Podcast
Upside
Hosted by Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen - SuperSeed · EN
This week's happenings in startup and investing land. Getting underneath VC, and discussing how to better support the European startup eco-system.
Every week we share what's been on our mind and get under the skin of VC, investing, startups and founder psychology.
From the team behind SuperSeed who invest in technical teams solving difficult business problems.
The network is run on LinkedIn so join me there - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbowyer/
With full interview audio and video uploaded to all major outlets.
Love to hear from you - dan@superseed.com
34episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Time To Rip Out Palantir? - Where Is The AI ROI? - And Florida Sues OpenAI?!
Yesterday00:55:06Tap to summarizePlus it's EU Sovereignty Week, more on the EU's Palantir Problem & who's now in the the $80bn club?This week Dan and Mads are joined by Matt Russell, Head of Secondaries at VenCap, the 40-year-old firm with a look-through portfolio of ~500 funds and ~17,000 companies, and seemingly exposure to every name that's ever mattered. We get into why secondaries aren't the bargain-bin everyone thinks, why Brussels keeps reaching for the statute book instead of the chequebook, whether the NHS can actually rip out Palantir (spoiler: with what?), and the three biggest IPOs in history queuing up at once. Plus: Florida sues Sam Altman, Europe's two-tier AI future, and a baby that won't sleep.00:52 — Meet Matt Russell: a secondaries 101, and why the best deals are the ones you pay up for.04:23 — EU Sovereignty Week — CADA, the four tiers of "sovereign," and the great Azure/Bleu/Delos licensing fudge. Mads's verdict: stop tinkering, complete the single market, unlock the pension capital.19:00 — Europe's Palantir Problem — MPs want the £330m NHS contract torn up and handed to a British supplier that doesn't exist. Featuring the ghost of the National Programme for IT. 24:45 — The Enterprise vs the AI Bill — Uber caps staff at £1,500/month, Pizza Hut delivers cold, and nobody can forecast token spend. So how do you measure ROI? (Answer, eventually: cashflow.) Andreessen's "sand into intelligence". 31:25 — The $80 Billion Club — SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all crowding the exit. Why buybacks mean the market can absorb it — and why SpaceX needs to 100x revenue by 2030 to justify the price. 39:30 — America Sues Its Own — Florida takes OpenAI (and Sam Altman, personally) to court as Trump waters down his own AI order. Limitation of liability, load-bearing. 43:05 — Dan's prediction: a two-tier European AI stack (sovereign Mistral/Aleph Alpha vs "tamed" US models) — plus Matt's "models are airlines, not utilities" framing. 48:33 — Deal of the Week: Stark (€300m at €2.5bn defence drones the Pope wouldn't approve of) and Dan's pick, Gigaton (née Carbon Re, £26m).50:18 — The Week Ahead: WWDC and the eternal wait for a real Siri, an ECB rate hike, and Friday's main event — the biggest IPO of all time.Upside: looking behind the headlines that move European venture. New episode every week.
Transcribe →AI Winners Beyond NVIDIA - Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 Is Out! - A Zero Employee Startup Raises $30m!
1w ago00:52:13Tap to summarizeThis week, Dan and Mads dig into the AI infrastructure boom spreading beyond GPUs, Europe's sovereignty contradictions, the era of the zero-employee unicorn, and a Pope weighing in on AI.00:00 — The week's headlines and some chit chat.01:15 — Ferrari's Luce, SpaceX Starship postponement, Gary Lineker's VC firm, Kirkland & Ellis builds its own AI stack. 07:00 — The new Dealroom report: London reclaims top spot from Paris. 08:30 — AI infrastructure beyond GPUs. Micron and SK Hynix cross $1T as the 40-year DRAM cycle breaks. 13:40 — How much AI capex is enough? Pascal's wager and the hyperscaler bet. 16:00 — Snowflake's CoCo pops 37%, Salesforce stumbles on the seat-based model. The applications-layer thesis in action. 19:30 — S&P 500 rule changes: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic's IPO clock accelerates.24:20 — Claude Opus 4.8 lands. Anthropic eclipses OpenAI as the most valuable frontier lab. 27:00 — European sovereignty in action. Dutch state blocks Kyndryl on CLOUD Act risk; ASML can't expand Eindhoven over nitrogen rules; €1.1T of European industry pushes back. 34:00 — The AI-only company era. Polsia raises $30m at $250m with zero employees and a 2.1 Trustpilot. Spell it backwards. 36:30 — AI-washing. Standard Chartered's "lower-value human capital", 7,800 cuts, and the real story behind the UK NEET crisis. 42:00 — The Pope's AI encyclical. 135 years after Rerum Novarum, Anthropic's Chris Olah stands at the Vatican. 47:00 — Predictions: which AI unicorn collapses first? 48:45 — Deal of the Week: Cognition's $1bn raise (Mads) and Eddy Grid's profitable Dutch energytech.51:30 — Week ahead: CrowdStrike and Quantinuum earnings. 53:00 — Mads turns 21 (again)
Transcribe →IPOs Unfreeze - 3 Sovereign Euro Deals Land - Do You Hate AI?
2w ago00:40:38Tap to summarizeThis week on Upside: Nvidia is so rich it's literally throwing money at shareholders, three megacaps queue up to IPO, and Americans discover they hate AI almost as much as politicians.(00:47) Mads at the BBCA / UKPC. Same name, same problem, same answers nobody's implementing. Plus a quick spin through Ben Evans' latest, ASML's revenue upgrade, and Meta canning 8,000 engineers. Cool, cool, cool.(02:30) Nvidia returns $80B to shareholders - roughly the GDP of Tunisia, give or take. Free cash flow of $49B a quarter. Stock down on earnings - maybe we've collectively lost our minds.(07:00) The Great IPO Unfreeze. SpaceX at $2T (an AI company wearing a rocket suit wearing a telecoms business), OpenAI at $1T (the most consequential S-1 of the decade, Dan bets it ain't pretty), and Anthropic's "final-final" pre-IPO round, number four. Sure.(13:24) Unitree IPOs in Shanghai at $67B. The dancing robot company actually shipping units. The Android of humanoids? Europe, please build the layer on top.(20:00) Europe writes its own future. Mistral grabs Vienna's EMMIE for neural physics simulation, EQT wins the €5B Scale-Up Europe mandate (sorry Atomico), and HMRC picks Quantexa over Palantir for £175M. Buying British: hopefully not the B-player.(27:30) American AI rebellion. AI now polls worse than ICE. Molotovs at Sam Altman's house. Europe, take note.(33:30) Prediction: France will cave on ESOP rules by end of '26. Mads disagrees.(36:30) Deal of the week: Isomorphic Labs, $2.1B Series B. Demis's side hustle is going great.(38:50) Week ahead: Salesforce earnings (where art thou, Agentforce?), AI-stack reports, and the S&P 500 rule change that could let SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic into the index faster than feels reasonable.
Transcribe →Upside Special - What Would European Investors Back With Their Last Euro?
3w ago00:44:27Tap to summarizeUpside Live from Montenegro: Five GPs, Five BetsRecorded live from a Montenegrin port at a European LP/GP gathering of 80 investors, Dan asked 5 European investors the same question: If you had to put every penny of your fund and personal capital into one bet in Europe, where would it go?(01:21) Jens Lapinski — German super angel Jens would back the full AI stack, money transfer infrastructure, training environments, enterprise deployment. On sovereign AI, he argues the US-Europe relationship is one investment continuum rather than two competing blocs: chips, foundation models, hyperscalers, operating systems and the application layer are predominantly US-built, and pretending otherwise isn't productive. He acknowledges defence and security carve-outs make sense, but the broader play is co-investing with American capital, not against it. The one structural fix: unlock European pension fund and insurance capital flows into venture, and fix the public market exit path so companies don't default to US listings.(07:24) Andra Bagdonaite — First Pick, Lithuania First-check pre-seed investor for Baltic founders since 2022. Andra's bet: AI applied to traditional SMBs; logistics, manufacturing, businesses still running on legacy ERPs and Excel. Lithuania functions as a fast sandbox for founders to pilot with one or two customers before going global. She frames this as a long compounding opportunity rather than a rocket ship, the scale of legacy process digitisation across European SMBs is the prize.(12:21) Ella Goldner — Zinc Ella would concentrate on transformative deep tech climate. Her view: incremental solutions won't shift the trajectory, so a portfolio approach to moonshot bets, fusion and energy provision featured explicitly, is the rational play. She cites Kate Bingham's COVID Vaccine Taskforce as the model: urgency strips out bureaucracy and accelerates the research-to-commercialisation path. Insurance pricing is already starting to reflect climate risk, which she sees as an early commercial signal. Her one change for Europe: cultural rather than structural, building a problem-solving, business-building mindset from school age. She contrasts this with Israel and the US, where building and discussing ventures is embedded in everyday conversation.(23:58) Mike Reiner — 432 Legacy, Netherlands Mike's bet: the software and safety layer around physical AI. Roughly 11% of revenue is currently lost to safety-driven slowdowns and caging where robots and humans share environments. His firm has already backed a Swiss company using ultra-wideband to detect people through walls for multi-sensor safety platforms. The thesis comes from a proprietary value-chain analysis system: the same tool surfaced transformer and specialist hardware supply as the binding constraint on data centre buildout (not just energy), and identified firmware security (portfolio company Binary) as a durable cyber gap less likely to be absorbed by the foundation model providers. On founders, he looks for trauma-driven ambition paired with active self-development work, the combination he sees correlating with mission-driven, durable companies. His one change: more funds willing to take on tough problems with longer fund cycles, which he argues is also where the largest demand-supply gaps, and returns sit.(34:39) Dave Haynes — FOV Ventures Dave's bet: robotics and physical AI. He separates the two cleanly; robotics is the embodiment, physical AI (or world models) is the intelligence layer that understands real-world physics rather than text and images. Sizing: digital economy roughly $15T, physical economy in the hundreds of trillions, and software has only meaningfully disrupted the former. FOV maps the space across four layers: hardware and infrastructure (sensors, hyperspectral imaging, wireless power, portfolio company Willow), software and operating systems, the intelligence layer (world models, where Yann LeCun's Amy sits as a European entrant), and vertical applications. Europe's edge, in his view, is in vertical deployment; labour shortages, real industrial pull, and strong robotics talent from TUM, ETH and Imperial. He frames the shift as "Robotics 2.0": where Robotics 1.0 needed £5m of CapEx, founders can now build serious automation businesses on a £500k cheque, mirroring the Web 1.0 to 2.0 transition. He estimates the ChatGPT-equivalent moment for robotics is roughly five years out.
Transcribe →Anthropic Builds - ASML defends - Meta Cracks
May 900:56:52Tap to summarizeHosts: Mads Jensen (moderator), Lomax Ward (Lisbon beach bum), Dr. Andrew Scott (serial mute-button offender) Missing: Dan Bowyer — scaling actual mountains. We told him to come back alive. Mostly because nobody else wants to moderate.[02:30] — ARM vs Spotify: One the Market Loves, One It Doesn't Both posted good numbers. ARM got rewarded, Spotify got a -13% haircut and a 25% YTD drawdown despite record margins and 761m MAUs. Lomax calls ARM's AGI CPU pivot a "bet the farm." Mads drops the CPU:GPU ratio shift from 1:8 to potentially 1:1 as agentic AI explodes tool calls. Infrastructure compounds, consumer optimises, and the market knows which is which.[10:38] — Anthropic: $200bn Google Deal, $45bn ARR, Just Give Them Europe Too $200bn to Google Cloud. ARR at $45bn (up from ~$9bn in January). Potential $50bn raise north of $1tn. Lomax declares Anthropic "so, so hot right now" — secondary-market appetite lives in WhatsApp groups and members' club washrooms.[16:15] — Enterprise AI JVs: Palantir Meets Accenture Meets PE's Existential Crisis Anthropic and OpenAI both announced PE-backed JVs on May the 4th. Zero investor overlap. Andrew warns frontier labs risk becoming expensive consulting firms. Lomax: PE returns are compressed, LPs restless, AI is the new pitch to juice portfolio EBITDA. Everyone agrees this is IPO prep dressed in a consulting trench coat.[23:15] — Mythos, Trump's AI Safety U-Turn, and Regulatory Capture Mythos is so good at hacking that Trump is drafting FDA-style pre-deployment AI reviews — having revoked Biden's AI EO on Day One. Andrew deploys the nuclear weapons analogy (drink!). Lomax offers the conspiracy theory: everyone in the administration has so much money in these companies that regulation now suits them. He then distances himself from that theory. Barely.[31:30] — EU vs Meta/WhatsApp: Brussels Says Open Sesame, Zuck Says Pay Me Meta kicked rival chatbots out of WhatsApp, offered to let them back for a fee. Brussels rejected it. Mads lands the kill shot: open banking made UK payments vastly superior to America's. Sometimes the regulator is right. Potential fine: ~$16-20bn.[39:27] — ASML: "No One Is Coming for Us" (Famous Last Words?) Fouquet went to Milken and said "come at me." Lomax notes China isn't replicating EUV — they're engineering around it with Huawei's CloudMatrix. Mads roasts Fouquet for lacking Jensen's paranoia. Lomax delivers the closer: founder mode vs. conference mode.[46:33] — UK Fusion: Always 30 Years Away, Now Only 10 (Maybe) Sounds like a Bond villain's energy company: Gates money + American stellarator IP + UK magnets. 400MW by mid-2030s. Andrew: "magnets are not the reactor." Lomax: anemic growth, £120bn in interest payments, defence plan a year overdue. Building a fusion industry — or buying a franchise?[56:09] — 🏆 Deal of the Week: SAP Acquires Prior Labs for €1bn 15-month-old startup. €9m seed. €1bn exit. The "GPT for spreadsheets." Possibly the fastest seed-to-exit in European venture history.[57:30] — Week Ahead: Anthropic IPO board watch (they won't) · EU AI Act trilogue (~13 May) · Tencent Q1 earnings (13 May) · Fed transition — Powell's last day (15 May) · SpaceX S-1 (week of 18-22 May)[59:46] — Dan's back next week. The nation breathes a sigh of relief.
Transcribe →Musk v. Altman - UK Eats EU AI Act - SMRs Solve UK’s Energy Crisis?!
May 100:40:45Tap to summarizeEvery week on Upside, we look behind the headlines to expose the real news affecting European venture, startups and investing. Charles hands Trump a bell, Musk says he's not building AGI (this week), and Brussels manages 12 hours of trilogue with absolutely nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Big Tech spent the GDP of a small country on GPUs, and Europe, yes, Europe, quietly dropped two near-billion-dollar AI rounds out of UCL. Buckle up.(00:48) Round-up King Charles's grooming of Trump hits new heights with HMS Trump's actual ship's bell. Whisky tariff dropped one win, banked. Hormuz still a mess, Brent at $126, Canada launches a sovereign wealth fund, and Musk testifies under oath that Tesla isn't pursuing AGI. Six weeks after saying it would. Pick your audience, pick your claim.(02:42) Big Tech Earnings: capex needs cloud growth to justify itself Alphabet (+22%, cloud +63%) and Amazon (AWS +28%) get rewarded. Microsoft and Meta punished. Meta's stock down 8.5% for the crime of having no cloud P&L. Apple, supposedly the AI laggard, is the only one to trade up after print: iPhone +22%, Greater China +28%, and Tim Cookie insists AI will be "fast, personal, private." Memory is the new bottleneck SK Hynix sold out for all of 2026.(09:14) Frontier-Lab Politics: state-level chess Musk vs Altman in court, with OpenAI's lawyer delivering the line of the week. China blocks Meta's $2bn Manus acquisition not tit-for-tat, but China running the US export-control playbook in reverse. Google's "up to $40bn" into Anthropic at a flat valuation: smart hedge, not a bailout.(14:31) Europe quietly outperforms Ineffable: $1.1bn at $5.1bn, David Silver, RL-from-scratch. Recursive Superintelligence: $500m, Tim Rocktäschel, AI that improves itself. Two UCL professors, two near-unicorn rounds, one week. The DeepMind diaspora is real.(16:29) Frontier Models: monetisation arrives GPT-5.5, Kimi K2.6, Grok 4.3, Opus 4.7 all in eight days. Cadence is no longer the story. OpenAI doubled API prices. Anthropic pulled every quiet lever it had, and your Claude bill went 10-50x. Nobody's leaving. Run-rate $9bn → $30bn in four months. Models commoditise; stacks don't.(21:09) SpaceX S-1: $1.75–2tn target Biggest IPO in history filing in May. 220x earnings. Bull case is space compute Musk's bet that we run out of Earth-based power before we run out of orbital sunlight. Don't bet against him, etc.(26:54) EU AI Act vs UK AI Plan Trilogue collapses. The Omnibus that would have softened the Act is what died Act now harder, not easier. London becomes the only place in Europe to build an AI lab. Not enough, but we'll take it.(30:04) Energy & SMRs UK industrial energy: 125% above EU-14 median. SMRs won't power a data centre until the 2030s. Even fixing energy doesn't fix the electrician shortage. Build everything, in parallel, yesterday.(35:43) Predictions Dan: France becomes Europe's OPEC by Q1 2027. Mads: Anthropic should IPO, probably won’t, the May board vote is the marker.Deal of the Week (38:40) Mads: Ineffable, obviously. Dan: Atech, £681k from Lovable, making hardware prototyping accessible.Until next week, muchachos.
Transcribe →EU Eats Its Own - Europe Gives Up On Space - Is SpaceX Really Buying Cursor?
Apr 2400:45:34Tap to summarizeUpside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real news behind the headlines affecting European venture startups and investing. Hosted by Mads and Dan from SuperSeed. This week: the EU admits it wrote a bad AI Act (shocking), Sergey Brin is wheeled out of retirement again, SpaceX buys a coding company because of course, and Wall Street invents a new way to short private credit. Dan and Mads untangle.(02:00) DeepSeek V4 drops overnight — Chinese open-weights model benchmarking at Opus 4.6 level. The gap between Western frontier and Chinese open source is now 78 days. Trained entirely on Huawei chips, so the three-year US chip embargo has been going brilliantly. Anthropic will probably survive, but NVIDIA might want to glance at its share price.(07:30) The EU quietly euthanises its own AI Act — Monday's trilogue is gutting the juicy bits and calling it "simplification." Translation: Brussels is admitting it was wrong without admitting it was wrong. Europe needs inference chips, public procurement as anchor demand, pension capital unlocked, a real 28th regime, and nuclear next to datacentres. Otherwise we're just tidying.(11:00) Cyber week: three stories, one confused headline — France's ANTS loses 19M identity records (run by Atos, which is insolvent, what could possibly go wrong). The UK Biobank "breach" isn't a breach, it's a 2003 open-science policy finally meeting 2026 strategic competition. (18:40) Sergey Brin un-retires (third time lucky?) — Leaked DeepMind memo: every Gemini engineer must now use Google's own agents, because they'd been quietly reaching for Claude Code when they actually wanted to ship. Embarrassing. Meanwhile Google owns 14% of Anthropic and just sold them $10bn of TPUs. Panic stations over here, revenue party over there. Beautifully incestuous.(24:20) SpaceX options Cursor at $60bn — or pays $10bn in compute to walk away. OpenAI has Codex, Anthropic has Claude Code, xAI had vibes. Now it has a distribution front door. Every frontier lab is becoming an application company. Europe's shot is here; Lovable, enterprise workflows, anything touching physical AI.(28:45) Europe has ceded space to SpaceX — we just haven't admitted it — Starlink: 7,000 satellites. Eutelsat: 600. IRIS² won't be operational until ~2030. The architecture's right, the scale is pathetic, procurement is pork-barrel nonsense. Fix: scrap ESA geographical return, let a thousand flowers bloom at every input layer, anchor with state demand.(33:30) Wall Street opens a short on private credit — JPM, Barclays, Morgan Stanley now making markets in CDS against Blackstone, Apollo, Ares. ~20% of BDC loans went to SaaS. AI is eating 25-35% of that. Blackstone took $3.8bn of redemptions in Q1 and posted its first monthly loss in three years. Not 2008, but a slow, jagged repricing of old-economy SaaS. (40:30) Predictions — Dan: the next trillion-dollar European company will be a defence prime, not software. Anthropic crosses $100bn ARR and never IPOs (Mads: sad, it should).(41:20) Deals of the week — Mads: ATMOS Space Cargo (€25.7M Series A: Europe can finally bring things back from orbit without asking SpaceX, Russia, or China nicely). Dan: €1.07bn into 57 EDF defence projects, yikes grants, yes, but hopefully the bedrock rather than a grantrepreneur buffet.(43:30) Week ahead — EU AI Act trilogue Tuesday, Ariane 6 launching American Kuiper satellites the same day (the irony writes itself), $14 trillion of hyperscaler earnings Wednesday, and a BoE decision that's drifted from "two cuts" to "possibly a hike." Cheers, Iran.
Transcribe →EU Hungry for Hungary - Solo Founder Unicorns - & Let’s Ship Something Great!
Apr 1800:42:02Tap to summarizeUpside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the news and headlines that will affect European venture startups and investing. This week Dan and Mads go deep on what Hungary's political earthquake means for European capital flows, why Anthropic is speedrunning a monopoly, and whether one bloke with a laptop can really build a unicorn (spoiler: it's complicated).[03:28] Orbán Out, Money In Hungary was the EU's most corrupt member state and Orbán was Russia and China's favourite circuit-breaker inside Brussels. Peter Magyar takes over mid-summer and suddenly €90bn in EU funding unlocks, twenty sanctions packages clear, and Hungarian defence spending gets greenlit. [09:53] Anthropic Eats the Stack Six months ago Mads predicted frontier labs would either become application companies or get absorbed by hyperscalers. Anthropic ships an app builder, leaks a design tool, hires Workday's CTO, and Mike Krieger resigns from Figma's board the same day the Figma-killer surfaces.[15:09] Mythos vs GPT-5.4-Cyber: The Weapon vs The Tool OpenAI released their cyber model publicly. Anthropic can't because Mythos is genuinely terrifying. First model to complete a full 32-step autonomous corporate network takeover from a simple prompt. No security expertise required. The distillation angle matters: every month Mythos stays gated is a month the Chinese open-source labs can't copy it. [21:53] The One-Man Unicorn (Or Is It?) Matthew Gallagher claims $400M in year-one revenue selling GLP-1 supplements, built with ChatGPT, Claude, and his brother. Sam Altman's prophecy, fulfilled? Not so fast. Class action lawsuits, dodgy marketing, and numbers that don't survive a Trustpilot audit. [28:19] Compute Scarcity: Still Very Much Early Innings TSMC spending $52-56bn in capex. ASML raising guidance. Blackwell GPU spot rent up 48% in two months. CoreWeave extending minimums from one to three years. OpenAI quietly cut its infra plan from $1.4T to $600B because Anthropic took pole position and they can't justify the spend. The lie detector test? If the chipmakers are still spending, the demand is real. [37:00] Musk's Terafab: 50x Global Compute, 80% in Space Elon's answer to scarcity: build a factory producing 50x today's global AI compute and launch most of it into orbit. The physics says cooling 1GW in a vacuum needs 834,000m² of radiators. A guest expert's verdict: "putting servers in orbit is a stupid idea, unless your customers are also in orbit." But betting against Musk has historically been expensive.[38:00] Predictions & Deal of the Week Dan calls it: within 12 months, a major breach gets publicly attributed to an AI model, triggering first AI-specific liability law. Mads picks Synera ($40M Series B, Bremen). Dan picks Helical (£10M, London) the AI virtual lab speeding up drug discovery.[41:00] Week Ahead TSMC Q1 earnings (already out by the time you hear this), EUVC Live in London on Wednesday, and Dan's off to dinner with founders he's known for 28 years.
Transcribe →Menacing Mythos, Mega IPOs & Dimon’s Doomerism
Apr 1100:48:41Tap to summarizeUpside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. On this week's show...Anthropic is having the week of its life, Jamie Dimon wants you to know the sky is falling (again), and Germany spent €2 billion learning that shipbuilding is hard. Dan and Lomax fly as a duo this week.00:00 – Intro & News Radar – Iran ceasefire (maybe), global VC hits $300B in Q1 alone (70% of all 2025 deployment), four companies absorbed $188B of that, Russian hackers are in your router, and a Brit insists he isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. Busy week.04:16 – Anthropic: The Full Picture – Run rate has tripled to $30B, overtaking OpenAI's $25B. Over 1,000 enterprise customers spending $1M+, eight of the Fortune 10 on the books, and 32% of the enterprise LLM API market locked down. Mythos, their new frontier model, found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and hit a 72.4% exploit rate versus Opus 4.6's 14.4%. So powerful only 40 organisations have access. They also acquired Coefficient Bio for $400M in stock — six employees, founded last year, backed by Dimension Capital who turned $10M into $204M in Anthropic paper. EMEA is their fastest-growing region with 9x revenue growth and offices across six European cities.22:15 – Jamie Dimon's Annual Letter – 48 pages of structural warnings. Historically brilliant on multi-year calls (fiscal deficits, fintech disruption, HTM accounting), less brilliant on timing — he's called recession four years running. This year: inflation as "the skunk at the party," private credit's $1.8T transparency problem, and JPM spending $20B a year building AI in-house with $2B in cost savings already.29:36 – Mega IPOs – SpaceX ($2T, June), Anthropic (October, $60B raise), OpenAI (Q4/Q1 '27, $852B). Combined primary issuance could exceed 2025's entire US equity capital formation of $232B. Every major 2025 IPO traded down. Worth noting.37:43 – Climate Tech Returns – Rebranded as energy security and resilience. Climate VC hit $40.5B in 2025, up 8%. 87% of US companies quietly increased sustainability spend. The money's flowing — just under different letterhead.43:32 – Germany's Defence Nightmare – €10B for six warships, four years behind, prime contractor fired, Dutch-French-German finger-pointing all round. Defence budget rising from €86B to €152B by 2029 but procurement can't keep up. The EU's new AGILE fund offers €115M for defence startups with a four-month turnaround. Welcome to the age of cheap warfare.48:34 – OpenAI Buys TBPN – A one-year-old live tech show with 58,000 YouTube subscribers, acquired for low hundreds of millions weeks before a potential IPO. OpenAI says it'll stay independent. Sure.50:44 – Predictions & Deals of the Week – Dan calls Anthropic becoming Europe's de facto AI partner. Lomax brings Gilead's $5B acquisition of German biotech Tubulis. Dan flags Zero Shot Fund from OpenAI alumni.
Transcribe →Why $800m Mistral? - Who’s Boycotting Palantir? - When CoreWeave Crushed Poolside
Apr 400:53:20Tap to summarizeEvery week we look behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. This week it's with Lomax from Outsized Ventures, Andrew from 7 Percent, and myself, your host Dan Bowyer from Superseed. 00:00 – Dan declares himself sexy for the first time ever. The physical AI / reshoring zeitgeist has finally caught up with what SuperSeed's been doing for a decade. Lomax gently reminds him that being in vogue doesn't actually fix anything.06:01 – Quick-fire news roundup: Artemis II launches, Apple turns 50, software stocks crater, SpaceX files for what might be the largest IPO in human history. Andrew reminds us the stock market is mostly vibes anyway.11:06 – Mistral raises $830M in debt to build Nvidia-powered AI data centres in Europe. Lomax points out everything Mistral does is roughly 1% of the US equivalent. Andrew thinks it's a safe bet. Dan wonders if the French government will end up owning it.12:17 – NHS staff boycott Palantir. Andrew says this is the tip of the iceberg when you outsource critical infrastructure to a company whose chairman publicly slagged off the NHS. Lomax reveals New York is also dumping Palantir. The hunt for a European alternative begins. Lomax conveniently has an Italian pre-seed for this.31:13 – UK defence tech brain drain. Founders relocating to the Bay Area because MoD procurement takes longer than most startups survive. Lomax drops a monologue about Anduril's $20B contract while UK founders can't even get framework agreements cashed up. Andrew notes the MoD has capped software procurement at three years, which is still absurd.41:56 – Poolside loses its CoreWeave compute deal, tanking a $2B raise at $12B valuation. The lesson: if you're going full-stack, hire people who've actually built data centres.47:21 – Dan predicts local models will handle 95% of knowledge work within 18 months. Andrew remains wonderfully unconvinced.48:42 – Deals of the week: Starcloud ($170M, fastest YC unicorn ever), Fractile ($200M AI chip talks, Oxford spinout), and Manna Air Delivery ($50M Series B, drones from Dublin).
Transcribe →