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:
00:03 FDA shifts: deregulation + faster approvals for AI medical devices/wearables
00:09 Trump + Greenland + NATO: geopolitics, minerals, defense, European sovereignty
00:18 France proposing social media ban for under-15s; phones in schools; EU vs US regulation
00:23 Meta reportedly buying Manus (AI agents/applications layer)
00:25 Octopus Energy’s Kraken spin-out: valuation, contracted revenue, European “hidden champion.”
00:27 Discord IPO chatter: nearing ~$1B ARR; monetization model
00:32 UK pensions: pressure to allocate to privates; constraints + risk/return tradeoffs
00:42 FTSE 100 hits 10,000; UK vs S&P; defense-driven rally; low tech weighting
00:50 CES: Nvidia autonomous driving + open sourcing; “physical AI” + Mercedes partnership
00:54 China & Nvidia H20 pressures; AMD vs Nvidia software gap; Intel relevance
✍️ Show Notes
AI Goes to the Doctor, Regulators Blink
The episode opens with OpenAI’s release of a health-specific version of ChatGPT, notable as much for what it does as for where it doesn’t launch. Europe, once again, is excluded.
Lomax explains the core difference. This isn’t just ChatGPT with a stethoscope. It’s positioned as a secure, encrypted environment designed for uploading blood tests, wearable data, and medical records. The backlash online has been immediate, with concerns about safety and misuse, but the group largely agrees on one thing. People are already using LLMs for health. The question is whether they’ll do it blindly or with better tools and clearer guardrails.
The bigger story sits with the FDA. In a move that would be unthinkable in Europe, the US regulator has announced it wants to move at “the speed of Silicon Valley.” Years of heavy regulation around AI-based medical devices are being rolled back. Software that once required multi-year, multi-million-dollar approval processes may no longer need them.
For new startups, this is rocket fuel. For companies that built their moat through regulatory pain, it’s existentially annoying.
Second Opinions at Machine Speed
Mads takes the conversation deeper, outlining how LLMs can already function as a powerful form of second opinion. By querying multiple frontier models simultaneously and reconciling their outputs, you can surface disagreements, edge cases, and nuance that a single model might miss.
It’s not consumer-ready yet. It’s still hacky. But it points to where healthcare AI is going. Not replacing clinicians, but amplifying judgment, pattern recognition, and speed.
The group agrees on the real missing piece. Education. Not telling people “don’t use AI,” but teaching them how to use it critically.
Greenland, Trump, and the End of Comfortable Assumptions
The tone shifts hard as the conversation moves to geopolitics.
Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland isn’t treated as a joke. Mads lays out the history. Denmark’s centuries-long relationship with Greenland. NATO ties. The long-standing US military presence. And the uncomfortable reality that this isn’t really about defence. It’s about resources.
What worries the group most isn’t the island itself, but what it signals. The erosion of trust. The shift from alliance-based order to transactional power plays. The creeping sense that European governments must now seriously plan for a world where American guarantees are conditional.
Sovereignty, once an abstract talking point, is becoming operational.
Europe Regulates, America Deregulates
That contrast sharpens with France’s move to ban social media for under-15s and extend phone bans into high schools.
Lomax is clear. Trump will hate this. It feeds the narrative of European overreach and nanny-state regulation. But this is one area where he’s unapologetically supportive. The data on teenage mental health is grim. The commercial impact on Big Tech is survivable. The social cost of doing nothing is not.
If this creates compliance moats for incumbents, so be it. Some speed bumps are worth building.
Meta Buys Speed, Not Models
From regulation to strategy, the discussion turns to Meta’s acquisition of a fast-rising AI application company.
Mads frames it simply. Models matter, but applications win users. What Cursor and Claude Code have done for developers, Meta wants to do for consumers. Buying execution is faster than building it.
It’s another signal that the AI race is shifting up the stack.
Kraken Emerges from the Shadows
One of the most underappreciated stories of the week is Kraken, spun out of Octopus Energy at a valuation north of eight billion.
Built quietly inside a utility, Kraken now runs energy systems for competitors and global markets alike. It’s infrastructure software disguised as a boring energy tool, with hundreds of millions in contracted revenue.
A reminder that some of Europe’s biggest tech companies don’t look like tech companies at all.
Discord, Revolut, and the Shape of Scale
Discord’s IPO chatter surfaces almost casually, but the numbers are serious. Near a billion in ARR, consumer subscriptions at scale, and a product that owns its niche.
Revolut’s move into Turkey is read as pure execution. Buy the license. Enter the market. Keep going. With 65 million users and ambitions for 100 million by 2027, the question is no longer whether Revolut wins, but how big it gets.
The UK, meanwhile, feels increasingly optional.
Pension Funds and the Cost of Fear
The most frustrated segment of the episode centers on pension funds.
Some UK schemes are delivering barely one to two percent annual returns. After inflation, that’s value destruction. The problem, as Mads explains, isn’t malice. It’s incentives. Trustees are rewarded for minimizing volatility and fees, not maximizing long-term outcomes.
Lomax brings the data. Top-quartile and top-decile venture funds deliver extraordinary net returns over time. The problem isn’t the asset class. It’s access, expertise, and courage.
Until pensions are judged on outcomes instead of optics, capital will keep flowing to safety and stagnation.
Markets Up, Signals Mixed
Yes, the FTSE hit 10,000. Yes, it briefly outperformed the S&P 500.
But context matters. Defence stocks drove the rally. Tech representation remains tiny. Celebration without introspection is misplaced.
Biotech, Psychedelics, and a Quiet Revival
Away from the headlines, biotech is back.
Lomax points to strong performance across the sector and eye-watering gains in niche areas like psychedelics. Companies working on non-hallucinogenic compounds for epilepsy and depression are posting real clinical progress.
China, meanwhile, is sprinting ahead in biotech investment, largely unnoticed.
CES and Nvidia’s Physical AI Bet
CES brings the hardware conversation roaring back.
Nvidia’s big swing is physical AI, especially autonomous driving. Open-sourcing models and data, partnering with Mercedes, and targeting Level 4 autonomy by 2027, the ambition is massive.
Whether Nvidia can translate chip dominance into application-layer success remains an open question. History suggests it’s hard. But Jensen Huang is betting this is bigger than GPUs.
Grok, Valuations, and Free Speech Trade-offs
The episode closes on Grok’s enormous funding round and equally enormous valuation.
At hundreds of times revenue, this isn’t about fundamentals. It’s about Musk. Speed. Free speech. And running straight at the walls others avoid.
Some of the outputs are already problematic. The tension between openness and responsibility is unresolved. But the market has spoken, at least for now.
Deals of the Week
Faculty exits to Accenture in a reported billion-dollar deal, one of the UK’s quietest big AI wins.
Biographica raises to build next-generation crop technologies that reduce pesticides and increase resilience, proving again that some of the most important innovation happens far from consumer hype.
One-Line Takeaway
From AI in hospitals to minerals in the Arctic, from pension capital to physical autonomy, the rules are being rewritten in real time — and Europe’s biggest risk is assuming the old ones still apply.
