The latest news behind the European venture headlines - let's connect the dots.

Dan, Mads and Pri follow the AI money and find it in your pension, your next laptop and a $40bn SpaceX bond. Plus: Mistral's trillion-parameter cat, DeepSeek discovers that "cheap" costs $12bn, and Britain and Europe make eyes at each other across a crowded room.

02:12 Firmus pulls its $5.5bn Sydney IPO: $10bn valuation in August, $30bn ask in October, 95% of capacity still on paper.
04:33 Isomorphic eyes $40–50bn, at least double May's price, zero drugs in the clinic. The asset is Demis.
07:19 RIP Margaret Hamilton, 90, who landed Apollo 11 back when software "wasn't engineering".
08:25 Tesla: ~$4bn operating profit, $1tn+ valuation, 90%+ of it priced on robots and robotaxis.
10:53 UK–Germany tech corridor: the Kensington Treaty finds a pulse
11:48 Revolut ($115bn, Europe's 7th most valuable bank) will list in the US. London may get seconds.
13:09 The AI build-out: who's actually paying?
14:14 Samsung: ~$80bn operating profit in one quarter = 20 years of Tesla profit. Memory is the new oil.
16:35 TSMC revenue +51%; Alphabet capex ~$45bn, free cash flow –$5.9bn
18:02 SpaceX's $40bn debt raise; Oracle CDS at 244bps, SpaceX 194bps. Junk-adjacent chic.
20:56 Claude Haiku 5.5 tops 8 of our 30 test workloads
25:02 Mistral Large 4 "Le Chonk": 1tn parameters, trained in Europe, 47x the cost for a slightly better ticket sort.
26:44 UK told to use cheaper AI. Cheapest options: Chinese or American. Sovereignty sold separately.
28:05 Germany's sovereign AI champion launches Kolibri, now as part of a Canadian company.
31:58 DeepSeek raises ~$12bn, 4x Europe's record round, for the "cheap" lab.
33:19 Anthropic's IPO sets the price tag for the whole sector.
35:08 UK & EU: Burnham in Berlin, the Tories go full Thatcher-core.
42:03 Deals of the week: Vocca AI ($20m Series A) and Universal Quantum ($100m Series A, 10 miles from Dan's sofa)
44:19 Week ahead: Anthropic investor day, ASML Q3, US CPI, UK GDP.

Not investment advice. If it were, we'd charge 2 and 20.

#VentureCapital #EuropeanTech #DeepTech

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

Oura had a book covered four times over and still walked. Micron is printing money. Bailey says everyone's priced to be a winner. Burnham wants to take us back to the 1970s, but with free VAT on your electricity bill.

Dan, Mads and Pri unpack the week.

01:15 Oura pulls its IPO: $3bn, then $2.2bn, then nothing
04:43 Micron's monster quarter, and Europe's last memory maker
06:50 Bailey: "everybody is priced to be a winner"
09:07 Burnham's speech: 0% VAT on household power, nothing for industry
12:04 AI safety: OpenAI cancels a model, an agent escapes, the FTC moves in
20:37 Anthropic's leaked S-1: 12x revenue, $2tn ambitions, half a trillion in compute bills
26:41 UK venture: BBB returns, Monzo, ElevenLabs at $22bn, Nscale
29:57 AMD buys World Labs for $8.2bn: chipmakers want world models
33:24 Personal agents everywhere, except Europe
39:02 Buy British: Burnham, Healey and the ghost of the Austin Allegro
47:30 Deals of the Week
50:39 Week Ahead

🚀 Deals of the Week

• Morphotonics (Veldhoven): €40m Series B. It makes the factory machines behind the tiny optical parts that put displays inside smart glasses.
• Terasi (Stockholm): €11m seed. Jam-resistant millimetre-wave military radios, backed by the NATO Innovation Fund, Join Capital and In-Q-Tel.
• Zenithon (London): $10m seed. AI models for extreme physics: fusion, rockets, chips.

📅 Week Ahead: Tesla Q3 deliveries, the Conservative conference, London Tech Week, Deep Tech Week, and Dan at WSAI in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

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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