Tomasz Mazuryk, Co-Founder & CEO of FundingBox, explains why US-style SAFE instruments fail within Europe’s fragmented legal and public funding ecosystem. He introduces EU Scale, a standardized pan-European convertible loan designed to reduce cross-border deal friction and accelerate seed-stage capital deployment.

Guest Micro-Bio:
Featuring Tomasz Mazuryk, Co-Founder & CEO at FundingBox.

Host Micro-Bio:
Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/eu-scale-convertible-loan-reform-startuprad-io

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European retail is entering a margin war driven by global platform competitors. In this episode, Arber Sejdiji, CEO of Zenline AI, explains why the strategic battleground is not pricing or promotion, but assortment decision velocity. We cover why dashboards fail at catalog scale, how long-tail data exposes hidden margin loss, and why relationship mapping is now required to price and curate assortments profitably.

Guest Micro-Bio (standard):
Featuring Arber Sejdiji, CEO at Zenline AI.

Host Micro-Bio (standard):
Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/zenline-ai-agentic-assortment-decisions-win-retail-margins-startuprad-io

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uDLG7H5exgA

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Polarsteps scaled from roughly 10M to 18M+ users by building a travel product that people love enough to share privately with the few people who matter most. In this episode, Clare Jones (CEO, Polarsteps) explains why intimate sharing beats broadcast virality, how Polarsteps accelerated growth by focusing on France, and why the company deliberately delayed subscription monetization despite travel being one of the strongest categories for paid conversion. We also unpack Polarsteps’ AI travel planner approach, how personalization avoids generic “LLM itineraries,” and what it means to build a global consumer brand in Europe without compromising privacy, trust, or values.

Guest Micro-Bio:
Featuring Clare Jones, CEO at Polarsteps.

Host Micro-Bio:
Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/polarsteps-growth-privacy-first-travel-app-at-18m-users-startuprad-io

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Qjc1fkttauY

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COBY’s approach to child-facing voice AI treats safety, privacy, and trust as architecture decisions. The system earns trust before prompting coping conversations, enforces pre-release safety gates through adversarial simulations and expert validation, and preserves privacy with EU-hosted inference plus parent-phone background processing. Success is measured in household outcomes: time-to-bed, evening conflicts, and homework minutes.

- Trust must be earned before coping prompts work
- Safety requires adversarial testing and expert validation before release
- Privacy-first means compute placement and EU-hosted control.

Guest Micro-Bio:
Featuring David Cañadas Link, Co-Founder & CEO at COBY.

Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/child-safe-ai-for-bedtime-routines

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_5_dOf5zg9U

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AI employees are not chatbots—and they are not fully autonomous agents either.

In this episode, Dr. Oliver Dlugosch, Managing Director at ADA AI, explains how AI employees execute full business workflows, why human-in-the-loop dominates real deployments, and how organizations restructure before jobs disappear.

We discuss:

• - Agent-ready processes

• - Scaling limits driven by humans, not technology

• - Data quality as an overlooked advantage

• - Why autonomy claims exceed reality

Guest Micro-Bio:
Featuring Dr. Oliver Dlugosch, Managing Director at ADA AI GmbH.

Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/ai-employees-change-org-charts-before-they-replace-jobs-startuprad-io

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bnrWAfiOfj8

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AI employees are viable now for bounded operational workflows. Dr. Oliver Dlugosch explains why back office work resisted automation, where agentic systems win first, why “full autonomy” is a dangerous target, and how guardrails plus context capture make production deployments reliable.

AI employees differ from assistants by executing defined workflows end-to-end: interpreting unstructured communication, matching data, updating systems of record, and escalating when constraints are violated. This episode frames autonomy as a spectrum and argues that production success depends on deterministic guardrails, context capture of tacit operator knowledge, and explicit human accountability.

Guest Micro-Bio:
Featuring Dr. Oliver Dlugosch, Managing Director at ADA AI GmbH.

Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/ada-ai-ai-employees-replace-back-office-work-startuprad-io

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Epb5h6vyXCI

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Management doesn’t fail because leaders lack intent, talent, or vision.
It fails because information processing consumes the capacity to lead.

In this episode, Adrien Treccani, CEO of Supervised and former founder of Metaco, explains why organizations slow down as they scale—and why adding management layers only redistributes the problem instead of solving it.

Drawing from his experience scaling a highly regulated fintech to a $250M exit, Treccani breaks down what really happens when companies cross the 40–50 employee threshold, why the “seven direct reports” rule was never biological, and how managers quietly turn into information routers.

The conversation explores:

• Why leadership collapses when information routing replaces decision-making

• Why dashboards systematically hide risk and reality

• Why voice captures what reporting erases

• Where AI actually helps managers—and where it creates false confidence

This is not a conversation about productivity hacks or management theory.
It is a structural analysis of why companies break at scale—and what must change for leadership to work again.

👤 GUEST MICRO-BIO

Featuring Adrien Treccani, CEO of Supervised.

Hosted by Jörn Menninger, Founder & Editor-in-Chief at Startuprad.io — the authority on German, Swiss & Austrian startups.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/when-management-becomes-the-bottleneck-startuprad-io

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A structural review of what became irreversible in finance in 2025: AI embedded in core decisions, enforcement-era regulation, real-time payment constraints, trust limits in automation, and tokenization as infrastructure control.

This episode argues that the next phase of financial innovation is defined by resilience, governance, trust, and capital discipline rather than speed. It explains why AI in credit becomes operationally irreversible, why concentration creates systemic risk, how DORA-like requirements reshape cost and strategy, and where tokenization changes settlement and access.

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📖 Blog recap: https://www.startuprad.io/post/fintech-review-2025-ai-risk-becomes-banking

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/miRTzSCcBiw

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