Upside Special - What Would European Investors Back With Their Last Euro?

Upside Live from Montenegro: Five GPs, Five Bets

Recorded live from a Montenegrin port at a European LP/GP gathering of 80 investors, Dan asked 5 European investors the same question: 

If you had to put every penny of your fund and personal capital into one bet in Europe, where would it go?

(01:21) Jens Lapinski — German super angel 

Jens would back the full AI stack, money transfer infrastructure, training environments, enterprise deployment. On sovereign AI, he argues the US-Europe relationship is one investment continuum rather than two competing blocs: chips, foundation models, hyperscalers, operating systems and the application layer are predominantly US-built, and pretending otherwise isn't productive. He acknowledges defence and security carve-outs make sense, but the broader play is co-investing with American capital, not against it. The one structural fix: unlock European pension fund and insurance capital flows into venture, and fix the public market exit path so companies don't default to US listings.

(07:24) Andra Bagdonaite — First Pick, Lithuania 

First-check pre-seed investor for Baltic founders since 2022. Andra's bet: AI applied to traditional SMBs; logistics, manufacturing, businesses still running on legacy ERPs and Excel. Lithuania functions as a fast sandbox for founders to pilot with one or two customers before going global. She frames this as a long compounding opportunity rather than a rocket ship, the scale of legacy process digitisation across European SMBs is the prize.

(12:21) Ella Goldner — Zinc 

Ella would concentrate on transformative deep tech climate. Her view: incremental solutions won't shift the trajectory, so a portfolio approach to moonshot bets, fusion and energy provision featured explicitly, is the rational play. She cites Kate Bingham's COVID Vaccine Taskforce as the model: urgency strips out bureaucracy and accelerates the research-to-commercialisation path. Insurance pricing is already starting to reflect climate risk, which she sees as an early commercial signal. Her one change for Europe: cultural rather than structural, building a problem-solving, business-building mindset from school age. She contrasts this with Israel and the US, where building and discussing ventures is embedded in everyday conversation.

(23:58) Mike Reiner — 432 Legacy, Netherlands 

Mike's bet: the software and safety layer around physical AI. Roughly 11% of revenue is currently lost to safety-driven slowdowns and caging where robots and humans share environments. His firm has already backed a Swiss company using ultra-wideband to detect people through walls for multi-sensor safety platforms. The thesis comes from a proprietary value-chain analysis system: the same tool surfaced transformer and specialist hardware supply as the binding constraint on data centre buildout (not just energy), and identified firmware security (portfolio company Binary) as a durable cyber gap less likely to be absorbed by the foundation model providers. On founders, he looks for trauma-driven ambition paired with active self-development work, the combination he sees correlating with mission-driven, durable companies. His one change: more funds willing to take on tough problems with longer fund cycles, which he argues is also where the largest demand-supply gaps, and returns sit.

(34:39) Dave Haynes — FOV Ventures 

Dave's bet: robotics and physical AI. He separates the two cleanly; robotics is the embodiment, physical AI (or world models) is the intelligence layer that understands real-world physics rather than text and images. Sizing: digital economy roughly $15T, physical economy in the hundreds of trillions, and software has only meaningfully disrupted the former. FOV maps the space across four layers: hardware and infrastructure (sensors, hyperspectral imaging, wireless power, portfolio company Willow), software and operating systems, the intelligence layer (world models, where Yann LeCun's Amy sits as a European entrant), and vertical applications. Europe's edge, in his view, is in vertical deployment; labour shortages, real industrial pull, and strong robotics talent from TUM, ETH and Imperial. He frames the shift as "Robotics 2.0": where Robotics 1.0 needed £5m of CapEx, founders can now build serious automation businesses on a £500k cheque, mirroring the Web 1.0 to 2.0 transition. He estimates the ChatGPT-equivalent moment for robotics is roughly five years out.