Upside
This week's happenings in startup and investing land. Getting underneath VC, and discussing how to better support the European startup eco-system.
Every week we share what's been on our mind and get under the skin of VC, investing, startups and founder psychology.
From the team behind SuperSeed who invest in technical teams solving difficult business problems.
The network is run on LinkedIn so join me there - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbowyer/
With full interview audio and video uploaded to all major outlets.
Love to hear from you - dan@superseed.com
Upside
Intelligence Crisis, Europe’s Rearmament Boom & The End Of AI Safety
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Upside is a weekly review of all of the news affecting European venture, startups and investing.
VC Hosts: Dan, Mads, Lomax
[03:05] Nvidia Earnings — 14th consecutive beat. Data centre rev up 75% to $62B. Stock basically flat. The market has priced in perfection. Bull case: 16x 2028 earnings, Rubin shipping, China at zero = pure upside. Bear case: custom ASICs climbing, 75% margins under siege. "The question is whether the AI companies can actually monetise it."
[09:11] Ukraine, Four Years On — From aid recipient to defence-tech supplier. Ukrainian startups raised $105M in 2025 — a third of all European early-stage defence capital. European defence budgets heading from ~$300B to ~$600B. Defence tech investment: $100M in 2019 → $1.5B in 2025. The 100:1 drone kill ratio is extraordinary economics. War is maths, and Ukraine is winning it.
[23:30] Anthropic's Safety Meets Reality — Founded to be the safe one. Now dropping guardrails weeks after a $30B raise. Pentagon threatened to brand them a supply chain risk. Lomax: "Call me cynical." Mads: "Existential threats rewire moral calculus. It happened to OpenAI. It happened to Google. Now it's Anthropic's turn." RIP Bletchley Park.
[29:25] Chinese Distillation — 24,000 fake accounts. 16M exchanges. DeepSeek, Moonshot and Minimax caught training on Anthropic's models at industrial scale. National security issue? Obviously. But China has a chokehold on the US defence supply chain, so good luck with that conversation.
[32:00] Anthropic Goes Enterprise — Salesforce, Slack, DocuSign integrations. Partner or Trojan horse? Mads: building enterprise apps is way harder than vibe coding on a Thursday afternoon.
[35:30] SaaSpocalypse or Renaissance? — The market can't decide. Current thesis: SaaS = system of record, AI = system of action. Honest answer? Nobody knows.
[36:20] AI Margins — OpenAI hit 33% gross margin (targeted 46%). Anthropic hit 30% (targeted 40%). Nearly $4B spent on free users. Break-even pushed to 2028-2030. Lomax: "Can you run a giant tech company on 30% gross margin? The multiple doesn't work."
[41:45] European Quantum — Funding hit $1.5B in 2025 (+170% YoY). Strong science layer, governments actually buying from startups. But PsiQuantum alone raised $1B in the US. Mads: "Europe has €16T in pension capital. The deficit is plumbing, not capability."
[52:45] The Doomsday Paper — "What if AI succeeds so hard it triggers a macro crisis?" Mads dismantles it. Jamie Dimon tie-in: maybe SaaS is the new subprime.
[57:35] Deal of the Week — Wayve raising $1.2B at $8.6B. First automotive investor: Nissan.
[58:20] Week Ahead — UK Spring Statement. DeepSeek DBC-4. OpenAI $100B round. Hegseth vs Amodei showdown — Dan's prediction: Anthropic caves.
