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

18:55 Rare earths: not rare, just outsourced to someone else's backyard

23:12 Trump's autonomous robotics ban. Your Roomba is now a geopolitical issue

26:23 AI price war: Opus 5.5 is 40% cheaper, Sol and Luna are half price, and open source keeps eating lunch

35:46 Jev: a classifier model at 1/50th the cost of Sonnet, named after Jevons, because of course it is

38:02 Dan predicts an Anthropic IPO in October. It was pushed to November yesterday.

39:00 Is the AI money window narrowing? SB Energy delayed, nScale as the litmus test, Nvidia's "cheap" forward multiple

43:12 Agents loose in the hoose: Amazon blocks Meta's Muse. Walled gardens get walls

47:12 22 countries want an IAEA for AI. The two that matter don't. Plus the Australian breach and EU product liability landing on 9 December (lawyers rejoice)

54:33 Deals of the Week:

• Euclid (Eindhoven) raises a €200m Series A chaired by ex-ASML boss Peter Wennink. Not your grandfather's Series A
• Dutch pension giant ABP commits €1bn to venture and tech. Dan has a a moment
• Standard X raises a 10m seed for alpha therapy isotopes. Dan admits he doesn't know what alpha therapy is

59:25 Week Ahead: Labour conference in Liverpool (brace for "growth"), BADR post-mortem, Oura's $15bn Nasdaq IPO (Dan went back to his Apple Watch), Micron as the AI capex lie detector, and Bits & Pretzels, where Dan orders a 0% alco-frolic

01:03:09 Always a pleasure, never a chore

🔗 Deep Tech Week London: deep-tech-week.com/london-2026

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