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Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen - SuperSeed

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 

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  • 25 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 52 min
  • English

Episodes 25

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  • S1 · E112
    Yesterday · 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.

  • S1 · E95
    June 13 · 1 hr 9 min

    Has AI Hit Its Glass Ceiling? Quantum IPOs at 500x Rev?! & Siri Goes Google!

    Upside 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-Berkshire 14:01 — ECB's first hike since 2023, and Iran 14:35 — European Quantum Week: inside OQC's £260m round 24:45 — Quantum sensing: navigation without GPS 31:08 — Fable & Mythos: Anthropic's new model and the AI glass ceiling 41:30 — AI safety, ENISA and CADA: the European sovereignty angle 46:17 — Lumen Sovereign: Britain's first sovereign frontier model 54:55 — UK AI Hardware Week: the £1.1bn plan & the Playground Global cheque 1:05:50 — WWDC: Siri reborn with Google Gemini under the hood 1:06:58 — 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, Accenture This week's guest Callum Stewart — Investment Principal, Bullhound Capital Hosts Mads Jensen (SuperSeed) & Andrew Scott (7percent Ventures) Links & sources Quantum OQC Series C: https://oqc.tech/company/newsroom/series-c BBB £100m into OQC: https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/news/british-business-bank-commits-ps100m-oxford-quantum-circuits Quobly €115m Series A: https://www.quobly.io/press-releases/quobly-secures-e115-million-series-a-to-bring-silicon-based-quantum-computers-to-market IQM 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 & Mythos https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5 https://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-access Lumen Sovereign https://cosine.sh/blog/building-lumen-sovereign-uk-industry-coalition https://tech.eu/2026/06/08/cosine-secures-industry-backing-for-britain-s-first-sovereign-frontier-model/ UK AI Hardware Week Gov £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-revolution BBB / Playground Global: https://www.british-business-bank.co.uk/news-and-events/events/silicon-valley-deeptech-vc-playground-global-launch-uk-support-british-business-bank AMD 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-kingdom WWDC / Siri https://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.htm Deals of the week ICEYE €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

  • S1 · E94
    June 6 · 55 min

    Time To Rip Out Palantir? - Where Is The AI ROI? - And Florida Sues OpenAI?!

    Plus 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.

  • S1 · E93
    May 30 · 52 min

    AI Winners Beyond NVIDIA - Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 Is Out! - A Zero Employee Startup Raises $30m!

    This 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)

  • S1 · E92
    May 22 · 40 min

    IPOs Unfreeze - 3 Sovereign Euro Deals Land - Do You Hate AI?

    This 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.

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