Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures gather for a holiday-home special to cut through the noise around Europe’s tech, geopolitics and AI shifts.
What begins as an innocent debate about whether DeepMind is “still a UK company” quickly spirals into a tour of sovereign AI strategy, the SpaceX mega-raise, Europe’s increasingly uncomfortable place between China and the US, defence-spending reality checks and a surprisingly uplifting set of deep-tech deals across the continent.
It is classic Upside: the takes are sharp, the geopolitics gets spiky, and the optimism… well, it arrives eventually.
What’s covered:
04:36 AI-for-Science, robotics and the new “AI scientist” era
06:50 A national-curriculum Gemini and the vision of a tutor for every child
09:39 The SpaceX 2026 IPO: what investors are actually buying
14:00 Starship, orbital compute and the trillion-dollar imagination gap
18:07 Why Europe missed the space race once again
19:43 Portugal flips the script: “Economy of the Year”
22:58 Europe between China’s export tsunami and America’s cold shoulder
32:07 Defence budgets: the hype, the delay and the reality for startups
34:25 AI Corner: bubble fears, Mistral’s comeback, Meta goes closed, China goes full-stack
Comms Strategy Expert Session
Apply or share the opportunity with a founder or investor in your network: https://luma.com/euvc-comms-expert-session
