Innovation and Private Capital x aulium

Luca Bovone raised €90 million, expanded across continents, then realized he'd funded the wrong model. Co-living in residential buildings created operational nightmares—shared kitchens, regulatory constraints, and impossible unit economics at scale. The pivot to flex-living changed everything: commercial real estate instead of residential, full apartments instead of rooms, fewer buildings with...

Stefan Permien warns that Europe risks losing entire industries — not just battery production — because the continent treats batteries as a commodity rather than a strategic enabler. If European companies can't make their own cells, they'll soon find themselves buying complete systems from Asia, ceding control over robotics, automotive, and defense applications in the process. The conversa...

European venture capital has matured from simple investment managers into true fund managers who understand that producing returns means more than waiting ten years for an exit. Chris Wade of Isomer Capital explains why the shift toward active portfolio management—including strategic secondaries and disciplined liquidity events—is reshaping how European VCs operate and how LPs evaluate them. The c...

Quantum computing is no longer a lab curiosity—it's approaching commercial reality, and enterprises unprepared for the shift risk being left behind. Simon Fried from Classiq explains why 2026 is emerging as quantum's inflection point, and what businesses must understand now to build durable advantage in a space most still find impenetrable. The conversation cuts through quantum hype to rev...

The European data center market faces a critical talent shortage: fewer than 40 people on the continent possess the deep operational experience needed to deliver at scale. While speculators chase headlines about AI infrastructure demand, the real bottleneck isn't capital—it's grid capacity, permitting delays, and a four-year build cycle that turns promising projects into multi-year slogs....

Most roboticists think people love robots — because roboticists love robots. That fundamental misunderstanding, according to this conversation, is holding back the entire industry from mainstream adoption. The discussion unpacks a critical gap in the robotics stack that has nothing to do with dexterity or computer vision. While foundation models and scaling laws are unlocking short-horizon skills...

When Claude is 10x better, is your business model still defensible? That's the question Hillel Zidel says every growth investor must answer before writing a check — because frontier models will get there faster than most founders expect. This conversation unpacks how Kennet Partners sources and scales capital-efficient B2B software companies — businesses that have bootstrapped to meaningful sc...

Industrial heat decarbonization represents nearly 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet alternatives like hydrogen and electrification repeatedly fail feasibility studies. Mark Verhagen and his co-founders at RIFT discovered a century-old technology that modern economics finally make viable: burning iron powder to generate industrial heat with zero carbon emissions. The process sounds counte...

95% of tenders in North America now include AI requirements, while France lags far behind. The gap isn't about innovation—France produces world-class startups—but about adoption speed, regulatory complexity, and a reluctance to move beyond legacy systems. The conversation unpacks why European SMBs, particularly in France, remain slow to embrace cloud and AI despite aggressive domestic innovati...

Ten years ago, telling investors you were doing secondaries in venture-backed tech companies meant explaining what secondaries even were. Today, everyone wants to talk — because everyone has liquidity needs or is considering a transaction. Thomas Dadashi, founder of eNTIER Capital, walks through the mechanics and market dynamics of secondary investing in late-stage European tech. The conversation...

Impact investing has been criticized as superficial—labeling without real change—but what happens when a fund puts 50% of its carry at risk unless it triples measurable impact? Rémi Said explains how Partech Impact built a €300M growth equity strategy around companies that deliver both environmental ROI and hard financial returns, and why that dual value proposition isn't a trade-off but a com...

Thomas Goergen spent 30 years in Luxembourg's fund industry, exited his AIFM business for a low nine-figure sum, and started a family office — only to discover that digital health offered something his fintech and real estate plays never did: purpose at scale. Now, as founder of Catalpa Ventures, he's betting that Europe is standing in front of a wave in healthcare innovation, driven by ag...

Europe's venture ecosystem needs more than capital — it needs scale, unified industrial policy, and the willingness to let go of narrow national interests. Drawing on nearly three decades in venture, the conversation unpacks why fragmented sovereignty, undersized funds, and "green fundamentalism" are holding back the continent's ability to compete with the US and China. The discu...

Bringing a drug to market in Europe costs as much as a typical pre-seed round just to comply with AI regulations — before a single line of code is written or a patient enrolled. That bottleneck is slowing innovation at the exact moment AI could cut clinical trial timelines by two-thirds. Clara Bernardes co-founded Biorce in 2024 to automate the clinical trial lifecycle from phase one to phase thre...

Can a business survive if its economics depend on anticipated regulation? Mahir Sahin, General Partner of Cloudberry Ventures, argues it cannot — a lesson that shapes every deep-tech investment decision his firm makes, from quantum computing to hydrogen generation. The conversation unpacks how early-stage investors navigate highly technical markets where product-market fit is measured not in downl...

Not every good business is a good investment — and for venture capital, the gap between the two can cost billions. Alexey Bulygin of Verb Ventures explains why intellectual honesty from founders matters more than polished pitch decks, and why his fund focuses on the unsexy, archaic backbone of global trade: a $33 trillion market still running on fax machines, Excel spreadsheets, and paper document...

Can AI truly replace the weeks lawyers spend grinding through due diligence documents — or will it just reshape how legal value is delivered? As M&A dealmaking grows more complex, the manual work of reviewing thousands of contracts remains a massive bottleneck, and the answer may lie in workflow integration rather than raw automation. Jorrit Willaert explains how Jurimesh tackles legal due dil...

Healthcare remains one of the least digitalized industries — still largely operating in the "dinosaur phase" with paper records and fragmented systems. Yet the sector is expected to grow at over 20% annually for the next decade, creating massive opportunities for investors who understand both the technical and regulatory complexity of healthcare innovation. Christoph Kausch, Managing Par...

Athletes writing cheques into European startups was once considered a red flag by VCs. Today, it's a legitimate asset class—but only if founders and investors understand what's actually on offer beyond the Instagram following. Arthur Bernard launched Athletico Venture to bridge Europe's top athletes with the tech ecosystem, following a model that had already matured in the US two decad...

Early-stage venture capital is often romanticized as spotting the next unicorn, but the real edge lies in understanding when to hold and when to exit. Nicolas Debock, partner leading Eurazeo's early-stage fund, explains why the power law is not a bug but a feature of venture design — and why liquidity matters more than most founders realize. The conversation moves from the mechanics of buildin...

Why does Jean Schmitt feel physically ill every time someone mentions a unicorn? Because, as he puts it, no serious entrepreneur should want their company named after "a fake animal from fairy tales for girls." This isn't just rhetoric—it's a philosophy that shapes how Jolt Capital invests in European deep tech at the growth stage, targeting companies doing €10–20 million in reve...

Deep tech ventures require years of patient capital, yet most of them reach Series B without any revenue at all. Matthias Winter explains why traditional metrics like monthly recurring revenue and churn rates simply don't apply when you're building quantum computers or photonic processors — and why that's exactly the point. This conversation unpacks how Constructor Capital conducts due...

If Europe wants resilience and sovereignty, it must stop treating green tech as a moral project and start treating it as the path to re-industrialization. Laurits Bach Soerensen argues that 92% of Europe's risk capital flows into software, fintech, and biotech—sectors designed to hit a profitability plateau—while the hard technologies needed to rebuild energy infrastructure, production systems...

Roland Dennert argues that European tech could grow one hundred-fold over the next twenty years—but only if the continent's pension funds and insurers shift from allocating roughly one percent of their assets to technology up to ten percent, matching their US counterparts. The capital exists; the problem is where it's directed. Dennert explains how Cipio Partners operates in the growth equ...

Most startups fail not from lack of talent, but from lack of experience. When a 28-year-old founder has only recruited three people in their life, they're walking into lethal mistakes that seem obvious to someone with 20 years of experience. Elie du Pré de Saint Maur is co-founder of TOMCAT, a French venture fund and accelerator that works with early-stage B2B startups. Before co-founding TOMC...