Welcome back to another episode of the EUVC Podcast, where we bring together Europe’s venture family to share the stories, insights, and lessons that drive our ecosystem forward. This week, we sit down with Will Wells, founder-turned-VC, and now Partner at Speedinvest, where he leads deep tech and supports the firm’s growth strategy. Will’s journey spans building Hummingbird Technologies, an AI-powered agtech company exited to Agreena in 2022, to leading frontier tech at Firstminute Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Now at Speedinvest, he’s focused on backing European founders working on sovereign compute, defense, energy resilience, biosecurity, and the “picks and shovels” of the next decades. 🎧 Here’s what’s covered: 01:00 From founder to investor: lessons from building Hummingbird Technologies and the empathy it gave Will as a VC. 05:00 Learning venture at Firstminute and Lightspeed: what “good” looks like in deep tech investing. 07:00 Beyond buckets: why the biggest opportunities lie in combining AI, hardware, defense, and science into multi-sector platforms. 10:00 Big bets in deep tech: Europe’s challenge at pre-seed and why bold consortium funding matters early. 12:00 Defense tech & geopolitics: reconciling economic opportunity with moral responsibility. 15:00 Strategic sovereignty: compute, semiconductors, energy resilience, and why Europe needs its own infrastructure. 17:00 Thesis-building: inevitable truths, technical stacks, and where customers will actually buy. 20:00 Agtech, climate, and humility: what Will learned from being early in robotics and regen agriculture. 24:00 Leveraging Speedinvest’s platform model: why deep vertical teams and operational scale matter in frontier tech. 29:00 Looking ahead: biosecurity, autonomy, energy resilience — and why Europe must back multi-generational deep tech companies.
