about the funding environment - extremely tough for first time funds, easily the hardest in at least a decade

on the local ecosystem - the reality is that most European VC’s are generalists run by non-founders

on making super early stage bets - our only datapoint is the founder, the failure odds are crazy, so only the crazy really go for it

on emerging verticals - the next big revolutions will be in healthcare and industrial.

Today that means the US. Start here, build here. Raise money there, scale there and (ultimately) win there. That’s hard and it’s not for everyone. But it’s our sole focus. And so we've just announced our early-stage fund to help founders on the first part of their journey to do exactly that.

NB: It’s quite the opposite for AI first companies - it’s like 2019 all over again in some places - and not necessarily in a good way! But overall this is an incredible time to be investing, with so many previously ignored sectors being totally transformed and accelerated.

As the saying goes “a terrible time for raising funds is a fantastic time to be investing”.

There's a massive difference between the two, when investing at the earliest stages of a company. It's not to say non-founders don’t make great investors - they of course can do - but in general if you ask any early-stage founder who they’d rather take money from - a founder or an ex banker - 9/10 times they will say ‘we would rather take money from an ex-founder’.

That’s because founding any business is the hardest but most satisfying thing a person can ever do. Being multi-time founders ourselves we have the empathy and operational chops to be truly helpful when needed - and stay out of the way when not! And that's why so many of our previous founders have invested in our fund and we’ve been able to consistently deploy even into the hottest follow-on rounds; because our founders want us there.

It’s also why we left very well paid jobs running big VC firms to build Odyssey in the first place - from our own experience of working with great (and not so great) VCs and a strong view on what it takes to be successful in this next cycle.

In the last 20 years the term ‘Deeptech’ has been conflated with sectors like energy, hardware biotech that have previously had very long term return horizons; a place for scientists and patient capital - not real venture capital. But that is changing, fast.

Hardware doesn’t have to be hard now - it can scale at software speed with software margins now. And if you combine that with the fact that many of the biggest sectors out there are still relatively untouched by digitisation - it’s a truly enormous opportunity.

The reality is that US markets are bigger, so US funds are bigger, so US risk appetite is bigger, so US rounds are bigger and so of course ultimately… US companies are bigger. Which inevitably means that going to the US is essential if you want to win globally. In that way it’s an easy screening question for us, and one that sets the bar on the ambition of the founder, and how likely they will be to be successful raising from the big guns on the west coast.

Firstly you need experience of having done it before, of translating European to American. It’s very very different - despite the language! I went to school on the east coast as a kid, lived in the mid-west in my early 20’s, and then lived in California for a decade with my last start-up. I can tell you some totally-counter intuitive things about building US go-to-market and hiring sales teams here in Europe vs in the US. It’s nuanced and not always what you expect!

And secondly you need a deep and genuine network; it helps that we are privileged to sit on boards with some of the best investors in the valley, and we have an SF office and team to help founder practically when they are there. As a result we're very proud that our first investment out of London - Flow Engineering founded by the incredibly Pari Singh - just raised an amazing round from Sequoia in SF alongside the founders of Stripe and Unity - with none other than Roelof joining the board. Pari is well on his way to building that global winner…

The UK BioBank is an incredible example that startups all over the world are leveraging to bring amazing new therapies and devices to market. As a result, the combination of post-covid vaccine research, AI therapeutics and personal health measurement are going to lead to a transformation in personalise health, whilst robotics and neurotechnology are going to revolutionise intervention and the health system overall. We have an amazing stealth investment in a founder from Cambridge in the latter.

One example of this is Viridi - a Southampton spin-out transforming all the everyday products we use like shampoo, cleaning detergents, plastics - into cleaner, lower cost, more degradable products that use CO2 as the feedstock instead of fossil fuels or palm-oil. Washing our hair with petroleum based products - or turning virgin rain forest into huge plantations just for palm oil - in this age? No thanks! Viridi transforms these huge (think gigatons of volume) industrial processes into products that that are better for us, better for the environment and much better for business. Oh - and in a business model that has software margins, low capex and is infinitely scalable. Yes please…

We are huge believers in building here. But to scale - US capital and market access is essential in the sectors we focus on. In the future we of course hope that the capital part of the equation might change - but as founders and investors our job is not to build on what might be. We build on what is true today, and we scale fast. And the fastest place to scale truly big and truly fast is by going to the US.

a closer look at latest Sequoia’s early stage bet on an Euro startup building an open source enterprise-grade solution

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it’s an interesting business case that follows a media conglomerate pattern fashionable in the US 15-20 years ago, when telecom giants (Verizon, AT&T, Cox, Comcast, etc.) started buying media and content companies in order to vertically integrate and control distribution, ads, and user data. Those synergies never materialized though - integration was too messy and capital-intensive.

Bending Spoon is pursuing a leaner, digital-native version of the same model - notably those brands will be harder to offload as at some point they will need to provide liquidity for shareholders.

the whole bundling thing also reminds me a bit of how the Germans have discovered the same strategy a few years ago, buying Amazon shops thinking they’re smarter than everybody else, while pissing away billions of investors money - hopefully the Italians are more disciplined.

fwiw, Bending Spoon is not alone in Europe doing this, it’s also what the Russians are doing with Palta in a much more focused way - after quietly exiting Target Global and the VC exposure, Alex Frolov and co have focused on a mini holding with multiple digital products aiming to generate meaningful vertical business in health tech.

their flagship product is Flo, which is the dominant consumer asset in the family with $216M in gross bookings - the Russians have put it in the market and raised $200M at 1B+ for it last year. Backed by good execution, so far - Palta is growing at 60% a year atm.

for those who don’t already know, the dude is one of those social media influencers talking endlessly, without selling an actual product but attention and merch.

raising money gets him to the next level - posting on social media plays an educative part, builds notoriety and converts to some extent, but finding PMF for an actual product is a different beast.

while the upside for preventative health is high, the market is still incipient and not mature - the American will now compete in a fairly crowded ecosystem that’s undifferentiated, un-standardized, and heavily competing on price, as everybody copies each other rather than building meaningful business. Besides, preventative is still a subjective issue for everybody - hence the GTM and distro building is a killer feature, as always, TBD if 60 million will work out.

Neo of Norway launched a consumer robot that’s available for $500 a month or $20k a piece - sadly not available in Europe, just in the US, I am guessing because of the messy Euro legislation.

it’s almost 2026 and Uber’s mobile app was banned in Germany by a regional court as it’s considered a way for brokering rides between riders and drivers. Hard to be competitive and evolve when still stuck in the past century’s paradigms, idly wondering how the Germans will have Waymos, or the above robots, and generally become a modern society, as today they’re just competing with the French for being the joke of Europe, see below.

Criteo, one of the older ad-tech French companies, is moving from France to enable potential American acquisition and in general for a better upside construct - France makes mergers with US companies complicated, both legally and administratively, making unbearable the costs of doing business with the French. As a context, the French have made $470 million in sales last quarter, which is quite significant by European standards.

the EU is putting together a €5 billion fund for backing European scale-ups, combining taxpayers money with private contributions. Local late stage needs more money while market indexing is not a bad strategy for a dumb administrator such as the EU - Vinod in the US is preaching the same btw.

Luxembourg’s Sovereign Wealth Fund invested 1% in bitcoin.

EQT plans to invest €250 billion in Europe compared to €120 billion deployed over the past five years.

General Catalyst is chipping in to an offer made by major shareholder to buy the UK-based Janus Henderson for $7.2 billion.

ElevenLabs CEO says AI audio models will be commoditized over time.

Grammarly rebrands to ‘Superhuman,’ launches a new AI assistant - well, the name is much better.

Tim Cook says Apple is open to M&A on the AI front - no, they won’t buy Mistral, though they still need to show anything for AI in their products.

Goldman Sachs launched an ETF tracking PE-like returns.

the Chinese have launched a new open-source large language model whose performance is ranked the highest among such models on some leaderboards.

for generations, Saudi Arabia exported oil - now it wants to export AI computing power.

Matt’s a solid proof that there’s still hope for the UK.

Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream.

Shopify’s 2025 global holiday retail report.

what’s working in GTM right now.