Europe’s Builders Are Rewiring the Stack
Submit your nominations for The EUVC Awards 2026
Hi friends 👋
This week, we’re spending time with the people quietly rebuilding Europe’s venture plumbing from the inside out. The operators, founders, and investors are addressing issues that have been long-standing problems.
We sit down with Oskar Hartmann on what comes after ‘beast mode’ and why angel investing needs better structures, not louder hustle. Emil Eifrem shares why graphs are becoming a core part of the AI infrastructure stack and how Neo4j is backing founders with a $100M global program. And Sean Mullaney and Will Prendergast walk us through how Seapoint is untangling the messy startup finance stack with an AI-native approach.
We’re also opening nominations for The EUVC Awards. Help spotlight excellence in European venture by submitting your nominations for the eight different categories, including Hall of Fame, Emerging Manager of the Year, and the newly added CVC of the Year.
Join our team! We’re hiring a Content Production Assistant (Lisbon-based) to help bring EUVC’s podcasts, newsletters, and content to life. If you love storytelling and want to learn how great content gets made, we’d love to hear from you.
As always, thank you for being part of this community, reading, sharing, challenging, and contributing. It genuinely makes EUVC better.
Hope you enjoy,
with 💖 David & Andreas
Introducing the EUVC Awards 2026: Submit Your Nominations
Help define excellence in European venture
Nominations for the EUVC Awards 2026 are officially open. Now in the third edition, the awards have evolved to better understand how excellence in VC actually shows up across different fund sizes, strategies, and stages.
Key insights:
Recognition by context, not hype: Award categories are split by fund size and role, ensuring fair comparison between emerging managers, established firms, and corporate venture funds.
Community-led, credibility-driven: Nominations from the ecosystem play a central role, with winners selected by a jury of experienced LPs and strategic investors to maintain rigor and trust.
Broader definition of excellence: Beyond firm performance, the awards highlight impact, leadership, meaningful exits, and long-term contributions to European venture capital.
Submit your nomination for the EUVC Awards 2026 and help spotlight excellence in European VC.
[Masterclass] Foundations of Fund Modelling in VC
Foundations of Fund Modelling in VC is a practical masterclass for investors, operators, and aspiring fund managers who want to understand how venture capital funds actually work under the hood. Moving beyond theory and spreadsheet templates, the session focuses on the core mechanics of VC fund models, how capital flows over time, how returns are generated, and how assumptions drive real outcomes.
This 2-hour masterclass establishes a shared baseline on VC fund modelling, focusing on structure, terminology, and real-world use cases rather than complex scenario building.
Join the masterclass and build a clear, practical understanding of VC fund modelling.
Register using the code UIWUFJXY for €50 OFF.
Members of the EUVC community receive a 50% discount.
Table of Contents
Podcasts of The Week
🎧 Podcasts of The Week
Oskar Hartmann, Accumulator: From Beast Mode to a New Angel Investing Model
Oskar Hartmann, the legendary operator turned super angel, sits down with Andreas Munk Holm to talk about a lifetime of building, burning out, and reinvesting at scale.
From backing companies across Europe and Asia to supporting over 150 startups (including 14 unicorns), Oskar shares why adverse selection is the silent killer of angel portfolios and how his latest venture, Accumulator, introduces a new share-pooling model to unlock liquidity and diversification for founders and angels.
It’s a candid conversation about 'beast mode,' meaning overbalancing, and why communities create enduring venture outcomes.
Key takeaways:
Europe doesn’t lack unicorns; it lacks ambition for deca- and hectocorns
Concentration risk breaks founders’ and angels’ diversification and liquidity matter earlier
Community-led investing beats solo angels in both returns and resilience
🎧 Listen on Apple or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapters ready to go.
Emil Eifrem, Neo4j: Building the AI Infrastructure Layer—Neo4j’s $100M Bet on the Next Wave of AI Startups
Emil Eifrem, Founder & CEO of Neo4j, joins Jeppe Høier to discuss why graph technology is becoming a core infrastructure layer for AI.
From Neo4j’s breakout moment during the Panama Papers investigation to its role today powering mission-critical AI systems across banking, pharma, and automotive, the conversation explores why LLMs need structured context to avoid hallucinations and why graphs are the missing link.
Emil also introduces Neo4j’s $100M global startup program, designed to help founders build the next wave of AI-native products on top of graph architectures.
Key takeaways:
Graphs provide context, memory, and explainability, which foundation AI systems currently lack
Neo4j is backing founders directly with a $100M program, free credits, deep technical support, and GTM
Europe is structurally strong in AI infrastructure and applied systems if regulation doesn’t get in the way
🎧 Listen on Apple or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapters ready to go.
Sean Mullaney, Seapoint & Will Prendergast, Frontline Ventures: Rebuilding Europe’s Startup Financial Stack with an AI-Native Playbook
Sean Mullaney, Founder & CEO of Seapoint and Will Prendergast, Founding Partner of Frontline Ventures share why the financial stack European startups rely on is fundamentally broken and how Seapoint is rebuilding it from the ground up.
Fresh out of stealth with a $3M pre-seed led by Frontline, Seapoint is building an AI-native financial home that replaces today’s patchwork of banks, tools, spreadsheets, and inbox chaos with a single, unified system designed for how tech companies actually operate.
Key takeaways:
Europe’s startup finance stack is fragmented by default. Seapoint rebuilds it as a single, process-native system
AI-native engineering enables smaller, senior teams to ship infrastructure at unprecedented speed
This isn’t a tool; it’s infrastructure with startups as the wedge and Europe’s mid-market as the prize
🎧 Listen on Apple or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapters ready to go.
This Week in European Tech with Dan, Mads & Lomax
Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures return on Upside to unpack the forces reshaping European tech, venture, and geopolitics — from AI in healthcare and regulatory divergence to sovereign risk, capital misallocation, and the race for physical AI.
This episode connects the dots between seemingly disparate stories: OpenAI’s health push, US deregulation, Trump’s Greenland fixation, Meta’s AI strategy, Nvidia’s autonomous ambitions, and why Europe’s pension systems may be quietly destroying long-term value.
Key takeaways:
AI is moving into real-world power centers (health + platforms), and the advantage is shifting to whoever ships fastest.
Europe is waking up to sovereignty, but still risks regulating itself into dependency.
Capital allocation is Europe’s hidden constraint.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapter markers ready to go.
The European Pension Capital Dialogues at GoWest
We are delighted to bring The European Pension Capital Dialogues—a series of pan-European dialogues to unlock pension capital for growth and tech sovereignty—to GoWest, where Europe’s leading deep tech investors convene for keynote insights, fireside conversations, and high-impact networking around the forces shaping the future of European investment.
This year’s program spotlights the Green Transition, Defense & Security, and Frontier Innovation at the intersection of science and industry—sectors critical to Europe’s next wave of competitiveness.
As Nordic pension funds increase their activity across clean tech, defense, and early-stage innovation, GoWest becomes a natural launchpad, connecting long-term capital, insight, and vision in a region leading on impact and pension reform.
Speakers include: Philippe Tibi (The Tibi Initiative, French Ministry for the Economy, Finance and Recovery, and Professor at École Polytechnique Paris), Michel Scheffer (EIC), Christina Brinck (Volvo Group VC), Daniel Keiper-Knorr (Speedinvest), and Joe Schorge (Isomer).
What do VCs actually get paid? 💰
The VC Compensation Benchmark is back—and if you work in venture, we need your input.
Last year, 400+ VCs and CVCs across 24 countries contributed. This year, we’re raising the bar to deliver the most useful, trusted snapshot of VC compensation in the industry.
Take part and help shape the benchmark.
✅ 100% anonymous
🚫 No emails, no personal data—ever
Add your data. Strengthen the signal.
Thank you. We’ll share the full results with you soon!
A small step toward better fund models (for all of us)
We’ve been digging deep into fund modelling—through masterclasses, podcasts, and countless GP/LP conversations. One thing is clear: everyone’s wrestling with similar challenges, but almost nobody talks about them openly.
So we’re pulling together a shared snapshot for the whole community. Not an ask, just something we’re building together so we can all get a clearer picture of where the real friction points are in fund modelling today.
You can read about it here, but more importantly, please add your voice 👇.
We’ll gather the themes and share them with everyone. No fluff, just continuously striving to raise the bar and giving Europe’s venture ecosystem the signal it’s been missing.
Grateful to be building this with you all.
Join our team in Lisbon!
We’re looking for a Content Production Assistant to help bring EUVC’s podcasts, newsletters, and content to life. You’ll work closely with our Content Lead and founders in a hands-on, early-career role that’s perfect for someone curious, organized, and excited to learn how great content gets made. If you love storytelling and want to grow inside Europe’s venture platform, we’d love to hear from you. Lisbon-based.
LP AMA with VenCap’s Sion Evans
January 23rd | 12 pm GMT (Virtual) | Priority for Academy Members.
Get an inside perspective on how one of the world’s most selective venture capital fund-of-funds evaluates top-tier VC managers globally. This AMA is designed for founders, investors, and operators who want to understand how elite institutional capital thinks about venture investing across cycles, geographies, and strategies.
Limited seats available. Register now to secure your spot and gain access to insights rarely shared outside institutional circles.
🤗 Join the EUVC Community
Looking for niche, high-quality experiences that prioritize depth over breadth? Consider joining our community focused on delivering content tailored to the experienced VC. Here’s what you can look forward to as a member:
Exclusive Access & Discounts: Priority access to masterclasses with leading GPs & LPs, available on a first-come, first-served basis.
On-Demand Content: A platform with sessions you can access anytime, anywhere, complete with presentations, templates, and other resources.
Interactive AMAs: Engage directly with top GPs and LPs in exclusive small group sessions — entirely free for community members.