EUVC

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast, where we bring you the people and perspectives shaping European venture.
This week, Andreas Munk Holm is joined by Max Schertel, co-founder & CEO of finmid, and Tim Rehder, General Partner at Earlybird, to unpack the rise of embedded lending infrastructure for B2B platforms.
From food delivery and PSPs to ride-hailing and fleet platforms, finmid lets marketplaces offer financing directly to their merchants – with a single integration, across 30+ European markets. Together, they break down why embedded lending is often new capital, not just smoother UX; how better data lets you underwrite the “invisible” SME segment; and what it really takes to scale regulated infra across a fragmented Europe.
Here’s what’s covered:
01:03 – What finmid does: One integration for platforms to offer any financing product to business users across Europe

02:02 – Why embedded wins: Tim on data access, risk scoring, and turning platforms into “banks in all but the balance sheet”

04:05 – Owning infra, not capital: Regulation, operations and data engine vs outsourcing pure funding to institutions

06:43 – Economics & margins: Market size, 60%+ gross margins, and why net income beats headline spread

10:47 – Customer examples: How Wolt Cash works, proactive offers in the merchant dashboard, and +80% retention uplift

12:32 – Impact on the market: New capital for underserved SMEs vs just smoothing the bank journey

17:57 – Ticket sizes & duration: Typical loans of €10–20k, up to ~12 months, 85% renewal and the path to larger, longer credit
21:15 – AI & risk: Using generative and agentic AI in ops (adverse media) and data science (millions of data points, daily model iteration)
29:20 – Scaling to 30 countries: U27 + UK, CH, IS – regulation, payments rails and why “ugly detail work” is the real moat

40:17 – Partner alignment: Making financing core to platform metrics (GMV & retention) and hard-won lessons on incentives

Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures cut through the noise shaping tech, venture, and geopolitics in Europe and beyond.
This week starts lightly, as all good episodes do, with kids, illness paranoia, and the small joys of enforced medical naps. It escalates quickly.
From OpenAI’s new health-focused ChatGPT and the FDA’s sudden sprint toward deregulation to Trump’s Greenland fixation and what it really signals about European sovereignty, to Meta buying its way into the AI application layer, pension funds destroying value at scale, and Nvidia’s push into physical AI.
This is one of those episodes where everything connects.
The common thread is power. Who has it. Who’s losing it. And who’s still pretending nothing has changed.
This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the systems are breaking, and the optimism is… cautiously conditional.
What’s covered:
03:00 ChatGPT Health launches and why Europe is locked out

05:00 The FDA’s pivot to deregulation and what it means for health startups

10:00 Using multiple LLMs as a “second medical opinion”

13:00 Trump, Greenland, and the slow collapse of Pax Americana

18:00 Sovereignty, defence spending, and Europe’s strategic wake-up call

23:00 France moves to ban social media for under-15s

27:00 Meta buys its way into the AI application layer

30:00 Kraken spins out of Octopus at multi-billion scale

34:00 Revolut’s Turkey move and the march to 100 million users

37:00 UK pension funds, catastrophic underperformance, and broken incentives

45:00 Why venture returns matter more than fees

49:00 FTSE hits 10,000 and why it doesn’t mean what you think

56:00 CES, Nvidia’s autonomous ambitions, and physical AI

01:04:00 Grok’s $230B valuation and free speech trade-offs

01:07:00 Deals of the Week

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we go behind the craft of building and backing venture-scale companies in Europe.
Today, we’re joined by Sean Mullaney, Founder & CEO of Seapoint, and Will Prendergast, as the Founding Partner at Frontline Ventures.
Seapoint has just come out of stealth with a $3M pre-seed to rebuild the fragile and fragmented financial stack that European startups (and later: mid-market companies) rely on.
With a Stripe-forged team, AI-native development culture, and operators from Revolut, Tines & more on board, Seapoint wants to become the financial home for European startups.
This conversation dives deep into founder pain, broken tooling, AI-native product building, engineering culture, the changing shape of startup teams, syndicate-building, and why Frontline backed Sean with high conviction.

Here’s what’s covered:
01:07 The Mission: “The financial home for European startups”

03:32 Frontline’s conviction moment

06:24 The founder pain: 5 tools, 5 accounts, zero clarity

08:07 The invisible tax: fragmentation, reconciliation hell, no real-time view

10:14 Why this problem is structurally important

12:19 European vs US lens: why Seapoint is ahead

13:18 AI-native engineering: “We rebuild the stack from processes, not accounts”

15:19 AI agents allow senior engineers to ship full-stack features alone — compressing timelines that previously required 2–3× more engineers.

17:19 Rethinking teams: fewer people, more senior, more generalist

19:33 Productivity does NOT reduce funding needs — it increases ambition

21:27 Culture: curiosity, experimentation, and founder-led technical push

36:11 Syndicate design: Angels as a go-to-market weapon.

40:23 From startup financial home → to powering Europe’s mid-market backbone: lending, treasury, automation, embedded finance.

Welcome back to another episode of the EUVC Podcast. Today, Jeppe sits down with Emil Eifrem, founder & CEO of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database and a core infrastructure layer for AI applications used by all 20 of the top US banks, 9 of 10 global pharma giants, and every major automotive OEM.
Emil recently announced a $100M global startup program to back founders building the next generation of AI-native products on top of graph technology — from knowledge graphs to hallucination-free LLMs.
We delve into why graph thinking matters now, how Neo4j came of age during the Panama Papers investigation, and why Europe is better positioned than people think to compete in the AI platform shift.
Here’s what’s covered:
02:00 — The Panama Papers “Coming Out Party”
How journalists used Neo4j to uncover 7-layer-deep financial relationships invisible to traditional databases — and why it triggered a wave of global adoption.

06:40 — Why Graphs Are the Missing Link for AI
Knowledge, meaning, context, and relationships: why LLMs without structured knowledge graphs hallucinate.

08:50 — The $100M Startup Program
Why Neo4j is returning to its roots to support AI-native founders — and why the packaging for startups had to change.

12:00 — What Founders Get
Free Aura credits, dedicated graph engineers, joint GTM, and access to the world’s largest graph developer community.

14:30 — Early Traction: 300+ Startups in Weeks
Why early demand is far ahead of expectations — and the kinds of companies applying.

16:10 — Community as a Strategic Moat
500+ annual global events, deep developer love, and why skill availability is now a CIO-level buying criterion.

19:00 — Building Deep Tech in Europe
Why Neo4j kept engineering in Europe, how the ecosystem matured, and what today’s founders can learn.

22:00 — Regulation & Competitiveness
Will Europe overregulate itself out of the AI race? Emil’s perspective on models vs infrastructure vs applications.

23:40 — The Future of AI Infrastructure
Why every company must rethink its stack — and why the biggest threat is assuming your business will survive without change.

In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm speaks with Oskar Hartmann, legendary operator turned super angel.
From Kazakhstan to Germany, Russia, Japan, and now Dubai and Silicon Valley, Oskar has built and exited more than 10 companies, invested in 150+ ventures (14 unicorns among them), and today is pioneering a new way to solve concentration risk for founders and angels: Accumulator, a share-pooling model unlocking liquidity and diversification.
They dive into Oskar’s “beast mode” founder philosophy, his candid battles with burnout, the importance of product–soul fit, and why Europe doesn’t just need more unicorns, it needs deca- and hectocorns.
Along the way, Oskar shares his learnings from India’s ecosystem, his obsession with avoiding adverse selection, and his belief that communities, not individuals, create enduring success.