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Upside: European Tech & VC Weekly

Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen - SuperSeed

Upside is a weekly show on European tech, venture capital and startups from the team at SuperSeed. Each week, Dan Bowyer and Mads Jensen look behind the headlines in AI, funding and policy, and what they mean for founders and investors in Europe. New episodes every Sunday.

Full interview audio and video on all major platforms. Join the conversation on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbowyer/

Get in touch: dan@superseed.com

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S1 · E116
Today · 45 min
Jensen’s Jettison Means What? - Unpacking Anthropic’s IPO - Europe Rejects US Big Tech
Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the news and looks behind the headlines affecting European venture. Recorded on Friday the 13th, which was asking for it. Dan, Mads and Pri set out to talk about the biggest IPO in history and get mugged on the way: Nvidia loses its founder, the AI trade does the hokeycokey, and Europe decides it would quite like its data back, thanks. 00:00 Intro: Friday the 13th. What could possibly go wrong? 01:22 Nvidia's CEO and its moat: Jensen walks after 33 years and 60 direct reports, Mads applies for the job, and Anthropic moves Claude onto AMD in three days 11:30 Anthropic's IPO goes live: up to $1.4tn, 20% for retail, $26bn from its own suppliers. Vote of confidence or circular money? Yes. Plus OpenAI discovers it's no longer the biggest kid in class 23:53 The AI trade whiplash: CoreWeave's best day in 18 months, junk-priced bonds, and why your old H100s are suddenly worth more 30:29 Europe's tech dependence: Helsing takes on Palantir, Fractile raises $720m, and Mads asks what "better" actually means 36:48 UK economy: 0.7% growth on AI and cloud, a Bank of England rate hike to celebrate, and the 2027 playbook for founders 42:10 Deals of the Week: Fractile and Zipline. Dan still won't take his loo roll by drone 44:02 Week ahead: Nvidia reports under new management, Anthropic prices Wednesday and trades Thursday, and everyone decamps to Slush Not investment advice. The hosts may own some of the things discussed.
S1 · E115
November 7 · 54 min
Sequoia Leaves London - Voters Leave Data Centres - Notaries Leave Umm, Nothing
Upside is a weekly look behind the headlines, where we connect the dots affecting European venture startups and investing. I took one week off and they handed Lomax the keys. Mads, Pri and Andrew keep him company. Mads opens by confessing to two crimes, one against economics and one against Canada. Then the Nasdaq has its worst day in years. 01:41 Sequoia quits London. Andrew: "nothing to see here, move along" 08:18 Midterms: Democrats take both houses, voters reject data centres in 40 of 41 local ballots, and the neoclouds get shredded 17:00 EU Inc meets the notary lobby. Guess who's winning 26:36 The UK publishes seven AI principles. Principles. Seven of them 31:27 Revolut swaps Claude for a self-hosted Chinese model and cuts AI costs 10x. Mads has tens of thousands of tests and a different view 35:24 Hackers warm up Europe's supermarket freezers. Your fridge is now a computer, and computers need patching 39:38 Walmart spends billions on robots that look nothing like people. Meta builds one that does 44:51 AI Corner: Anthropic's amended S-1, $900bn of compute commitments, and "very close to RSI." Mads underwrites $2tn 50:02 Deals of the Week: Fractile, Lumirel, Hypersonica Not investment advice. Mostly not advice of any kind.
S1 · E114
October 31 · 50 min
The Budget - Are Founders' Relieved? Living In A Trustless World, and Are VCs Dangerous?
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.
S1 · E113
October 24 · 1 hr 2 min
AI Cyber Shocks - The "Boring" Budget - How Britain Gets Its Mojo Back
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.
S1 · E112
October 17 · 47 min
AI capex falters, AI goes vertical, AI's new moat
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
S1 · E111
October 10 · 45 min
AI - Who's Paying Now? - Le Chonk - Any Good? - The UK EU Situationship
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
S1 · E110
October 2 · 52 min
Who Should Police AI - Inside Anthropic's S1 - UK Venture Shines
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.
S1 · E109
September 26 · 1 hr 3 min
Trump & Xi summit means what for Europe? - The AI Price War & Agents Are Everywhere
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 Subscribe, rate, and forward this to a pension fund trustee. Europe needs you.
S1 · E108
September 19 · 55 min
Unpacking AI Doomerism - What Rate Hikes Mean For CAPEX? - Humanoids Land!
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.
S1 · E107
September 13 · 54 min
Our Future According To Anthropic - UK Is Innovating? - An AI Doomer Says What?
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.
S1 · E106
September 5 · 46 min
AI Free Lunch Is Over - Bonds Burning Will Bite - NVIDIA Circular $ Update
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.
S1 · E104
August 15 · 52 min
Nvidia Backstops Wall Street - Open Source is Back Baby! - More AI Agents Go Rogue
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. Subscribe, or the agents win.
S1 · E103
August 8 · 57 min
Markets Too Hot? - The DeepMind Shake Up - The UKs £1bn Fund
Upside #103 - Power Laws, Poached Engineers & The Chuck Norris of Coding Unpacking the week's news that will affect European venture capital, startups and investing. Mads and Dan from SuperSeed host. This week: special guest Sion Evans, MD at VenCap International, the Oxford fund-of-funds that's put $3bn into 500 funds and politely passed on Palantir. He's fine about it. 02:27 Palantir doubles revenue; CXMT becomes China's most valuable company. State capitalism: annoyingly effective? 09:58 Stoxx 600 hits a record 657. All five of Europe's best-performing stocks are semiconductors. Some don't even have growing revenue. Vibes-based repricing, live. 14:54 SpaceX's first public quarter: analyst targets range from $62 to $800. So, nobody knows. 17:45 Bending Spoons buys Airtable for $1.3bn — a mere $10bn below its 2021 valuation. Sion: "I never get tired of a billion-dollar exit." 29:13 Demis steps aside; Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to run science experiments. Google invests anyway. Keep your enemies funded. 37:07 The £1bn UK Scale-up Fund, plus VenCap's receipts: 17 billion-dollar funds, 2.8x net, and the top 5 of 759 companies drive a third of all value. Power law, power law, power law. 53:45 Deals: Olix raises $312m; iron-air batteries get $43m.
S1 · E102
August 1 · 53 min
Markets: Why Winning Is Losing - Big Tech Is Out Of Cash - Cracks in Claude’s Cryptography.
Upside looks behind the headlines to uncover the real stories affecting European venture. Hosted by Europe's leading emerging managers investing early in innovation; space, resilience, deep tech, and physical AI. Recorded 31 July. Dan, Mads, Lomax and Andrew on the FTSE having a record week precisely because it owns no technology, a Chinese memory maker worth more than Intel on the strength of laptop RAM, and a 24-year-old's hedge fund discovering that leverage cuts both ways. [00:00] Nobody's on a yacht [02:36] Markets: FTSE record high, NASDAQ in correction, SOX in a bear market. Winning by owning nothing anyone wants [04:37] Big Tech earnings — Jassy floats a trillion-dollar AWS. Meta spends like an emperor, sells nothing [08:06] CXMT: +466% on debut, 1,600x earnings, zero HBM. Ten percent float, capital controls, and a very enthusiastic retail bid [10:30] Amazon's 5,000 satellites vs Starlink's head start. AST SpaceMobile's tennis-court antenna [13:00] Situational Awareness unwinds. Hubris, meet Griffin [16:53] VIX calm, VXN screaming, a 99th-percentile gap [18:07] Jevon's Paradox: efficiency never saved anyone any coal [20:12] Thinking Machines loses four of six co-founders. OpenAI nears 1bn WAU [22:27] Give Hiring in the UK - £48k for a nuclear propulsion cyber lead. £57k for Cabinet Office TikToks - Gah [23:53] The US humanoid import ban is more than you think, and the death of the Shenzhen shortcut [30:40] Nvidia backstops $250bn. Numbers stop meaning things... [34:34] HAWK's key size halved in 60 hours and $100k of Claude [42:46] Mads' software factory reinvents the paperclip maximiser [45:58] Meta + BlackRock's $14bn El Paso vehicle, conveniently off-books - more fancy financing to come [46:48] Deals: nuclear turbines, Humanoid's unicorn Series A, synthetic defence environments, more quantum [51:34] Week ahead: Palantir earnings, Anthropic IPO still bumbling Subscribe for weekly European venture, minus the hype. Views are the hosts' own. Not investment advice.
S1 · E101
July 25 · 56 min
US Bans Chinese AI? - Hugging Face Hack PR? - What Will Burnham Do Next?
Every week we dig behind the headlines shaping European venture. This week Dan, Mads and Lomax - all early stage European VCs investing in space, resilience, physical AI and deep tech look at a market that's suddenly charging Big Tech for its AI spend, an agentic breach we called back in April, and the one question that decides Britain's future: is there any growth without a return to risk? ⏱️ Chapters 01:05 – Check-ins: Proto Town, what is it? 01:35 – Quick News: $100 oil, the PayPal/Stripe tie-up, a £74 battery, PitchBook's barbell & Kalanick's $1.7bn Atoms. 08:10 – Farnborough's quiet order book, plus Burnham to No.10 and Healey to No.11. 09:40 – The bill arrives: markets still charging bigly for AI capex — Alphabet, Tesla, SAP & Intel. 14:20 – Humanoids: a Newton moment or an iPhone moment? 21:00 – AI Corner: Kimi K3 vs Fable, the Chinese open-model "ban," the Hugging Face breach & AMD–Anthropic. 31:20 – Deep Dive: If you woke up as PM tomorrow what would you do? The risk-free society and the £10k everybody lost. 53:30 – Deals of the Week: Cusp AI, Arrakis & Uber/Delivery Hero. Also: the same week markets punished Alphabet and Tesla for spending, Moonshot shipped Fable-level reasoning at a third of the price, both blades of the squeeze at once. And the Hugging Face breach laid bare the asymmetry every European CISO should fear. For LPs, founders and fellow VCs — knowledge is having the information; wisdom is connecting the dots. 👉 Subscribe for weekly European venture, unfiltered. ⚠️ This show is not investment advice. The hosts may be invested in the funds and companies featured.
S1 · E100
July 18 · 1 hr 5 min
100th Episode Special: What will our world look like in 2028?
Upside #100 - Two Years, Two Wars, One Existential Crisis, Zero Trophies. Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind headlines affecting European venture. Hosted by European emerging managers who all invest early into deep tech, space, physical AI, health, defence and resilience. [02:34] Football grief counselling. Lomax recounts dragging a foldable chair home through the streets in an England shirt "my low point of 2026." Denmark, meanwhile, won something in 1992, apparently. [04:20] News blast: EU Inc's five non-negotiables, Thinking Machines ships "Inkling" (toolkit: "Tinker," adorable), Uber eyes Delivery Hero, and Yan LeCun launches a fund then kills it roughly ten seconds later. [07:10] Markets wobble live on air. NASDAQ down, TSMC down, everyone blames memory and Iran. [08:09] Eli Lilly buys Atai Beckley for up to $3.8bn. Lomax explains DMT nasal spray with the confidence of a man who has opinions about ayahuasca ceremonies. [11:19] Earnings carnage. ASML and TSMC print growth "as far as the eye can see." IBM has its worst day since 1972 (-25%). Mads eulogises the mainframe; Andrew notes it at least doesn't hallucinate your bank balance. [17:43] Korea's memory supercycle; the KOSPI went from 2,500 to 9,000 to 7,000, which is fine and normal and not at all terrifying. Mads says the cycle will turn; the only question is when. [21:57] The main event: two years reviewed. Anthropic up 52x, SpaceX pulls off the biggest IPO in history, and Europe's share of global VC… halves from 16% to 8%. Cool cool cool. Mads insists Europe is thriving; Lomax insists Europe is missing the boat again; both are somehow right. [41:00] Predictions for 2028. Dan calls Bitcoin sub-$20k and declares Apple and Google will "win AI" then admits every prediction is just a personal grudge. Lomax: smart glasses become real and a quantum winter arrives. Andrew: tech is foreign policy, one big LLM ends up in trouble, and Europe manages eight orbital launches to America's ~180. Ouch. [57:12] SpaceX quietly stops taking rideshare bookings until 2028, casually orphaning every hardware startup on Earth. Lomax spots the European opportunity; Andrew reminds him we're "nowhere near" the industrial scale to seize it. [59:24] Deal of the Week: Valerian ($50m, the "anti-Palantir"), MicroAGI ($55m — largest seed in German history, and software-only), plus a repeat cheer for Atai Beckley. [1:02:20] Week ahead: the UK gets its seventh Prime Minister (lucky number seven!), Alphabet and SAP report, Farnborough flexes, and Lomax reveals he got a First in his Odyssey paper then threatens Christopher Nolan with notes. Thanks for a hundred episodes. Still not Joe Rogan. WiP.
S1 · E99
July 11 · 1 hr 1 min
China Blocks AI - Are UK Pensions Now In Venture!? - Is it 1999?
Live from a Lisbon beach studio, Dan, Mads and Lomax dig behind the headlines shaping European venture. This week: China's AI power play, is UK pension money finally trickling into venture, and a full 10-vs-10 slugfest on whether we're partying like it's 1999. 01:10 — Quick news roundup. Grok 4.5 with Cursor, all three flavours of GPT-5.6, Nvidia shedding $1tn (still up 1,500% since ChatGPT), and UK startups raising $17bn in H1 2026 across four mega-rounds. 03:17 — Last week, settled. Tesla smashes deliveries at 480k on European demand; SpaceX's index entry proves a non-event; Samsung's 19x profit jump still can't lift the stock. 06:13 — Burnham and the OBR. A sobering warning: £100bn a year in cuts or tax rises to stabilise debt, against a new PM promising to spend more. 09:24 — GPT-5.6 gets the nod. OpenAI's public launch arrives only after government sign-off — a sign of the strange new times. 10:41 — China's AI playbook. Distilling US models, then gating their own. The lads debate Europe's exposure and why Mads thinks Nvidia's Nemotron wins whatever happens next. 21:10 — UK Pensions pile in. NEST's £200m venture sleeve via Schroders. Small beans, late-stage, top of the market — but is coercion or incentive the right unlock? 32:00 — Is it 1999? Ten reasons yes (CAPE past 40, $800bn circular deals, burn rates) versus ten reasons no (real revenue, saner multiples, constrained demand). The core split: this time the tech actually works. 46:13 — AI Corner. Fable 5 goes metered and chews credits alarmingly fast; Sonnet 5 mops up the low end; ID verification goes live. 48:57 — Portugal special. The 1755 earthquake, Pombal's proto-prefab "birdcage" buildings, and why Lisbon punches above its weight on unicorns per capita. 56:50 — Prediction. Europe's opening: win the real-world, industrial, regulated applications when the bubble deflates. 58:15 — Deals of the week. Luffy AI (£8.1m), Proxima Fusion (€411m), QuantumDiamonds (€91m), plus Blue Origin's $130bn raise. 1:00 — Week ahead. US CPI, ASML and TSMC earnings, and the VW restructuring showdown. New episode every week. Subscribe for the European venture view on global tech. #VentureCapital #AI #EuropeanTech #Startups
S1 · E98
July 4 · 1 hr 6 min
Burnham’s Britain - AI Creates A New World Order - How Trade Becomes War
Every week, Upside digs behind the headlines shaping European venture. This week Dan, Mads and Lomax get into Burnham's Britain and what a Manchester PM means for tech and capital; how AI is being pulled into a new world order as Washington moves from regulating the frontier to gating it, and possibly owning a slice of it; why June's "AI meltdown" was really a rotation, not a crash; trade turning into economic warfare across the US, EU and China; and the quiet return of the human, the rise of the forward-deployed engineer. Plus deals of the week and what to watch in the days ahead. Hosts: Dan (SuperSeed), Mads (SuperSeed) and Lomax (Outsized VC). CHAPTERS 00:43 – Quick-fire news: fusion's "first", Musk's not-a-phone, Iran & Hormuz, Google's brain drain & Gemma 4 03:14 – It's Burnham's Britain: the Starmer scorecard & what a Manchester PM means for tech, tax and risk 19:31 – AI & the new world order: the Anthropic gate, model bans and Washington's 5% stake 33:51 – Markets: rotation, not meltdown and where the next bottleneck (energy) sits 41:41 – Trade as a weapon: 100% tariff threats, Volkswagen's cuts and the China pickle 53:21 – Send in the humans: the rise of the forward-deployed engineer 59:13 – Deals of the week: Quantum Systems & EquiLibre 1:04:14 – The week ahead: Tesla, SpaceX, Samsung, RAISE Summit, VW board, TSMC HIGHLIGHTS – Why the "seventh PM in ten years" problem is itself a drag on UK investment and the risk-free-society thesis behind flat growth since 2007. – Devolution vs. deployment: Burnham wants AI and capital pushed to the regions, but "sovereign British data centres" mean little without models of your own. – The US going from regulator, to gatekeeper, to prospective part-owner of the frontier and what that sovereign risk means for anyone building on top. – Multiple layers of the AI stack holding 80%+ margins at once, and why every memory super-cycle has ended in oversupply. – The forward-deployed engineer as history rhyming: IBM sent engineers in the '70s, and the pendulum's swinging back. DEALS OF THE WEEK – Quantum Systems (Munich) — $1.2bn Series D; Ukraine-proven autonomous drones, and a mooted Stark merger to build a European Anduril. – EquiLibre (Prague) — Creandum's largest-ever single bet; RL trading agents from the DeepStack poker team. MENTIONED THIS EPISODE Realta Fusion · SpaceX · Google (Gemini 3.5 Pro, Gemma 4) · Anthropic (Fable, Mythos, Sonnet 5) · OpenAI · Tesla · Samsung · TSMC · Volkswagen · Alphabet EU fine · Mistral · Quantum Systems · Stark · EquiLibre · Creandum SOURCES & FURTHER READING – Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-launches-claude-sonnet-5-as-a-cheaper-way-to-run-agents/ – US jobs report (BLS): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm – Trump digital-tax tariff threat (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4rd71411ko – Additional analysis referenced from the Financial Times (AI world order, markets rotation, trade).
S1 · E97
June 27 · 45 min
Why Does Micron Matter? Will UK Capital Flow? The AI Bill Is Due - Who’s Paying?
Upside 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 kicking SpaceX 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 detector Mads 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 billions KNDS, 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 bloom Italy'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 blackout fable5up.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 — Predictions Dan: SpaceX halves to 120. Neil: please, god, no - it'll ruin his IPO pipeline. 44:01 — Deal of the Week British Business Bank backs ten first-time UK VCs. Dan talks his own book, shamelessly. 45:07 — Week ahead Bending 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.
S1 · E96
June 20 · 44 min
Anthropic’s Fable - Technical or Political - The G7 AI Backroom Chat - Europe's $Trillion Company
Upside 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.

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