What Europe's Latest Deals Reveal About Capital, Governance, and Speed

Working across large organizations for close to thirty years, I have learned to watch for moments when two situations look similar on the surface but diverge underneath. This third episode of The European Perspective gave us several of those. Stewart was away this time, so Stephen Brooks and Annette van Berge Henegouwen carried the conversation with me.

We started with SAP's investment in Prior Labs, a UK tabular model company that recently raised well over a billion. It reads like a European win, but Stephen pointed out that Microsoft is funding Mistral's infrastructure buildout too, meaning an American hyperscaler is paying for European capability while embedding it into its own cloud. The same question followed us through Humanoid, Cusp AI and Neko Health: Europe is producing valuable companies, but ownership of the growth that follows them is not guaranteed.

Annette brought a more hopeful thread from her time at the European Innovation Academy, where three hundred students are building startups from scratch this month. Her point: education systems reward compliance over curiosity, and the skills entrepreneurship actually needs are rarely taught directly.

Volkswagen and Continental gave us the sharpest contrast of the episode. Volkswagen is trying to bring its whole organization through a long co-creation process. Continental sold ContiTech to private equity and returned to being a pure-play tire maker. Same pressure, opposite paths, and neither one is obviously right.

Banking added another layer, with Berlin's UniCredit and Commerzbank agreement landing the same week as an EU banking reform blueprint. Annette called it integration in theory, ring-fencing in practice.

We closed on AI agents, and a mistake I made myself: burning three hundred euros in a single day without checking what the tokens were producing. Several corporates are now shutting agent programs down instead of fixing the measurement problem underneath them. The lesson is not to abandon the technology. It is to measure what it actually costs against what it returns.

Timecode

00:00 Welcome & Intro

00:44 Tech & AI: SAP, Mistral, Microsoft

05:08 Success Stories: Funding Roundup

17:00 Transformation & Governance: VW vs Continental

23:46 Banking: UniCredit & Commerzbank

27:45 Entrepreneurial Thinking: Founders Returning

34:28 F-Up of the Week

Guests Links

Annette Van Berge Henegouwen: https://www.annettevanbergehenegouwen.com/

Stephen Brooks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenabrooks1/

Links:

⁠https://www.jensheitland.com/links