Pathfounders

Granola started out as a note-taking app for meetings, but like all great startup Trojan Horses, it’s becoming a full-blown enterprise platform. After raising a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation this week, Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher caught up with co-founder Sam Stephenson to find out what its next moves are.

For the last few years, AI has often been about one model to understand language, another to generate images, another to handle video. To tackle this, Luma AI has just launched Uni-1: what it calls a “unified intelligence model.” The idea, says the company is to be not just another image generator, and in fact, might be posed to power Hollywood. Speaking to Pathfounders' Mike Butcher, Jason Da...

A new report from the European VC redalpine (with Sifted) argues that Europe’s next wave will not come from copying Silicon Valley consumer internet playbooks, but from sectors where Europe has genuine structural advantages: intelligent enterprise, digital health, new energy, space, biology and robotics. But can Europe capitalise on these? One of the report’s Sebastian becker, general partner at r...

Is Europe's ‘tech bro renaissance’ really happening, or is AI about to level the game for women? Recently the European tech world has been debating both the apparent - to some eyes - rise of a more masculine culture in the industry in the shape of (to take one example) the male domination of hackathons, in contrast to the continued paucity of female participation in the industry, across all areas...

Europe is facing a 6 trillion Euro infrastructure transformation over the next decade, with over €2 trillion already committed. But that leaves a leaving a €4 trillion private capital gap. At the same time intelligence warnings suggesting Russia could invade NATO territory some time before 2029, putting Europe’s defence systems are under massive pressure. So could infrastructure be the next big ca...

AI is leaving the chat window and entering the real world, showing up in factories, energy systems and in construction sites. This is the new era of Physical AI. UK-based VC fund SuperSeed is betting big on this next era with a new fund, which has just hit a first close of $50m. Pathfounders’ Mike Butcher spke to Dan Bowyer, co-founder of SuperSeed, about why he thinks will be a big arena for the...

Yesterday something big happened in Europe. The EU Commission is putting its weight behind a proposal to create a cross-EU company structure (similar to a Delaware Corp) dubbed “EU Inc”. In fact, that idea and the name emerged from a lobby group made up of founders and investors literally called EU Inc. However, EU President Ursula von der Leyen has, so far, stopped short of fulfilling all the wis...

Clinical trials for new drugs involve some of the most expensive and complex processes in modern industry yet, remarkably, much of the infrastructure still runs on spreadsheets and manual reviews. AI has begun to flood into this sector, but the question is which startups can seize the opportunity to reduce costs and speed up this sector? Erik Scalfaro, CEO and Co-Founder of Rivia, thinks they have...

Can you leverage media and community into an early start startup funding platform? That’s the bet that UK-based OPUS plans to make with its international membership network of founders and operators. The project, dubbed Day Zero, will be a venture investment platform aimed at backing technology startups from their earliest days across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, combining capital from indi...

Cross-border commerce has never been larger, but for companies trying to sell internationally, it has rarely been more complicated. London-based Outpost has raised a $17.5 million Series A round to help companies sell across borders without building an expensive patchwork of legal entities. CEO Will Mahon-Heap unpacks his strategy with Mike Butcher, Founder & Editor of Pathfounders.

Component manufacturing is a trillion-dollar-a-year market, but in Europe it’s an area dominated by small, often family-run businesses that are rapidly dwindling as the owners retire. Isembard is a UK startup that manufactures high-precision components, operating both its own, and franchisee factories. Following its $50 million Series A funding, Mike Butcher of Pathfounders caught up with Alexande...

Dr Ari Kristinn Jónsson has just stepped into the newly created role of President of the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), the €1 billion venture fund backed by 24 NATO countries to invest in technologies that strengthen defence, security, and resilience across the alliance. Pathfounders caught up with him to unpack how he plans to steady the NIF ship after a turbulent period. Correction: In the video,...

Qevlar AI says it can deploy AI to turn alerts about cybersecurity attacks into data that was previously invisible. Pathfounder’s Mike Butcher speaks to Ahmed Achchak, Qevlar AI Co-Founder and CEO, and Damien Henault, partner with Forgepoint Capital, about how AI is changing cybersecurity.

Speaking at the inaugural Pathfounders London Mixer — the first in a series — a panel of VCs and experts tackled the thorny subjects of the white-hot era of AI, what’s next for deeptech, and the future of so-called ‘sovereign’ technologies — all amid the background of, at times, quite chaotic geopolitical tensions. The panel also identified a new generation of AI-native entrepreneurs, operating in...

Can Italy surf the new AI wave with the new “Wave” conference? Vento CEO and partner Diyala D'Aveni unpacks this and more with Pathfounders Founder & Editor, Mike Butcher.

Pathfounders Interview: Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder/CEO, The Fourth Law

Spain-based Mundi Ventures recently launched the Kembara Venture Fund to address this with a €750 million first close, and the ultimate target of a billion euros. Partner Pierre Festal joined Pathfounders to unpack what this means for European deeptech.

Venture capital in the MENA region is moving decisively toward AI-native platforms, which captured 69% of AI funding. The UAE and Saudi Arabia jointly attracted 87% of all AI capital deployed. Pathfounders caught up with  Philip Bahoshy, CEO of Magnitt, a key research house in MENA, to discuss how investment AI is shaping the region's tech industry.

‘Edtech’ is morphing into ‘Learning & Work’ according to a new report from Brighteye Ventures. Pathfounders caught up with report author Rhys Spence to unpack where VC investors are putting their money in Europe.

Last week, Multiverse acquired Berlin-based data and AI training provider StackFuel, a small startup that had raised only €1.5m in total, from a handful of seed investors. Multiverse now plans to use that acquisition as a wedge into the German market, and subsequently other European markets. In a wide-ranging conversation, I asked Founder and CEO Euan Blair what his next strategic moves would be,...

Pathfounders, Episode 1: Interview with Christian Hernandez of Climate tech VC 2150. In this interview with Pathfounders' Mike Butcher, we hear how 2150 has executed on its thesis that cities are where the battle for the climate will be won or lost.

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