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
37episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Why Does Micron Matter? Will UK Capital Flow? The AI Bill Is Due - Who’s Paying?
5d ago00:45:56Tap to summarizeUpside is a weekly podcast looking behind the headlines to see what's going to affect European venture, start-ups and investing. Hosted by Dan and Mads from Superseed, and this week our special guest is Neil Shah from the London Stock Exchange. A man, his pants, and an ice cube. Dan melts on air. Neil gets called an "artificial Indian" for failing British weather. The London Stock Exchange's tech chief joins to share how the tide is turning. 02:00 — Mini market update: AI infra gets a kickingSpaceX limps from 225 to 150, now flogging a $25bn bond and moonlighting as an NVIDIA reseller. Shiller PE knocking on dot-com's door. Nothing to see here.05:56 — Micron: the canary, the coal mine, the lie detectorMads explains why a memory maker tells you everything. Revenue up 346%, 85% "sassy" margins, sold out for the year, customers throwing deposits at them. Also: this is why your iPhone got 20% pricier.10:06 — Can the UK unlock capital? (Spoiler: pensions)A history lesson. UK pension AUM in equities: 53% in 1997, ~2.8% now. Neil tours Mansion House, PISCES, AIM reform, and 19 train stations of brand recognition. One silver bullet: pensions. Also a confession about a tragic cash ISA.21:34 — Euro Defence attracts billionsKNDS, Stark, the EIC discovering it's allowed to do defence now the paperwork matches. Mads connects the dots from air-con bans to North Sea oil to virtue-signalling our industry offshore. Buckle up.30:39 — The AI invoice is due. Who's paying?Qualcomm crashes the chip party, 300 US data-centre moratoriums, enterprises haggling their bills down. Neil reveals the LSEG runs on Copilot (he's coping) and covets your Granola.37:16 — Sovereign AI: let a thousand flowers bloomItaly's Domyn gets anointed Europe's frontier champion. Mads thinks picking winners is "wasted money" and we should copy the Chinese: be a customer, not a VC.41:47 — Anthropic, Mythos & the Fable blackoutfable5up.com says "no." Refresh: still no. Coming 8 July: government ID and facial scans for your fix. Backup plan: send the next PM to Washington with a letter from the King.43:13 — PredictionsDan: SpaceX halves to 120. Neil: please, god, no - it'll ruin his IPO pipeline.44:01 — Deal of the WeekBritish Business Bank backs ten first-time UK VCs. Dan talks his own book, shamelessly.45:07 — Week aheadBending Spoons IPOs (AOL and Evernote's retirement home), SpaceX joins the Nasdaq 100, EIC defence equity, and Microsoft threatens to rip Claude Code from its devs by Monday. Pour one out.
Transcribe →Anthropic’s Fable - Technical or Political - The G7 AI Backroom Chat - Europe's $Trillion Company
2w ago00:44:51Tap to summarizeUpside is a weekly show that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture. This week Dan and Mads are joined by Joe Schorge of Isomer Capital — one of the people who literally decides which European VC funds get to exist. England beat Croatia 4:2, a new PM may have appeared overnight, and somehow we tied none of it back to venture. Onwards.02:25 Economic vibe check — S&P on a record tear (up ~24%), but 75% of economists now whisper "20% drop." The FTSE hits 10,504 and the UK quietly out-grows everyone in Q1. Stagflation: not great, not recession, very British.05:25 Accenture eats it — Shares down ~16-18% on a "thanks for that" earnings call. Mads unpacks whether AI grows consulting or guts it. Verdict: secular pain for the body-shop, maybe salvation for the reinventors. Not a melting ice cube. Probably.11:54 Anthropic gets unplugged — The US switches off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 worldwide, three days after launch. Dario warns AI is dangerous; AI gets controlled; Dario is surprised. The boring real lesson: don't single-source your model. One portco's app worked, then broke, in a single week.20:12 The G7 AI coalition — Amodei and Hassabis pitch a US-led, China-excluding club. China counter-pitches a global one the same day. Mads calls it a market-grab in a national-security costume, and probably self-defeating. Joe wants Europe in the front seat, not talking itself down for once.26:41 DeepSeek's $7.4bn — Raised at $50bn+ with five-year lockups, zero investor votes, and the state AI fund as the only one allowed near the steering wheel. Joe, ever the governance romantic: superpowers tend to become superproblems. Tell Elon.32:07 Mistral's €20bn — Nearly double September, for data centres and compute. Joe is delighted there's a European champion; nobody's entirely sure how much cash it takes to win a war. DeepSeek did it on a shoestring, after all.35:49 Can Europe build a trillion-dollar company? — ASML's basically there (~$720bn). We make more startups than the US, earn 6% higher returns, and watch 30% of our winners emigrate west. Joe: the next European trillion-dollar company already exists. He just wishes he knew which one.42:34 Deal of the Week — Theker (Barcelona): generalist factory robots, €73m Series A, Europe's largest robotics round. We sold KUKA and ABB; this is the comeback.43:47 Week Ahead — Micron's HBM print, GPT-5.6 rumours, and the Anthropic restoration watch.
Transcribe →Has AI Hit Its Glass Ceiling? Quantum IPOs at 500x Rev?! & Siri Goes Google!
3w ago01:09:38Tap to summarizeUpside is a weekly show that looks behind the headlines that will affect European venture, start-ups and investing. On the show this week: 3:03 — SpaceX IPO day: pop, flop or nothing-burger?7:16 — OpenAI files for IPO — own OpenAI at $1tn or Anthropic at $965bn?9:50 — Bending Spoons files for Nasdaq: Europe's app-Berkshire14:01 — ECB's first hike since 2023, and Iran14:35 — European Quantum Week: inside OQC's £260m round24:45 — Quantum sensing: navigation without GPS31:08 — Fable & Mythos: Anthropic's new model and the AI glass ceiling41:30 — AI safety, ENISA and CADA: the European sovereignty angle46:17 — Lumen Sovereign: Britain's first sovereign frontier model54:55 — UK AI Hardware Week: the £1.1bn plan & the Playground Global cheque1:05:50 — WWDC: Siri reborn with Google Gemini under the hood1:06:58 — Deal of the week: ICEYE (Finland)1:07:56 — Deal of the week: Neura Robotics (Germany)1:10:30 — The week ahead: SpaceX trades, Bending Spoons, AI Act loosening, AccentureThis week's guest Callum Stewart — Investment Principal, Bullhound CapitalHosts Mads Jensen (SuperSeed) & Andrew Scott (7percent Ventures)Links & sourcesQuantumOQC Series C: https://oqc.tech/company/newsroom/series-cBBB £100m into OQC: https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news/british-business-bank-commits-ps100m-oxford-quantum-circuitsQuobly €115m Series A: https://www.quobly.io/press-releases/quobly-secures-e115-million-series-a-to-bring-silicon-based-quantum-computers-to-marketIQM upsized PIPE: https://thequantuminsider.com/2026/06/02/iqm-and-real-asset-acquisition-corp-announce-upsized-146-million-pipe-with-new-commitment-from-ilmarinen/Anthropic — Fable & Mythoshttps://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/09/anthropics-claude-fable-5-is-a-version-of-mythos-the-public-can-access-today/https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-releases-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5-with-major-gains-in-coding-and-science/ENISA / Mythos access: https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-mythos-eu-enisa-cybersecurity-accessLumen Sovereignhttps://cosine.sh/blog/building-lumen-sovereign-uk-industry-coalitionhttps://tech.eu/2026/06/08/cosine-secures-industry-backing-for-britain-s-first-sovereign-frontier-model/UK AI Hardware WeekGov £1.1bn plan: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/a-decisive-shift-to-power-british-ai-new-11-billion-plan-to-back-chip-firms-boost-computing-power-and-skills-for-the-ai-revolutionBBB / Playground Global: https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/events/silicon-valley-deeptech-vc-playground-global-launch-uk-support-british-business-bankAMD up to £2bn: https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1288/amd-commits-up-to-2-billion-to-accelerate-ai-innovation-and-research-in-the-united-kingdomWWDC / Sirihttps://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/apple-unveils-next-generation-of-apple-intelligence-siri-ai-and-more/EU rejects exemption: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318136/20260610/eu-rejects-apple-siri-ai-exemption-commission-says-dma-never-blocked-launch.htmDeals of the weekICEYE €450m: https://tech.eu/2026/06/09/iceye-raises-eur450m-at-eur10b-valuation-as-demand-for-sovereign-space-intelligence-accelerates/Neura Robotics: https://www.ft.com/content/237f10c2-b2b2-490b-bec1-8864e0a22772
Transcribe →Time To Rip Out Palantir? - Where Is The AI ROI? - And Florida Sues OpenAI?!
4w ago00:55:06Tap 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!
May 3000:52:13Tap 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?
May 2200:40:38Tap 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?
May 1600:44:27Tap 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.
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