Hi friends,

There is a kind of startup-corporate partnership we’ve seen many times, and you may have too: the one that looks like it should work.

The startup brings speed, product and new ideas. The corporate brings customer access, trust, distribution and balance sheet. On paper, the logic is obvious.

But in practice, these partnerships often stall when the strategic story comes before the hard questions about what needs to be true.

Yes, the press release almost writes itself. But the harder test is whether there is a real path from interest to commitment.

That means a customer who genuinely wants it, a business unit willing to back it, a startup that can survive the corporate timeline and a partnership that can move beyond the pilot into something the market actually validates.

That is the focus of our conversation with Alex Manson, CEO at SC Ventures, the ventures building arm of Standard Chartered, and author of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained, alongside Jeppe Høier, EUVC’s in-house corporate expert.

All of this matters for founders building in markets where corporates can be part of the path to scale: fintech, enterprise software, infrastructure, cyber, compliance, AI for regulated industries, industrial tech and other B2B categories selling into complex organisations.

The same issues are also relevant to the investors backing those companies, the corporate venture teams trying to work with them and the LPs asking whether strategic capital can create real value without losing financial discipline.

We’ve shared the full conversation below, along with a few resources if you want to go deeper, plus other highlights, events and resources from across Europe’s tech and venture ecosystem.

Enjoy,

with 💖
David & Andreas

For founders selling into corporates, working with strategic partners or considering corporate capital, the hard part is knowing whether the relationship can actually help the company scale.

These resources help founders assess what a CVC can bring, what can go wrong and how to judge whether a corporate partner is set up to be genuinely useful.

Resources to use:

For investors, CVCs and LPs, the question is whether corporate engagement creates real value, not just access, branding or strategic language.

These resources look at how strong CVCs structure themselves, align strategic and financial goals and turn startup engagement into something that lasts beyond the investment.

Resources to use:

Basecamp Research is bringing its EDEN antibiotic and vaccine design models to Claude Science, helping researchers move from a biological target to a shortlist of therapeutic candidates through a conversational interface.

The integration points to AI moving deeper into biological design, with potential applications in antimicrobial resistance and emerging pathogens.

Key developments

The EUVC-curated investment stage. 90 minutes of keynotes. The Impact Circle Investor Lounge on July 24.

Europe's most interesting investors in the most unusual venue.

If you're coming, see you there. If you're not, now you know what you're missing.

Europe’s AI position is being tested from every direction: Chinese open-weight models are gaining usage, Nvidia could become even more central to the stack and Europe still has gaps across power, chips, data centres and model capacity.

In the latest episode of This Week in European Tech, Mads Jensen and Dan Bowyer of SuperSeed are joined by Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures to discuss China’s AI rise, UK pension capital moving into venture, whether today’s AI market looks like 1999 and where Europe may still have an edge.

Highlights

The LP Trust Report is a joint report by EUVC and Embracing Emergence on what LPs really want from VC quarterly updates and what makes reporting useful, based on direct LP feedback.

It matters because LPs read updates as more than performance summaries. They use them to assess clarity, consistency, transparency and fund discipline, including during due diligence.

The report is for fund managers, GPs, IR teams, fund operators and LPs. It covers:

World Fund’s Europe’s Power Play 2026 argues that resilience has become too defensive a goal.

Europe’s competitiveness, sovereignty and security now depend on rebuilding strength across energy, industry, critical materials and compute, four markets estimated to exceed $35 trillion globally by 2030.

The report is for investors, LPs, founders, corporates and policymakers looking at where Europe’s next industrial champions could be built.

It shows where the continent is most exposed, which technologies matter most and how companies including cylib, Space Forge, IQM and Isar Aerospace are turning frontier science into industrial capability.