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 t...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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, nothin...

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
<...

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 se...

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. Revolu...

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 Whi...

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 –...

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 h...

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 o...

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.

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...

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 stil...

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 a...

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 $25...

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...

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 S...

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 a...

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%, S...

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...

Upside Live from Montenegro: Five GPs, Five Bets

Recorded live from a Montenegrin port at a European LP/GP gathering of 80 investors, Dan asked 5 European investors the same question: 

If you had to put every penny of your fund and personal capital into one bet in Europe, where would it go?

(01:21) Jens Lapinski — German super angel 

Jens would back the full AI stack, money transfer infrastructure, training environments, enterprise deployment. On sovereign AI, he argues the US-Europe relationship is one investment continuum rather than two comp...

Hosts: Mads Jensen (moderator), Lomax Ward (Lisbon beach bum), Dr. Andrew Scott (serial mute-button offender) Missing: Dan Bowyer — scaling actual mountains. We told him to come back alive. Mostly because nobody else wants to moderate.

[02:30] — ARM vs Spotify: One the Market Loves, One It Doesn't Both posted good numbers. ARM got rewarded, Spotify got a -13% haircut and a 25% YTD drawdown despite record margins and 761m MAUs. Lomax calls ARM's AGI CPU pivot a "bet the farm." Mads drops the CPU:GPU ratio shift from 1:8 to potentially 1:1 as agentic AI explodes tool...

Every week on Upside, we look behind the headlines to expose the real news affecting European venture, startups and investing. 

Charles hands Trump a bell, Musk says he's not building AGI (this week), and Brussels manages 12 hours of trilogue with absolutely nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Big Tech spent the GDP of a small country on GPUs, and Europe, yes, Europe, quietly dropped two near-billion-dollar AI rounds out of UCL. Buckle up.

(00:48) Round-up King Charles's grooming of Trump hits new heights with HMS Trump's actual ship's bell. Whisky tariff dropped o...

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real news behind the headlines affecting European venture startups and investing. Hosted by Mads and Dan from SuperSeed. 

This week: the EU admits it wrote a bad AI Act (shocking), Sergey Brin is wheeled out of retirement again, SpaceX buys a coding company because of course, and Wall Street invents a new way to short private credit. Dan and Mads untangle.

(02:00) DeepSeek V4 drops overnight — Chinese open-weights model benchmarking at Opus 4.6 level. The gap between Western frontier and Chinese open source is now 78 days. Trained ent...

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the news and headlines that will affect European venture startups and investing.

This week Dan and Mads go deep on what Hungary's political earthquake means for European capital flows, why Anthropic is speedrunning a monopoly, and whether one bloke with a laptop can really build a unicorn (spoiler: it's complicated).

[03:28] Orbán Out, Money In Hungary was the EU's most corrupt member state and Orbán was Russia and China's favourite circuit-breaker inside Brussels. Peter Magyar takes over mid-summer and suddenly €90bn in EU funding unlocks, twen...

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 w...

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...

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...

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...

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 investa...

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, Open...

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 Eur...

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 Sol...