Upside

Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen - SuperSeed
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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 

  1. 2d ago

    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

    1h 1m

  2. Jul 4

    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).

    1h 6m

  3. Jun 27

    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.

    46 min

  4. Jun 20

    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.

    45 min

  5. Jun 13

    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

    1h 10m

  6. Jun 6

    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.

    55 min

  7. May 30

    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)

    52 min

  8. May 22

    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.

    41 min
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About

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 

Information

  • Creator
    Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen - SuperSeed
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Upside
  • Show Website
    Upside

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