week:

• Euclid (Eindhoven) raises a €200m Series A chaired by ex-ASML boss Peter Wennink. Not your grandfather's Series A
• Dutch pension giant ABP commits €1bn to venture and tech. Dan has a a moment
• Standard X raises a 10m seed for alpha therapy isotopes. Dan admits he doesn't know what alpha therapy is

59:25 Week Ahead: Labour conference in Liverpool (brace for "growth"), BADR post-mortem, Oura's $15bn Nasdaq IPO (Dan went back to his Apple Watch), Micron as the AI capex lie detector, and Bits & Pretzels, where Dan orders a 0% alco-frolic

01:03:09 Always a pleasure, never a chore

🔗 Deep Tech Week London: deep-tech-week.com/london-2026

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Europe needs you.

Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines to unpack what will affect European venture, startups and investing. 

Dan and Mads flew to LA to sit in row four while Donald Trump dialled into Jensen Huang's keynote. Pri went to Cambridge Tech Week. Let's unpack the week's shenanigans... 

00:30 — All-In Summit: capitalism or cosplay?
Elon, Jensen, Satya, Trump on speakerphone. Mads calls it a celebration of capitalism. Dan calls it MAGA-tastic. Also: Boom builds its own engines because Rolls-Royce wouldn't.

06:21 — Gurley's COVID inquiry - Bill Gurley calmly asks why 15 million deaths and several trillion dollars never got the Boeing treatment.

12:26 — Canada joins the EU (sort of), Trump calls it laughable, Mads treats that as the endorsement. Could the UK be next? Only 27 vetoes to get through.

15:51 — Langdock un-flips from Delaware
$1m to $50m ARR, then millions spent dismantling a US holdco with no staff because it was killing enterprise deals. The EU Inc argument, made for free.

18:00 — Dealroom: who actually funds European VC - Governments and sovereigns at 26%, pensions at 4.5%. A state-funded asset class with a 40-year liability mismatch. Dan blames 2022.

20:17 — AI Doomerism, the full conspiracy menu
Dario's essay, Elon's endorsement, then every theory from "save the IPO" to "Trump moves the deficit into crypto." Conclusion: Listen and see.

33:20 — Warsh hikes, 10-year hits 5%, capex maths
Mads walks $5.5tn of AI capex back through NVIDIA's 53% take rate to find where it snaps. Spoiler: at $3tn, everyone's in pain. 

40:01 — OpenAI: no IPO, $1.2tn round, $1bn in ads
A billion in ad run rate across a billion weekly users. 

44:26 — Luna vs Haiku: the model tier wars
Anthropic froze its cheap model to protect Sonnet. OpenAI shipped Luna into the gap. OpenRouter noticed.

45:52 — Physical AI: Agility, UBTech, Isembard - Digit 5 goes next to human workers, UBTech's factory runs on Siemens, and Isembard goes from 4 to 16 factories by franchising Britain's retiring machinists. 

50:08 — Deal of the Week
Exein ($270m at $1.7bn, from Rome of all places), Emulate's $700m "pre-seed", and Snap Specs, pre-emptively filed by Dan under perv glasses.

52:38 — Week Ahead
Trump hosts Xi for round two on chips and rare earths. SuperX on Monday: founder–corporate speed dating.

Mistral's €3bn, Europe finally reaches orbit, and Anthropic says no to the UK. Mads is off. Pri and Andrew Scott step in. 

00:45 – Elizabeth Holmes gets a documentary. Sam Altman gets a Christmas Day movie. Nobody asked for either.

03:00 – Personal AI agents want your credit card. Dan downloaded one and got the fear. Trust is the whole game now.

04:36 – Markets: ECB to 2.5%, 10-year kissing 5%, Brent over $100. Bad for us, worse for founders. Oracle's $664bn backlog: believe what you like.

05:48 – Europe raised €3.2bn in August. Everyone was on a yacht. Amazon issues sterling bonds. Revolut gets a US banking licence.

06:53 – HR tech: Andrew argues you can't automate the pub lunch. Pri disagrees.

10:10 – "100 Days to Save EU Inc." Clickbait title, real problem. Article 4 is the trapdoor.

15:00 – $2tn of unicorns built by Europeans elsewhere. The talent was never the problem. 

17:07 – Isar Aerospace: first orbital launch from European soil. One tonne. Starship does 100. Nobody in Europe is building heavy lift. Andrew is upset.

22:49 – Global public debt passes $100tn.

23:29 – AI Corner, sans Mads. Anthropic withholds Mythos from the UK's AISI. Frontier access is now gated by passport.

26:57 – 1-bit LLMs, on-device models, and why the GPU arms race may be overbuilt.

29:46 – Gordon Brown writes "innovation is the answer." Andrew's head is in his hands. Three of his LPs have left the UK.

32:54 – Anthropic's economic scenarios: 32% GDP growth, labour share collapses 14 points, robotics excluded. A lab modelling its own prize.

41:31 – An Anthropic engineer quits, predicts extinction. WSJ has the "exclusive" within 18 minutes. Both camps say "regulate me, fund me."

48:25 – Predictions: world-class models on standard kit within six months. A €1bn+ European physical AI round within 12.

50:22 – Deals of the Week: Mistral (€3bn at €21bn), Cognition ($2bn at $48bn), The Exploration Company ($450m).

52:48 – Week ahead: Dan takes a MAGA hat to LA. Pri to Cambridge Tech Week. Andrew has cancelled all his meetings to "produce work."

Subscribe. Or don't. Liquidity is a myth anyway.

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real stories behind the headlines that will affect European venture capital, startups, and investing. 

This week, Bonds, Bubbles and a £500 Toothbrush. 

Priyanka Savjani joins Mads, Andrew and I on the pod - she's the ex-founder of PriBakes, ran actual factories, and is now judging everyone else's.

02:43 - Broadcom "misses" by a rounding error, market has a tantrum anyway. Guidance says double, then double again. Fine.

04:38 - Matt Clifford leaves UK Gov for Anthropic. Turns out AI policy leverage lives in San Francisco, not Whitehall. 

06:26 - Apple rents Siri's brain from Google for $1bn/year. Andrew declares the death of Apple. Dan orders a foldable.

12:14 - Wayve hits London streets; car meets Just Stop Oil, everyone panics.

23:13 - AI Corner: Meta offers 95% off if you hand over your data. Genius or dystopia? Yes.

29:28 - Bonds. Stay awake - $160 trillion says you should.

33:33 - Circular AI financing goes from equity to debt. 29 entities, 61 flows, one nervous glance at Oracle.

37:25 - Prediction: Oracle to junk. You heard it here.

39:28 - Deals of the week: Instinct ($2.5bn, lives in iMessage, knows your credit card) and iPronics (Valencia, photonics, Nvidia on the ticket).

44:06 - The £500 AI toothbrush. Dan's £20k jaw declines to comment.

Mads is back in London, it's mid-August, and the AI train has once again failed to read the "quiet news week" memo. Dan and Mads go solo on money-go-rounds, half-trillion-dollar backstops, and a robot IPO that's 5,526x oversubscribed.

00:00 – Intro: just the two of us, we can make it if we try, just the two of us, building castles in the sky

01:20 – Markets: FTSE flatlining, S&P at records, UK GDP quietly outgrowing Germany and France. Nothingburgers all round 

05:32 – A $2–3 trillion AI IPO... timed for the US midterms. What could possibly go wrong?

06:31 – Thrive Holdings: Friend A pays Friend B to buy Friend C. It's fine. It's a billion in revenue. It's fine 

08:40 – Mistral reselling Chinese open-source models. Frontier lab to neo-cloud in one graceful pivot 

11:20 – Gemini hits 1B users; Google pays $1.5B for a 100-day-old startup. Regulators, look away 

13:44 – Nvidia lines up $500B+ of Wall Street money and guarantees a quarter of it. Compute is now an "investible asset class," apparently 

22:42 – Zuck's 6,500-word ode to open source. Dan calls bullsheets

29:00 – Unitree's $9B IPO: iPhone moment or very expensive Newton? 

36:10 – Rogue agents: Taiwan's government hacked autonomously... and one AI socially engineers its way into a Pilates class 

40:20 – Why American plumbers out-earn British graduates 

48:41 – Prediction: reverse acquihires land in Europe 

49:07 – Deal of the week: Cambridge Aerospace's $300M Series C

New episodes weekly. 

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