Venture Europe

Vay is one of Europe’s best funded startups in the mobility industry with almost $150M raised to date, from top tier investors like Atomico, Creandum and Kinnevik among others and Thomas the co-founder and CEO is here with us today, tuning in from Las Vegas to tell us more about his journey.

Vay pursues a different approach to the likes of Waymo, which is “remote driving”.

Remote driving is the most affordable door-to-door mobility service and you will learn why and how it works during the episode.

Prior to founding Vay, Thomas spent six years in Silicon Valley, where he launched Zoox's first self-driving vehicle on public streets. Zoox was bought in 2020 by Amazon for $1.2B according to Dealroom. Thomas was also part of launching Amazon's first Echo in leading Technical Program Manager positions.

During this episode we discuss the advantages of remote driving when it comes to safety, the market opportunities in the more than $1T driverless car industry, and why Elon Musk has announced to also focus on remote driving at Tesla pointing to the benefits of embodied learning.

Enjoy!

Anton Osika - co-founder and CEO of Lovable.

With Lovable you can go from an Idea to app in seconds. It functions like your superhuman full stack engineer.

Anton has a remarkable story in the startup world. He was the a founding member of several multimillion dollar startups.

One, Sana Labs that recently raised $55m lead by NEA bringing the total raise to ~$130m, he was also a founding engineer of Depict which raised ~$20m and now his latest venture - Lovable where they raised ~$7m pre-seed round in October this year.

During this episode we discuss about why now we are in the most transformational years in human history where machine intelligence become more capable than human intelligence, how you can get motivated when someone argues against you and how to run a successful fundraise.

Enjoy

Walter Ballheimer - founder and CEO of ⁠Reflex Aerospace⁠. The first venture backed satellite manufacturer in Europe.

They have raised ~15m Euros to design and build mass customised satellites to send into space.

Prior to founding Reflex Space he founded Germany’s first CubeSat Start-Up – “German Orbital Systems”. To date, the company has built and launched more than eleven satellites.

During this episode we discuss about the different types of satellites, the space tech market and and the split on value capture between upstream and downstream.

Enjoy!

Christian Vollmann - founder and CEO of ⁠Carbon One⁠. Founded in 2022 they have raised approximately $14M to date with the mission to lower the green premium on green methanol and thus reduce the world’s dependency on oil, gas and coal.

Their aim is to establish circular carbon economies in three hard-to-abate industries: container shipping, aviation and chemical production.

Prior to founding Carbon One, Christian has built, sold and IPO-ed multiple business.

1. First one, called iLove for his mentor ⁠Oliver Samwer⁠ where he built the business from scratch, up to Eur 25M Revenue while forgetting to get some equity in the business, ouch
2. The second one MyVideo, which was one of the leading video platforms back then in Germany and France that he sold to ProSieben
3. The third one was eDarling. They built a matchmaking business running 15 brands in 20 countries having revenue in 12 different currencies. They listed that on the New York stock exchange.
4. And the forth one ⁠nebenan.de⁠ the largest social network for neighbours in Germany with around 3m active users.

Such a hustler!

During this episode we discuss about his learnings in building multiple consumer businesses, the motivation to start Carbon One and the mental struggles that an entrepreneur is usually faced with and some suggestions on how to deal with it.

Enjoy!

Colin Hanna - Partner at Balderton Capital.

Balderton is multi-stage venture firm with over twenty years of expertise in aiding European founders from the initial seed stage through to IPO. According to Dealroom they have invested in over 30 companies valued at over a billion euros - among them Revolut, Sinch and Waye among many others.

Recently they’ve raised $1.3 billion, divided into a $615 million early-stage fund and a $685 million growth fund for more mature companies. The capital will be used to support emerging technology companies across Europe.

At Balderton, Colin invests in purpose-driven, product-focused founders spanning verticals including Cloud, Consumer, Crypto, and Fintech.

He began his career at Goldman Sachs in New York where he focused on raising capital for Asian internet companies, including Tencent, Nexon, and Tarena among others.

During this episode we discuss about his competitive swimming period from Princeton, the open-source movement and the crypto market.

Enjoy!

George Henry - General Partner at LocalGlobe - the seed fund which is according to Dealroom figures, EMEA’s most successful investor in unicorns at seed stage.

LocalGlobe invests across Europe and some of its notable investments include Wise, Improbable, Motorway, Tide and Automata. George himself focuses on finding the next generation of industry-transforming businesses to serve two over-looked sectors: the creative economy and SMEs. His investments range across several sectors and include some of Europe’s fastest growing companies - Qogita, Rekki, Sorare, Taster and Travelperk.

During this episode we discuss about learning velocity, the importance of having a compelling vision and taking risk.

Enjoy!

Lukas Saari - CEO and Co-founder of Tandem Health.

Tandem is building an AI co-pilot for healthcare practitioners. Their first product is an ambient scribe that listens during the patient-doctor consultation, transcribes the conversation and generates the draft of the medical note.

They were founded only 1 year ago, and recently closed a ~$10M seed round, led by Northzone, to accelerate their expansion from Sweden to across Europe.

Before Tandem, Lukas has worked at Spotify with machine learning and has been the leader of McKinsey's Healthcare Analytics practice in the Nordics.

During this episode we discuss why AI is the internet moment of our generation and why founders should take advantage of it, we touch on the cost and the administrative burden in healthcare and how Tandem solves that and how to go about validating a pain point and raise money from investors.

Enjoy!

Florian Brand co-founder and Co-CEO of ATAI Life Sciences.

ATAI was founded in 2018 and is a global, listed, biopharma company with the vision to heal mental health disorders so that everyone, everywhere can live a more fulfilled life.

They were one of the pioneers to use psilocybin in treating mental health and they have raised around $400M equity and debt from Petter Thiel and other investors to build a portfolio of compounds like MDMA, DMT and others, to go through clinical trials and bring them to market.

During this episode we discuss about Florians' motivation to start Atai, how drug discovery works and why it takes around 10 years to bring to market, and a personal story of trying psychedelics to go through the loss of a loved one.

Enjoy!

Michael Lazarenko, founder and CEO of Embedd.

With Embedd they provide a unified framework so that all the components coming from tens of different manufacturers can communicate with each other on the circuit board.

They raised $1.2M Eur pre-seed round led by Cocoa in May last year and now they are ready and gearing up to raise their seed round.

During this episode we discuss how they took 350 meetings to raise the pressed, the importance of storytelling when of explaining something complex to investors and how the war in Ukraine has built more resilience in him and his team but also killed his previous startup.

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