Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. On this week's show...

Anthropic is having the week of its life, Jamie Dimon wants you to know the sky is falling (again), and Germany spent €2 billion learning that shipbuilding is hard. Dan and Lomax fly as a duo this week.

00:00 – Intro & News Radar – Iran ceasefire (maybe), global VC hits $300B in Q1 alone (70% of all 2025 deployment), four companies absorbed $188B of that, Russian hackers are in your router, and a Brit insists he isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. Busy week.

04:16 – Anthropic: The Full Picture – Run rate has tripled to $30B, overtaking OpenAI's $25B. Over 1,000 enterprise customers spending $1M+, eight of the Fortune 10 on the books, and 32% of the enterprise LLM API market locked down. Mythos, their new frontier model, found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and hit a 72.4% exploit rate versus Opus 4.6's 14.4%. So powerful only 40 organisations have access. They also acquired Coefficient Bio for $400M in stock — six employees, founded last year, backed by Dimension Capital who turned $10M into $204M in Anthropic paper. EMEA is their fastest-growing region with 9x revenue growth and offices across six European cities.

22:15 – Jamie Dimon's Annual Letter – 48 pages of structural warnings. Historically brilliant on multi-year calls (fiscal deficits, fintech disruption, HTM accounting), less brilliant on timing — he's called recession four years running. This year: inflation as "the skunk at the party," private credit's $1.8T transparency problem, and JPM spending $20B a year building AI in-house with $2B in cost savings already.

29:36 – Mega IPOs – SpaceX ($2T, June), Anthropic (October, $60B raise), OpenAI (Q4/Q1 '27, $852B). Combined primary issuance could exceed 2025's entire US equity capital formation of $232B. Every major 2025 IPO traded down. Worth noting.

37:43 – Climate Tech Returns – Rebranded as energy security and resilience. Climate VC hit $40.5B in 2025, up 8%. 87% of US companies quietly increased sustainability spend. The money's flowing — just under different letterhead.

43:32 – Germany's Defence Nightmare – €10B for six warships, four years behind, prime contractor fired, Dutch-French-German finger-pointing all round. Defence budget rising from €86B to €152B by 2029 but procurement can't keep up. The EU's new AGILE fund offers €115M for defence startups with a four-month turnaround. Welcome to the age of cheap warfare.

48:34 – OpenAI Buys TBPN – A one-year-old live tech show with 58,000 YouTube subscribers, acquired for low hundreds of millions weeks before a potential IPO. OpenAI says it'll stay independent. Sure.

50:44 – Predictions & Deals of the Week – Dan calls Anthropic becoming Europe's de facto AI partner. Lomax brings Gilead's $5B acquisition of German biotech Tubulis. Dan flags Zero Shot Fund from OpenAI alumni.

Every week we look behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing.

This week it's with Lomax from Outsized Ventures, Andrew from 7 Percent, and myself, your host Dan Bowyer from Superseed.

00:00 – Dan declares himself sexy for the first time ever. The physical AI / reshoring zeitgeist has finally caught up with what SuperSeed's been doing for a decade. Lomax gently reminds him that being in vogue doesn't actually fix anything.

06:01 – Quick-fire news roundup: Artemis II launches, Apple turns 50, software stocks crater, SpaceX files for what might be the largest IPO in human history. Andrew reminds us the stock market is mostly vibes anyway.

11:06 – Mistral raises $830M in debt to build Nvidia-powered AI data centres in Europe. Lomax points out everything Mistral does is roughly 1% of the US equivalent. Andrew thinks it's a safe bet. Dan wonders if the French government will end up owning it.

12:17 – NHS staff boycott Palantir. Andrew says this is the tip of the iceberg when you outsource critical infrastructure to a company whose chairman publicly slagged off the NHS. Lomax reveals New York is also dumping Palantir. The hunt for a European alternative begins. Lomax conveniently has an Italian pre-seed for this.

31:13 – UK defence tech brain drain. Founders relocating to the Bay Area because MoD procurement takes longer than most startups survive. Lomax drops a monologue about Anduril's $20B contract while UK founders can't even get framework agreements cashed up. Andrew notes the MoD has capped software procurement at three years, which is still absurd.

41:56 – Poolside loses its CoreWeave compute deal, tanking a $2B raise at $12B valuation. The lesson: if you're going full-stack, hire people who've actually built data centres.

47:21 – Dan predicts local models will handle 95% of knowledge work within 18 months. Andrew remains wonderfully unconvinced.

48:42 – Deals of the week: Starcloud ($170M, fastest YC unicorn ever), Fractile ($200M AI chip talks, Oxford spinout), and Manna Air Delivery ($50M Series B, drones from Dublin).

Every week, we look behind the headlines to explore what's coming down the track that will affect European venture, start-ups and investing.

00:00 — Meet Harry Destecroix Dan butchers the fund status (already closed, Dan), Harry sets out the SCVC thesis: generalist deep tech, breakthrough technologies from UK universities, everything from quantum to advanced therapeutics.

01:40 — EIF's €15B Fund of Funds: Salvation or Same Old? The EU's massive growth-stage vehicle promises to unlock €80B in scale-up funding. Will it diversify European VC or just keep writing cheques to the same crowd? Harry drops the bomb that the ECF still has a €5M max round size. Lomax reminds everyone that 0.02% of EU pension assets are in venture. And the House of Lords just torpedoed Mansion House. Lovely.

07:10 — Fund Size Is Strategy A €50M seed fund split 20 ways produces "horrible syndicated rounds." The US writes $10-20M seeds while Europe argues over whether £5M is too generous.

11:02 — Should Europe Just Own the Application Layer? Let America build foundation models, let China sell cheap tokens, let Europe double down on defence, sovereignty, and AI applications. Harry agrees but insists deep tech still needs deep pockets.

14:07 — Getting Governments Out of VC Lomax makes the case for private capital. Harry points out 5% allocation to high-risk assets is hardly betting the farm. Dan reveals his portfolio is "95% that way."

21:10 — Project Prometheus: Bezos Drops $100B on Physical AI Buy old-economy manufacturers, juice them with AI. Europe has 20% GDP in manufacturing vs 10% in the US — massive opportunity. Harry suggests maybe it's just a clever way around EU planning laws. The eternal question: buy incumbents or build from scratch?

28:21 — China's Token Economy: The New OPEC? China prices inference at 1/180th of OpenAI. Chinese models hold 4 of the top 5 spots on Open Router. NIST found them 12x more susceptible to hijacking attacks. Great for cash-strapped startups. Terrifying for enterprise CTOs.

34:19 — Cursor's Kimi Scandal Got hammered not for using Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5, but for not being upfront about it. A cautionary tale in transparency.

36:14 — ARM Builds Its Own Chip After 36 Years ARM sacrifices its licensing model on the altar of AI inference. Meta is first customer. Dan asks if Intel still exists.

39:54 — Innovate UK Gets a Founder at the Helm Tom Adeyoola takes the reins of ~£1B annual budget. Harry (council member) is cautiously optimistic: stop spreading money thin, start tracking "deal flow," stop wasting founders' time. Can a founder survive the civil service?

48:12 — PREDICTIONS 🔮 Lomax: Hyperscaler revenue won't justify $602B capex. Amazon alone outspends the entire US energy sector. 🔮 Harry: Mag Seven fragmenting. Microsoft and Meta at 52-week lows. SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI IPOs could trigger rotation — unless Iran blows it up. 🔮 Dan: AI revenue reporting is smoke and mirrors. Anthropic's "$6B month" was run-rate maths. 79% of OpenAI customers also pay for Anthropic. Everyone's buying everything — and that stops.

56:19 — Deals of the Week 🏆 Lomax: Air Street Capital Fund III — $232M, solo GP. 🏆 Dan: Granola hits unicorn status. British. Brilliant. 🏆 Harry: Lace Lithography — Norwegian startup breaking below EUV limits. Harry explains optical physics without his PhD colleague. Brave.

Hosts Lomax Ward, Dan Bowyer and Harry Destecroix.

Guest: Dr. Harry Destecroix - founder, PhD chemist, sold Ziylo to Novo Nordisk for £800M, founder of SCVC, Innovate UK council member, and "super fabulous."