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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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