Venture Capital In Technology

Europe is losing a generation of founders. And it's 100% self-inflicted. I've invested in US startups from my laptop in 48 hours. I've also sworn never to invest in certain European countries again. Not because of bad founders or startups. Because the legal complexity makes it impossible. That's not just sad. It's a tragedy. Here's the brutal reality: 🚨 Delaware works: → 48-hour digital incorporation → Standardized investment docs (SAFE notes) → No notary fees eating chunks of small investments → One system. Done. It's not what fuels Silicon Valley. It's the oil that keeps it running. Europe's mess: → 27 different legal systems → Deals taking MONTHS because of cross-border complexity → €800 billion annual investment gap → Klarna, Revolut, and countless others forced to list in New York Some angel investors face notary fees consuming 30% of a €10K investment. Others simply can't make micro-fund economics work because fixed costs and fragmented regulations make it uneconomical. The solution we need: EU–INC One unified European corporate form. Digital-first. Standardized stock options. EU-wide registry. Think "Delaware meets Stripe Atlas" but for all of Europe. Why this matters: As I build Vota and invest across Europe, I see brilliant founders relocating to Delaware not because they want to, but because they have no choice. Every startup that flips to the US is a loss for European innovation, jobs, and competitiveness. The infrastructure EXISTS in the US. Europe needs to build its version. Not in 10 years. Now. Are you supporting EU-Inc? This isn't just policy. It's infrastructure that determines whether Europe produces trillion-euro tech companies or keeps watching them leave. #euinc #europe #startups #venturecapital #innovation #entrepreneurship

𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲’𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝗴𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥&𝗗: 𝗠𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗱 ‼️ Last week the International Monetary Fund published a very interesting and comprehensive paper about the need for more venture capital in Europe to tackle our continents challenges. To name a few: ✔️productivity per hour worked is app 30% lower in 🇪🇺compared to the 🇺🇸 ✔️R&D investments are still way below the target of 3% per annum ✔️Within the top 100 tech companies worldwide merely a handful are European Is it all about 💶 I here you say? No it is about keeping up our welfare for future generations. And about a liveable planet. And increasing our innovation and competitiveness are crucial to do so. Which is also the key message of Mr. Draghi’s report I hope. The IMF report takes a deeper dive into the underlying issues: ✔️ VC investments are only 0,4% of GDP. In the US it is 3x as much ✔️Europeans park their savings in bank accounts. And banks are very risk aversie when it comes to financing hightech startups. ✔️Long term savings go primarily via pension funds, who hardly invest in VC in Europe (despite some positive signs recently) ✔️The EU has fewer and smaller VC funds leading to smaller rounds, less opportunities for scale-up financing and limited exit options ✔️ European scale-ups end up listing in the US instead of Europe itself ✔️ National fragmentation within the EU leads to a lot of barriers for scaling What has to be done? ✅ Increase efforts on a real single European market, for example by consolidating stock market exchanges and diminishing cross border red tape ✅ Make it more attractive for pension funds and insurers to step into VC ✅ Enhance the capacity of European Investment Bank (EIB), European Investment Fund (EIF) and national promotional institutes, like Invest-NL ✅ Implement preferential tax treatments for equity investments in startups and VC funds ✅ Encourage more funds-of-funds And I would like to ad to the findings in the report two things: 1️⃣ We need a cultural mind shift, more urgency and embracing true entrepreneurship 2️⃣ We have to step up our game when it comes to tech transfer. Transforming our high quality academic knowledge into economic and societal impact via startups.

NVIDIA reported earnings yesterday, and, as is tradition, they crushed expectations, guided conservatively, and the stock promptly fell 3% because when you’re priced for perfection, even dominance is a mild disappointment. But let’s ignore the stock market tantrum for a moment and parse Jensen Huang's earnings call commentary for industry context: 🚀 AI Demand is Still in Hyper-Growth Mode. Data Center revenue surged to $35.6B (up 93% YoY). Blackwell is NVIDIA's fastest-ramping product ever—$11B in its first full quarter, not even a year after it was first announced. Jensen notes "It will be common for Blackwell clusters to start with 100,000 GPUs". 🧴 Inference is the Bottleneck. Reasoning models like OpenAI's GPT-4.5, DeepSeek AI-R1, and Grok-3 require 100x more compute per query than their early ancestors. AI is moving beyond one-shot inference to multi-step reasoning, chain-of-thought prompting, and autonomous agent workflows. Blackwell was designed for this shift, delivering 25x higher token throughput and 20x lower cost vs. Hopper. 📈 3 Scaling Laws. Jensen identified three major AI scaling trends that are accelerating demand for AI infrastructure: (1) Pretraining scaling (more data, larger models) (2) Post-training scaling (fine-tuning, reinforcement learning) (3) Inference-time scaling (longer reasoning chains, chain-of-thought AI, more synthetic data generation). 💰 Who's Buying? Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) still make up about 50% of NVIDIA's Data Center revenue, and their demand nearly doubled YoY but many enterprises are also investing in their own AI compute instead of relying solely on cloud providers 🍟 Custom Silicon and the ASIC vs. GPU Debate. Big Tech is building custom AI ASICs (Google has TPUs, Amazon has Trainium, Inferentia) to reduce dependency on NVIDIA but Jensen dismissed the notion that custom silicon would challenge NVIDIA’s dominance. GPUs remain more flexible across training, inference, and different AI models, while ASICs are often limited in their use cases. He flagged the CUDA ecosystem as a major competitive moat. 🛰️ The Next Frontier. Jensen repeatedly emphasized “agentic AI” and “physical AI” as the next major trends. The first AI boom was digital—models that generate text, images, and video. The next phase is AI that acts and interacts with the physical world. The market may worry about Nvidia's forward guidance but its hard to discount a company that controls everything from the chips to the networking (NVLink, InfiniBand), software (CUDA, TensorRT) and system-level AI solutions.

3 European Deeptech unicorns faltering in a single year is hardly just a coincidence. I'm a deeptech investor in Europe, but you won't find here the typical VC post saying the usual: "the government should have helped" "we don't have scale up capital" "it's the founders who weren't capable". The first is just BS. The answer to a capitalist shortcoming is hardly a socialist one. If European deeptech titans are to emerge on similar scale to the US, we can handly expect the government to be the babysitter. The second may be true in a general sense, but Northvolt specifically had raised over $15 Billion from global investors. Lilium was also a global firm by the time it tanked. And Graphcore, which successfully exited, but was effectively a fire sale to a foreign conglomerate instead of a unicorn or decacorn Nvidia challenger listing, had Sequoia as backers. In a deeper sense, however, you wonder if the capital story would have been different, had they moved the main operations to the US, where deeptech scaleups are able to raise several billions in capital once they hit product market fit. As for the third, that's clearly not the case. All these founders had proven themselves in previous ventures and the very fact they had achieved unicorn status raising global money is a testament to the fact it's not a simple case of "they made a mistake, the company collapsed". Companies don't explode nor collapse for single decisios. Yet there is an element of broader talent and process building issues when the FT reported that Northvolt failed to go past 1% of their production capacity. And industry experts I know through my portfolio (I invested in both fields at seed by the way) told me they were extremely skeptikal of Lilium's product and progress. So easy answers are clearly not the way to go. But I am at least going to be asking myself questions. Meanwhile, European banks and countries continue their silly in-flights over where they want VCs to deploy the capital or how they look at startup legislation (spoiler alert: only in their little backyard!) Maybe we should just accept European deeptech founders should raise seed, move to the US, and keep an R&D facility here? It's not a stupid question to ask. Even for someone like me who is fully dedicated to the sector here in Europe. #venturecapital #deeptech #europeantech

This map tells a story Europe should not ignore. The distribution of VC-backed European Deep Tech and Life Sciences university spinouts is highly concentrated by institute of origin. ➡️ A handful of universities dominate the landscape — while much of the EU, and especially Italy, is largely absent from the map. This is not about lack of scientific excellence. Europe produces outstanding research. The gap emerges between research and company creation: tech transfer effectiveness, incentives for faculty entrepreneurship, access to early-stage capital, and the ability to scale spinouts beyond the lab. The result is a paradox: strong science, weak industrialization of research. Until Europe — and Italy in particular — addresses the structural bottlenecks that turn research into venture-scale companies, it will remain underrepresented where value is actually created. The map is not just descriptive. It is a warning. Source: Deeptech and Life Sciences spinout value creation by universities in Europe by Dealroom.co Northern Gritstone Oxford Science Enterprises MITO Technology Cambridge Innovation Capital Atlantic. Here is the link for download: https://lnkd.in/dntZngyw #startups #universities #VC Mind the Bridge Alberto Calvo

Founders fundraising in 2025: Biggest red flags I see in VC term sheets: 🚩🚩🚩 (Fom someone who rejected a $450,000 check) 1. The "innocent" dividend clause What it looks like: Some bullsh*t about "working capital efficiency" buried in a paragraph about a "13% cumulative compounding dividend" Translation: Even if you're not profitable, that debt keeps piling up. By the time you exit, they own your soul. Three founders I know lost everything to this exact clause. 2. The "reasonable" board control What it looks like: "Identical representation rights on boards of all subsidiaries... including future ones" Translation: They want to control everything – even sh*t that doesn't exist yet. They'll block your Series A unless they get more control without putting in more cash. 3. The "standard" forced exit clause What it looks like: "Within 5 years... provide an exit... on terms acceptable to [VC]" Translation: They can force you to sell even if it's the worst possible time. We're at $3M revenue now – but under that term sheet, we could've been forced to sell way before we were ready. Founders, PLEASE, undersand: → VCs aren't your friends → A bigger check isn't always better → If you don't understand every single line, don't sign → When you're desperate for cash, predatory terms look mighty friendly Want to know what a clean term sheet looks like? Check out YC's SAFE. It's 5 pages. Simple. Clear. If YC can keep it simple, any VC can too. Don't let them tell you otherwise. TAKEAWAY: It's better to be broke than to build a company you won't own. And for god's sake, get a good lawyer. Not your uncle who does real estate contracts – someone who actually knows startup funding.

Europe is world-class at seeding innovation but poor at owning it as it grows. We need to change that! 💪🏼 Here's why, and how: Without a stronger domestic growth-stage ecosystem, we are essentially exporting the economic upside and long-term ownership of our own climate champions to foreign markets. Today, we at World Fund published our latest report: “The Series B Funding Gap in European Climate Tech: Key Market Insights.” The report quantifies a structural “missing middle” in European venture, the early-growth capital needed to take deep tech and hardware-heavy climate solutions from prototype to production. What we found: 1. Europe’s average Series B is $35.2M, more than 20% smaller than the US ($45.5M) 2. Europe accumulated a $13.5B Series B shortfall vs the US, an annual deficit of $2.7B 3. Only 15% of European Seed-backed climate tech companies reach Series B, vs 25% in the US 4. As rounds get larger, European participation drops sharply, by $250M+, nearly half of capital is foreign What we believe it will take to fix it: 1. Mobilising institutional capital (pensions, insurers, banks), supported by regulatory reform 2. Building more mid-sized European growth funds that can consistently lead $25–100M rounds 3. Expanding blended finance models that crowd in private capital at scale If Europe wants climate leadership, energy sovereignty, resilient supply chains, and the economic upside of the clean industrial revolution, we need to close the Series B gap. Special thanks to all those who contributed including Almi Invest, Cleantech for Europe, Cleantech Scandinavia, European Investment Fund (EIF), EIFO, Innovate UK, Tesi, and Dealroom.co. 👇 Read the full report in the link in the comments

In just three years, AI’s share of U.S. venture capital has surged to 71% in Q1 2025. This is more than a funding trend. It’s a capital reallocation event. Entire sectors are now competing with AI for oxygen. Foundational models dominate the dollars, but platforms and infrastructure are rising fast, signaling that investors see AI not as a product but as the next layer of economic infrastructure. The deeper question is what this means for other critical sectors, from healthcare to advanced manufacturing. Is this concentration a fleeting bubble, or a structural reset of the innovation economy?  Leaders must prepare for both the opportunities created by AI as infrastructure and the risks created by underfunded adjacent sectors that may be critical to long-term strategy. 

My previous startup was acquired for millions of dollars by a company valued over $300 million. Ever wondered how exactly do startups get acquired for millions? Here is how: I had been in touch with investors of the acquiring company well before the acquisition. One of their Managing Directors was a college alum I met at an event. That connection later led to conversations with the Partner who had led the acquirer’s Series A and eventually helped drive and mediate the acquisition. There was trust and context long before there was a term sheet. Second, our books were extremely clean. Every single bank entry had a corresponding invoice. My CA was meticulous about this. During due diligence, Deloitte went through everything in depth and did not find much to flag. Clean fundamentals remove enormous friction in M&A. Third, while we were small, we were disproportionately strong in the Financial Services market. Multiple large BFSI companies were actively using our product. That made us strategically valuable, not just financially interesting. Fourth, we were at around $1 million in annual revenue. Large enough to clearly prove product market fit. Small enough to be affordable and attractive to acquire. This "in between" stage is a powerful but often misunderstood position. Fifth, we were bootstrapped. Harshita and I held the majority of the equity and did not have any institutional investor on the cap table. That meant when the decision to sell came, it was just the two of us deciding. No board approvals, no misaligned incentives, no forced outcomes. Speed and clarity matter a lot in acquisitions. Finally, optionality changes everything. The acquirer was not the only company interested in buying us. Multiple companies were in active conversations for the same reasons above. That leverage allowed us to dictate terms instead of reacting to them. The biggest myth founders believe is that acquisitions are planned exits. In reality, they are outcomes earned by building something valuable, trusted, and hard to replace, while keeping relationships and fundamentals strong. Ironically, the less focused you are on "selling", the more likely someone wants to buy. Now that I have sold my first venture and am financially independent, my motivation has changed. I am building GreyLabs AI to be a long-lasting institution, not something optimised for a quick exit. Ironically, that mindset often creates the most durable outcomes. #startups #business #entrepreneurship

NVIDIA isn’t investing in AI. It’s designing the AI economy. NVIDIA’s startup bets are often read as aggressive VC activity. That’s a misread. This is about power shifting downward—from platforms to infrastructure. NVIDIA controls the bottleneck: compute. Then it seeds an ecosystem that must run on it. Innovation flourishes—but only on that terrain. This isn’t a platform play. It’s old-school industrial logic, updated for AI. Railways didn’t own factories. Power grids didn’t build appliances. They owned the layer no one could bypass. Most companies obsess over models and features. NVIDIA is locking in inevitability. In the AI era, infrastructure isn’t just plumbing. https://lnkd.in/eADffYYq #AI #Nvidia #Investment #Ecosystem