EUVC

Axel Deniz, CEO of Bosch Business Innovations and venture builder turning Bosch patents into founder-led deep tech startups. He discusses Bosch’s massive IP muscle and how a hybrid venture-building model pairs corporate tech with external founders. Topics include fast validation gates, founder acquisition challenges, university partnerships, and co-creation with scale-ups and investors.

Jan Hofmann, representative of Viessmann Generations Group, a multi-generational family investor focused on sustainable industrial solutions. Christian Hernandez, founding GP at 2150, a venture firm backing city and industrial climate tech. They discuss how climate investing has shifted to industrial-scale markets. Topics include energy and industrial electrification, grid and transmission bottlenecks, capital strategies for hardware scaling, and scaling urban climate infrastructure.

They dig into a halted £1bn UK data centre and the planning, environmental and power debates around AI infrastructure. The conversation covers Mark Carney’s Davos warning about geopolitical fracture and whether Europe can act at scale. They debate China’s AI strategy, the future of SaaS, a surge in defence IPOs, and proposed pan‑EU company law aimed at fixing cross‑border startup frictions.

Join Max Schertel, CEO of finmid, an innovator in embedded lending for European B2B platforms, and Tim Rehder, a General Partner at Earlybird specializing in fintech investments, as they dive into the transformative power of embedded lending. They discuss how better data unlocks access to underserved SMEs, turning platforms into banks without the need for capital ownership. Learn about the impressive margins in this space, the practicalities of scaling across Europe, and how customer integrations, like Wolt Cash, are driving retention and growth.

Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures cut through the noise shaping tech, venture, and geopolitics in Europe and beyond.This week starts lightly, as all good episodes do, with kids, illness paranoia, and the small joys of enforced medical naps. It escalates quickly.From OpenAI’s new health-focused ChatGPT and the FDA’s sudden sprint toward deregulation to Trump’s Greenland fixation and what it really signals about European sovereignty, to Meta buying its way into the AI application layer, pension funds destroying value at scale, and Nvidia’s push into physical AI. This is one of those episodes where everything connects.The common thread is power. Who has it. Who’s losing it. And who’s still pretending nothing has changed.This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the systems are breaking, and the optimism is… cautiously conditional.What’s covered:03:00 ChatGPT Health launches and why Europe is locked out05:00 The FDA’s pivot to deregulation and what it means for health startups10:00 Using multiple LLMs as a “second medical opinion”13:00 Trump, Greenland, and the slow collapse of Pax Americana18:00 Sovereignty, defence spending, and Europe’s strategic wake-up call23:00 France moves to ban social media for under-15s27:00 Meta buys its way into the AI application layer30:00 Kraken spins out of Octopus at multi-billion scale34:00 Revolut’s Turkey move and the march to 100 million users37:00 UK pension funds, catastrophic underperformance, and broken incentives45:00 Why venture returns matter more than fees49:00 FTSE hits 10,000 and why it doesn’t mean what you think56:00 CES, Nvidia’s autonomous ambitions, and physical AI01:04:00 Grok’s $230B valuation and free speech trade-offs01:07:00 Deals of the Week

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we go behind the craft of building and backing venture-scale companies in Europe.Today, we’re joined by Sean Mullaney, Founder & CEO of Seapoint, and Will Prendergast, as the Founding Partner at Frontline Ventures.Seapoint has just come out of stealth with a $3M pre-seed to rebuild the fragile and fragmented financial stack that European startups (and later: mid-market companies) rely on. With a Stripe-forged team, AI-native development culture, and operators from Revolut, Tines & more on board, Seapoint wants to become the financial home for European startups.This conversation dives deep into founder pain, broken tooling, AI-native product building, engineering culture, the changing shape of startup teams, syndicate-building, and why Frontline backed Sean with high conviction.Here’s what’s covered:01:07 The Mission: “The financial home for European startups”03:32 Frontline’s conviction moment06:24 The founder pain: 5 tools, 5 accounts, zero clarity08:07 The invisible tax: fragmentation, reconciliation hell, no real-time view10:14 Why this problem is structurally important12:19 European vs US lens: why Seapoint is ahead13:18 AI-native engineering: “We rebuild the stack from processes, not accounts”15:19 AI agents allow senior engineers to ship full-stack features alone — compressing timelines that previously required 2–3× more engineers.17:19 Rethinking teams: fewer people, more senior, more generalist19:33 Productivity does NOT reduce funding needs — it increases ambition21:27 Culture: curiosity, experimentation, and founder-led technical push36:11 Syndicate design: Angels as a go-to-market weapon.40:23 From startup financial home → to powering Europe’s mid-market backbone: lending, treasury, automation, embedded finance.

Emil Eifrem, Founder and CEO of Neo4j, shares insights on transforming data infrastructure for AI. He discusses how Neo4j's technology was key during the Panama Papers investigation, revealing complex financial ties. Emil emphasizes the need for structured knowledge graphs to prevent LLM hallucinations. He introduces a $100M program to support AI startups, offering resources like free Aura credits and dedicated engineers. With over 300 startups joining in weeks, Emil expresses optimism about Europe's potential in leading AI infrastructure, despite regulatory challenges.

In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm speaks with Oskar Hartmann, legendary operator turned super angel. From Kazakhstan to Germany, Russia, Japan, and now Dubai and Silicon Valley, Oskar has built and exited more than 10 companies, invested in 150+ ventures (14 unicorns among them), and today is pioneering a new way to solve concentration risk for founders and angels: Accumulator, a share-pooling model unlocking liquidity and diversification.They dive into Oskar’s “beast mode” founder philosophy, his candid battles with burnout, the importance of product–soul fit, and why Europe doesn’t just need more unicorns, it needs deca- and hectocorns. Along the way, Oskar shares his learnings from India’s ecosystem, his obsession with avoiding adverse selection, and his belief that communities, not individuals, create enduring success.

Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where ⁠Dan Bowyer⁠,⁠ Mads Jensen⁠ of ⁠SuperSeed⁠ and ⁠Lomax Ward⁠ of ⁠Outsized Ventures⁠⁠⁠ cut through the noise shaping tech, venture, and geopolitics in Europe and beyond.This week starts lightly, as all good episodes do, with kids, illness paranoia, and the small joys of enforced medical naps. It escalates quickly.From OpenAI’s new health-focused ChatGPT and the FDA’s sudden sprint toward deregulation to Trump’s Greenland fixation and what it really signals about European sovereignty to Meta buying its way into the AI application layer, pension funds destroying value at scale, and Nvidia’s push into physical AI. This is one of those episodes where everything connects.The common thread is power. Who has it? Who’s losing it? And who’s still pretending nothing has changed?This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the systems are breaking, and the optimism is… cautiously conditional.ShareWhat’s covered:00:00 Intro: ChatGPT Health launch, privacy/encryption, “use with skepticism”00:03 FDA shifts: deregulation + faster approvals for AI medical devices / wearables00:09 Trump + Greenland + NATO: geopolitics, minerals, defense, European sovereignty00:18 France proposing social media ban for under-15s; phones in schools; EU vs US regulation00:23 Meta reportedly buying Manus (AI agents / applications layer)00:25 Octopus Energy’s Kraken spin-out: valuation, contracted revenue, European “hidden champion”00:27 Discord IPO chatter: nearing ~$1B ARR; monetization model00:32 UK pensions: pressure to allocate to privates; constraints + risk/return tradeoffs00:42 FTSE 100 hits 10,000; UK vs S&P; defense-driven rally; low tech weighting00:50 CES: Nvidia autonomous driving + open sourcing; “physical AI” + Mercedes partnership00:54 China & Nvidia H20 pressures; AMD vs Nvidia software gap; Intel relevance

Giovanni Daprà, CEO of Moneyfarm, and Paolo Gesess, co-founder of United Ventures, dive into the journey of Moneyfarm as a leader in digital wealth management across Italy and the UK. They discuss the importance of a clear mission and founder alignment in their early days. The conversation also explores how Italy's fintech ecosystem has matured, the strategic shift from growth to profitability, and the future of consolidation in European fintech. Their insights into scaling across borders and the role of M&A in growth are both enlightening and practical.