Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. On this week's show...

Anthropic is having the week of its life, Jamie Dimon wants you to know the sky is falling (again), and Germany spent €2 billion learning that shipbuilding is hard. Dan and Lomax fly as a duo this week.

00:00 – Intro & News Radar – Iran ceasefire (maybe), global VC hits $300B in Q1 alone (70% of all 2025 deployment), four companies absorbed $188B of that, Russian hackers are in your router, and a Brit insists he isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. Busy week.

04:16 – Anthropic: The Full Picture – Run rate has tripled to $30B, overtaking OpenAI's $25B. Over 1,000 enterprise customers spending $1M+, eight of the Fortune 10 on the books, and 32% of the enterprise LLM API market locked down. Mythos, their new frontier model, found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and hit a 72.4% exploit rate versus Opus 4.6's 14.4%. So powerful only 40 organisations have access. They also acquired Coefficient Bio for $400M in stock — six employees, founded last year, backed by Dimension Capital who turned $10M into $204M in Anthropic paper. EMEA is their fastest-growing region with 9x revenue growth and offices across six European cities.

22:15 – Jamie Dimon's Annual Letter – 48 pages of structural warnings. Historically brilliant on multi-year calls (fiscal deficits, fintech disruption, HTM accounting), less brilliant on timing — he's called recession four years running. This year: inflation as "the skunk at the party," private credit's $1.8T transparency problem, and JPM spending $20B a year building AI in-house with $2B in cost savings already.

29:36 – Mega IPOs – SpaceX ($2T, June), Anthropic (October, $60B raise), OpenAI (Q4/Q1 '27, $852B). Combined primary issuance could exceed 2025's entire US equity capital formation of $232B. Every major 2025 IPO traded down. Worth noting.

37:43 – Climate Tech Returns – Rebranded as energy security and resilience. Climate VC hit $40.5B in 2025, up 8%. 87% of US companies quietly increased sustainability spend. The money's flowing — just under different letterhead.

43:32 – Germany's Defence Nightmare – €10B for six warships, four years behind, prime contractor fired, Dutch-French-German finger-pointing all round. Defence budget rising from €86B to €152B by 2029 but procurement can't keep up. The EU's new AGILE fund offers €115M for defence startups with a four-month turnaround. Welcome to the age of cheap warfare.

48:34 – OpenAI Buys TBPN – A one-year-old live tech show with 58,000 YouTube subscribers, acquired for low hundreds of millions weeks before a potential IPO. OpenAI says it'll stay independent. Sure.

50:44 – Predictions & Deals of the Week – Dan calls Anthropic becoming Europe's de facto AI partner. Lomax brings Gilead's $5B acquisition of German biotech Tubulis. Dan flags Zero Shot Fund from OpenAI alumni.

Every week we look behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing.

This week it's with Lomax from Outsized Ventures, Andrew from 7 Percent, and myself, your host Dan Bowyer from Superseed.

00:00 – Dan declares himself sexy for the first time ever. The physical AI / reshoring zeitgeist has finally caught up with what SuperSeed's been doing for a decade. Lomax gently reminds him that being in vogue doesn't actually fix anything.

06:01 – Quick-fire news roundup: Artemis II launches, Apple turns 50, software stocks crater, SpaceX files for what might be the largest IPO in human history. Andrew reminds us the stock market is mostly vibes anyway.

11:06 – Mistral raises $830M in debt to build Nvidia-powered AI data centres in Europe. Lomax points out everything Mistral does is roughly 1% of the US equivalent. Andrew thinks it's a safe bet. Dan wonders if the French government will end up owning it.

12:17 – NHS staff boycott Palantir. Andrew says this is the tip of the iceberg when you outsource critical infrastructure to a company whose chairman publicly slagged off the NHS. Lomax reveals New York is also dumping Palantir. The hunt for a European alternative begins. Lomax conveniently has an Italian pre-seed for this.

31:13 – UK defence tech brain drain. Founders relocating to the Bay Area because MoD procurement takes longer than most startups survive. Lomax drops a monologue about Anduril's $20B contract while UK founders can't even get framework agreements cashed up. Andrew notes the MoD has capped software procurement at three years, which is still absurd.

41:56 – Poolside loses its CoreWeave compute deal, tanking a $2B raise at $12B valuation. The lesson: if you're going full-stack, hire people who've actually built data centres.

47:21 – Dan predicts local models will handle 95% of knowledge work within 18 months. Andrew remains wonderfully unconvinced.

48:42 – Deals of the week: Starcloud ($170M, fastest YC unicorn ever), Fractile ($200M AI chip talks, Oxford spinout), and Manna Air Delivery ($50M Series B, drones from Dublin).

Every week, we look behind the headlines to explore what's coming down the track that will affect European venture, start-ups and investing.

00:00 — Meet Harry Destecroix Dan butchers the fund status (already closed, Dan), Harry sets out the SCVC thesis: generalist deep tech, breakthrough technologies from UK universities, everything from quantum to advanced therapeutics.

01:40 — EIF's €15B Fund of Funds: Salvation or Same Old? The EU's massive growth-stage vehicle promises to unlock €80B in scale-up funding. Will it diversify European VC or just keep writing cheques to the same crowd? Harry drops the bomb that the ECF still has a €5M max round size. Lomax reminds everyone that 0.02% of EU pension assets are in venture. And the House of Lords just torpedoed Mansion House. Lovely.

07:10 — Fund Size Is Strategy A €50M seed fund split 20 ways produces "horrible syndicated rounds." The US writes $10-20M seeds while Europe argues over whether £5M is too generous.

11:02 — Should Europe Just Own the Application Layer? Let America build foundation models, let China sell cheap tokens, let Europe double down on defence, sovereignty, and AI applications. Harry agrees but insists deep tech still needs deep pockets.

14:07 — Getting Governments Out of VC Lomax makes the case for private capital. Harry points out 5% allocation to high-risk assets is hardly betting the farm. Dan reveals his portfolio is "95% that way."

21:10 — Project Prometheus: Bezos Drops $100B on Physical AI Buy old-economy manufacturers, juice them with AI. Europe has 20% GDP in manufacturing vs 10% in the US — massive opportunity. Harry suggests maybe it's just a clever way around EU planning laws. The eternal question: buy incumbents or build from scratch?

28:21 — China's Token Economy: The New OPEC? China prices inference at 1/180th of OpenAI. Chinese models hold 4 of the top 5 spots on Open Router. NIST found them 12x more susceptible to hijacking attacks. Great for cash-strapped startups. Terrifying for enterprise CTOs.

34:19 — Cursor's Kimi Scandal Got hammered not for using Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5, but for not being upfront about it. A cautionary tale in transparency.

36:14 — ARM Builds Its Own Chip After 36 Years ARM sacrifices its licensing model on the altar of AI inference. Meta is first customer. Dan asks if Intel still exists.

39:54 — Innovate UK Gets a Founder at the Helm Tom Adeyoola takes the reins of ~£1B annual budget. Harry (council member) is cautiously optimistic: stop spreading money thin, start tracking "deal flow," stop wasting founders' time. Can a founder survive the civil service?

48:12 — PREDICTIONS 🔮 Lomax: Hyperscaler revenue won't justify $602B capex. Amazon alone outspends the entire US energy sector. 🔮 Harry: Mag Seven fragmenting. Microsoft and Meta at 52-week lows. SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs could trigger rotation — unless Iran blows it up. 🔮 Dan: AI revenue reporting is smoke and mirrors. Anthropic's "$6B month" was run-rate maths. 79% of OpenAI customers also pay for Anthropic. Everyone's buying everything — and that stops.

56:19 — Deals of the Week 🏆 Lomax: Air Street Capital Fund III — $232M, solo GP. 🏆 Dan: Granola hits unicorn status. British. Brilliant. 🏆 Harry: Lace Lithography — Norwegian startup breaking below EUV limits. Harry explains optical physics without his PhD colleague. Brave.

Hosts Lomax Ward, Dan Bowyer and Harry Destecroix.

Guest: Dr. Harry Destecroix - founder, PhD chemist, sold Ziylo to Novo Nordisk for £800M, founder of SCVC, Innovate UK council member, and "super fabulous."

Every week on Upside, we try to unpack the news that's going to affect European venture, start-ups and investing. If you're a founder, GP, or LP, this is the show for you to catch up on the week's shenanigans.

Hosted by Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, and Lomax Ward, all European venture capitalists.

00:00 — Nvidia's GTC: Jensen Drops a Trillion-Dollar Bomb

Three new chips announced, each more ridiculous than the last. The Groq inference chip does 35x tokens per watt. Vera Rubin does 10x Blackwell. And the Feynman chip (2028) stacks silicon on silicon like a semiconductor lasagne. Marginal improvements these are not.

04:38 — Star Cloud: Data Centres in Space, Because Why Not

A seed-stage startup founded by an English bloke gets its video played at the biggest GPU conference on earth. The lads are impressed. Dan remains "not sold" but concedes it's "a lovely story." Literal moonshots, baby.

07:54 — Is Nvidia a Buy? (This Is Not Investment Advice™)

Mads runs the numbers: Nvidia trades at 21x forward earnings, basically the S&P average, except the S&P doesn't grow 73% a year. Bull case: it's cheap. Bear case: three of its biggest customers are building competing silicon. Classic.

12:00 — The AI Lab Business Model Hunger Games

OpenAI kills side gigs and panics into enterprise. Anthropic does a Palantir cosplay with Blackstone. Mistral quietly shows up with a billion-dollar run rate. Mads says without consumer monetisation, OpenAI is "toast." Dan doesn't buy the ad model. Lomax says think outside the box.

20:42 — Norway's $2.2 Trillion Fund Manager Is Spooked

Nikolai Tangen says markets are sleepwalking past the Iran risk and an AI bubble could vaporise 35% of his fund. Amazon is free cash flow negative for the first time since the Clinton administration. Alphabet's FCF is down 90%. Meta's is near zero. The hyperscalers went from the greatest cash machines ever built to borrowing money for GPUs. Meanwhile Apple sits at the bottom of the CapEx chart, vibing.

30:00 — A Man, His Dying Dog, and ChatGPT

Sydney tech founder uses ChatGPT + AlphaFold + a university lab to build a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his rescue dog. Lomax provides the necessary reality check (the dog still has cancer) but admits personalised medicine is coming, just give it 20-30 years. Meanwhile DeepMind can't define AGI and is paying researchers $200K to help them figure it out.

41:00 — Google Stitch: Vibe Design & Lovable's Nightmare

Google coins "vibe design" (jury's out on whether that sticks) and launches a free AI design canvas that ships code straight to MCP. Lovable's head of growth already said her biggest fear is platforms with distribution. Lovable responds by pivoting into... everything? The internet is not impressed.

45:49 — Rachel Reeves Discovers Non-Competes Are Bad

The Chancellor uses the Mais lecture to announce non-compete limits, £500M for sovereign AI, and £2B for quantum, including actually buying quantum computers from UK companies. Then she mentions £13.8M for quantum research hubs and the mood deflates slightly.

50:10 — EU Inc: Europe's Delaware (Pending Lobbying Apocalypse)

The EU wants 48-hour company formation, under €100, no notary. Andreas Klinger's movement becomes official policy. The gang gives it a 50/50 chance of surviving the legislative sausage factory. Lomax notes that even Delaware made him send a fax, so maybe the bar is lower than we thought.

53:33 — Travis Comes Out of Stealth (Not the Band)

The Uber founder resurfaces after eight years of cloud kitchens with "Atoms" - a physical AI company targeting food, transport, and mining. The combination makes zero obvious sense but nobody wants to bet against the man who built Uber. Fair.

Every week we dig into the news affecting European venture, startups and investing.

This week, Trump may have speed-run a global recession. Europe is having a moment. Cursor might be toast. And Jensen Huang promises a chip that will "surprise the world."

00:00 — The Oil Shock: Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, 20M barrels/day offline, IEA buffer lasts ~20 days. Dan calls it: we're in recession territory.

01:37 — Europe's Energy Crisis 2.0: Gas storage down 40%, prices doubled, the post-2022 diversification strategy is broken.

03:00 — Silver linings: UK nuclear push, EU Industrial Accelerator Act, sovereignty becoming investable.

04:54 — Defence Tech & Drone Economics: Ukraine is the Silicon Valley of drone warfare. $20K Shahed drones are taking out $300M US radar bases.

07:00 — The $3.6M Tomahawk problem: US firing missiles faster than it orders them. George Bush quote of the week involving a camel.

08:38 — AI in warfare: school tragedy raises hard questions about AI-guided targeting and accountability gaps.

11:08 — Poland rejects €44B EU defence loan for political reasons. Polish Iron Dome: €3.5B. US Golden Dome: $1T. "It's gold. It's Trump."

13:03 — Europe's Big Week: AMI Labs raises $1B seed (Europe's first Instacorn), Revolut gets UK licence, Alan hits €800M ARR, #LondonMaxing trends.

15:29 — World Models vs LLMs: LeCun thinks current AI is the wrong path to AGI. Mads agrees — you can't have general intelligence if you can't cross a room.

25:19 — Cursor at $50B? 20x in a year, but it's a middleman. Claude Code killed the IDE. The Jasper parallel is not flattering.

30:00 — AI & Chips: Meta building its own inference chips. Custom ASICs growing 3x faster than GPUs. Nvidia's moat showing cracks. GTC next week.

33:30 — Atlassian & Oracle cutting jobs. AI as cover for a general RIF?

34:18 — Deal of the Week: UForce (Ukrainian defence, UK-based), $1B valuation, $50M raise.

34:53 — Week Ahead: Fed holds, rate cuts pushed to September, ECB meeting, 42% chance of a 2026 rate hike.

36:00 — Hot Take: AI pendants and wearable mics — Dan's not buying it.

🔥 BEST LINES

"I don't know anybody who is a leading thinker on coding who writes their own code."

"Computer science seems to be largely a solved problem."

"Of course it's gold. It's Trump!”

Every week we unpack the real stories behind the headlines affecting European venture.

Hosts: Dan, Lomax and Mads - All European early stage VCs.

02:00 — Why Hormuz matters more than you think.

04:08 — Europe: affected, not influential. Europe keeps ending up front row for crises it cannot shape.

10:38 — The startup angles: energy, drones, sovereignty

13:29 — “Fast fashion” warfare. Ukraine-style low-cost interceptor drones versus million-dollar missiles. Warfare has entered its brutally efficient Zara phase.

17:29 — Anthropic vs the Pentagon. Anthropic says no to some defence use cases, Washington gets angry, OpenAI pounces, and Claude fans turn the whole thing into a consumer loyalty event.

19:54 — Mads: pick a lane. You cannot call AI the new nuclear weapon and then act shocked when governments treat it like strategic infrastructure.

24:30 — Lomax: moral stance, fine. Pentagon contracts, also fine? Anthropic can absolutely posture as the ethical lab. It just looks awkward while cashing defence-adjacent cheques.

27:49 — AI layoffs… or just layoffs with better branding? Dan calls BS on Block’s “AI-driven” cuts: more likely a classic overhiring hangover dressed up in robot costume.

32:30 — The tech is real, the memo is theatre. Mads agrees AI is delivering genuine productivity gains. That does not mean every layoff deck suddenly becomes visionary.

34:19 — $650bn of AI infra: boom or bubble? Answer from the group: yes.

35:57 — Mads: froth on top, substance underneath. Some of the market is ridiculous. But revenue growth at the top labs is so real that “it’s all a bubble” no longer survives contact with reality.

38:26 — Black Swan memo season. Lomax reviews Lux’s warning to founders: preserve runway, know your infra risk, and do not assume the money tap stays on forever.

45:23 — Real advice needs real trade-offs. Mads’ sharpest point: “raise more if it’s easy” is not advice. The real question is whether founders should spend time fundraising or building.

47:05 — Merz drops the diplomatic niceties. Germany’s chancellor says Europeans are not productive enough, boosts defence, and generally sounds like someone who has seen the spreadsheet.

51:20 — Lomax: kill FCAS. His take on the Franco-German-Spanish fighter programme: too slow, too old, too late. Back the future, not the museum.

56:07 — Defence primes vs insurgents. Should Europe protect legacy giants or let new defence players eat their lunch? The answer gets lively.

1:01:25 — Proxima Fusion: Europe swings big. A rare hopeful note: a European fusion startup is trying to build something properly enormous and properly ambitious.

1:02:12 — Stellarators, briefly. Mads explains fusion like a sane person: tokamaks are more proven but unstable; stellarators are harder to build but may work better long term.

Upside is a weekly review of all of the news affecting European venture, startups and investing.

VC Hosts: Dan, Mads, Lomax

[03:05] Nvidia Earnings — 14th consecutive beat. Data centre rev up 75% to $62B. Stock basically flat. The market has priced in perfection. Bull case: 16x 2028 earnings, Rubin shipping, China at zero = pure upside. Bear case: custom ASICs climbing, 75% margins under siege. "The question is whether the AI companies can actually monetise it."

[09:11] Ukraine, Four Years On — From aid recipient to defence-tech supplier. Ukrainian startups raised $105M in 2025 — a third of all European early-stage defence capital. European defence budgets heading from ~$300B to ~$600B. Defence tech investment: $100M in 2019 → $1.5B in 2025. The 100:1 drone kill ratio is extraordinary economics. War is maths, and Ukraine is winning it.

[23:30] Anthropic's Safety Meets Reality — Founded to be the safe one. Now dropping guardrails weeks after a $30B raise. Pentagon threatened to brand them a supply chain risk. Lomax: "Call me cynical." Mads: "Existential threats rewire moral calculus. It happened to OpenAI. It happened to Google. Now it's Anthropic's turn." RIP Bletchley Park.

[29:25] Chinese Distillation — 24,000 fake accounts. 16M exchanges. DeepSeek, Moonshot and Minimax caught training on Anthropic's models at industrial scale. National security issue? Obviously. But China has a chokehold on the US defence supply chain, so good luck with that conversation.

[32:00] Anthropic Goes Enterprise — Salesforce, Slack, DocuSign integrations. Partner or Trojan horse? Mads: building enterprise apps is way harder than vibe coding on a Thursday afternoon.

[35:30] SaaSpocalypse or Renaissance? — The market can't decide. Current thesis: SaaS = system of record, AI = system of action. Honest answer? Nobody knows.

[36:20] AI Margins — OpenAI hit 33% gross margin (targeted 46%). Anthropic hit 30% (targeted 40%). Nearly $4B spent on free users. Break-even pushed to 2028-2030. Lomax: "Can you run a giant tech company on 30% gross margin? The multiple doesn't work."

[41:45] European Quantum — Funding hit $1.5B in 2025 (+170% YoY). Strong science layer, governments actually buying from startups. But PsiQuantum alone raised $1B in the US. Mads: "Europe has €16T in pension capital. The deficit is plumbing, not capability."

[52:45] The Doomsday Paper — "What if AI succeeds so hard it triggers a macro crisis?" Mads dismantles it. Jamie Dimon tie-in: maybe SaaS is the new subprime.

[57:35] Deal of the Week — Wayve raising $1.2B at $8.6B. First automotive investor: Nissan.

[58:20] Week Ahead — UK Spring Statement. DeepSeek DBC-4. OpenAI $100B round. Hegseth vs Amodei showdown — Dan's prediction: Anthropic caves.

For the week's latest news behind the headlines affecting European Venture, startups and investing.

Hosts: Dan Bowyer, Lomax Ward Guest: Eyal Malinger — Co-founder, Resurge Growth Partners (venture equity — the gap between VC and PE)

[02:18] Humanoid Robots at China's Spring Festival Gala Four Chinese firms showed off cable-free dancing robots. Eyal's reaction progression: "game over" → "Clone Wars" → "why are there swords near children?" China controls ~90% of humanoid shipments. H1/G1 robots going for $6-10K. Europe has… Neuro Robotics and OverSonic at Series A. Cool.

[05:59] Will Robots Replace Soldiers? Eyal: if you don't need to risk soldiers, you will use them. Lomax: nukes still deter total war, but skirmishes could proliferate. Everyone: yes, we'd have a robot butler. Lomax: depends on the price (he lives in Portugal).

[10:57] Raspberry Pi — Europe's First Meme Stock? Stock pumped after CEO bought shares + Reddit hype around OpenClaw. Trading at ~£600M. Edge AI debate ensues. Lomax: "Isn't this a time to celebrate Europe finally has its own meme stock?"

[14:36] AI Causing a Fuss: Anthropic vs The Pentagon Anthropic doesn't want autonomous kill decisions. Eyal channels Palantir's Alex Karp: "Our adversaries will not pause for theatrical debate." Lomax: Dario wants to have his cake and eat it. Everyone broadly agrees ethics are a luxury when the other side doesn't play by the rules.

[17:19] Peter Steinberger Leaves Europe for OpenAI Created OpenClaw, Europe celebrated for two weeks, then he bounced to San Francisco. Lomax: "I thought things had got better." Dan: who in Europe could've called him? Eyal: if he'd been in London instead of Austria, maybe different story. Cue weekly EU ecosystem lament. Macron pledged €30M for AI. Anthropic just raised $30B. Right.

[24:00] VC AI Toolkits — David Stark Open-Sources His Setup WhatsApp meeting briefs, auto-transcription, deal flow into HubSpot. Lomax calls it "cute." Eyal: most of this is just Zapier with extra steps. Real alpha = agentic AI that sources and approaches founders autonomously. Dan: if everyone has Harmonic, nobody has alpha.

[31:00] Munich Security Conference Recap 62nd edition. Rubio slightly less abrasive than JD Vance (low bar). Merz says the old order is over. Starmer accelerating UK defence spend to 3%. Stark (drones) raised big from Founders Fund — German defence minister uncomfortable with Peter Thiel on the cap table. Sovereignty debates continue. Lomax: "You can't tell Europe to be sovereign then beat them for being sovereign."

[37:56] Health & Bio Good News Compass Pathways nails second Phase 3 trial for synthetic psilocybin treating resistant depression — could be on market by 2027. Savo Health working on non-invasive CGM patches (goodbye arm claws).

[39:56] Deals of the Week

• Quantonation — largest European quantum fund ever
• Ineffable — $1B seed (!!) at $4B pre-money, led by Sequoia. David Silver (AlphaGo architect) leaves DeepMind
• Netflix / Warner Bros M&A — Eyal hopes it signals FTC/DOJ reopening the exit valve for VC and PE

[42:30] Fin. 🎙️