Hello and welcome to Sunday CET!
A packed edition, this one! We’ve got yet another super awesome interview this week - with Finn of Nebular VC, who is one of the fresh emerging investors re-shaping the local early stage ecosystem.
Some bangers:
on competing - middling my risk curve to get a promotion or basically just survive just isn’t interesting for me.
on Europe VC - people are more pseudo-competalaborative, if something is interesting expect it to be blasted across WhatsApp in like 13 hours.
on founders with global ambitions
- it is not a serious persons business to sell to the US sitting in Europe.
- you did a lot with a little of your pre-seed? Literally negative signal.
The whole thing is a must read, scroll for it below.
Also - one of Europe’s best investors takes a step back, Marc Cuban is bullish on Europe’s startups, EU doing super computers the wrong way and Swedish crew being cocky with the market.
Enjoy - btw, what do you guys make of those interviews? Aye or nay - hit reply with your thoughts and comments!
Dragos
Market talk
We are doing an interview series for taking the pulse of the startup market through the eyes of the investors. This week - Finn Murphy - founder and solo VC at Nebular, an early stage fund operated from London and NYC, with global ambitions.
What's new with Nebular? What are the highlights of this year?
Good year! Starcloud getting set up for first satellite launch in early November.
I had made an early bet on healthcare in fund I and all the healthcare companies I backed have raised new rounds with half having raised their Series A’s.
I also did my first incubation - Project 11 - and started off as interim CEO - we got the team together for that in March and raised a $6m seed from some of the best crypto, quantum and bitcoin investors in the world.
+ I got my green card, moved in with my girlfriend & brought on board the first two full time members of the Nebular team!
You have started Nebular as a solo VC after spending almost five years with Frontline Ventures. What’s been the biggest shift - in how you source deals, make decisions, or even think about risk - now that the only investment committee is you. And what have you learned from this experience thus far?
I mean going from a €75m third seed fund with a large team and supportive partners and platform where I largely didn’t have to touch fundraising to a ‘if you do not do it, it will not happen’ was a pretty big step change. Everything from tax, banking, vendor relationships etc…
The steepest learning curve was all around fundraising. I was kind of clueless starting out but it was something I got a lot of great advice from other folks about and gradually got there.
On the investing job, sure you can take more esoteric risk and be more dynamic in negotiation but you’re also pulled in way more directions.
Previously my job was largely ‘find good companies’ now that’s one of 6 or 7 important things I have to do. It’s made prioritisation the sort of number one skillset I need to sharpen.
With the top of the market polarizing - big VCs writing pre-emptive checks and valuations running high - are we in a 'winner takes all' environment? How much optionality do boutique funds realistically have to compete for top market deals?
I don’t think they do. It really depends on what you view as ‘top market deals’ I believe there are companies that appear to be ‘obvious’ - i.e. Ex/IPO-ed founder, in Europe we went through an era of funding loads of random VPs from sort of good companies, now it’s like ‘oh you worked at an AI lab? You must be Jesus.’
The platform funds have a relative monopoly on these deals and if you want to do them you need to figure out smart ways of getting there early. It is hard to do this in a repeatable fashion and if you want to get meaningful ownership (so that you can, you know, make real money) - it is basically impossible.
There are however things that are ‘less obvious’ - I would call this kind of closer to what VC was in the older days. You’re taking some esoteric risk on the market, founder, tech or social acceptance of the business. It’s harder to push these deals through an IC when you’re an employee. I can’t be fired and I don’t care about anything other than being great. Middling my risk curve to get a promotion or basically just survive just isn’t interesting for me.
I’d rather do something that people think is retarded at first and then in 10 years make like a billion dollars. Obviously higher risk approach but that’s kind of the whole point.
You’ve spent time between Europe and USA, and invest across both. How do you see the ecosystems differing - in founder ambition, investor behavior, or the speed and structure of deals? Where is the sourcing more competitive?
The founders are just as good on both sides. Obviously there is a higher concentration of quality in the US around places like NYC + SF - also that compounds in shared lessons & immersion in ambition from the culture. It’s like the air is a soup thickened with the hearty spilled blood of capitalism when you walk around NYC or SF. London or Berlin just don’t slap the same.
The problem is honestly the hiring. Most people in Europe want to go to the office, do their work, go home and have a nice life. It’s fine and there’s a bunch of structural issues around it - culture, tax (this is a major fucking issue), and generally attitudes towards employment culture. Like it is possible to do the inverse but you have to be like Nik from Revolut and generally be considered an all time psycho.
Investor behaviour is kinda the same. The job is not that complicated. In Europe it’s funny I think things can actually end up being more competitive because it’s not that big a circle of people and people are more pseudo-competalaborative - if something is interesting expect it to be blasted across WhatsApp in like 13 hours.
What about founders, what patterns are you seeing in how Europeans are going to the market - ambition, speed, risk appetite - compared to US founders? Are European founders becoming bolder, or still too cautious?
A lot of Europeans I meet are targeting the US first. I think that’s fair but also if you’re going to do that then you better be on a plane and infant of an immigration lawyer ASAP. It is not a serious persons business to sell to the US sitting in Europe.
I also see some Europeans doubling down on ‘I’m going to build a local monopoly in my country’ and on that I’m like ‘let’s fucking go’ - do something aggressively in a market with shit competitors and use the AI wave to build a real moat.
I think it’s a bit of a risk tolerance thing. European founders generally are more pragmatic and want to build real sustainable businesses. The issue is that no one cares.
Your sales efficiency pre 100m ARR literally does not matter in VC land. Are you growing? The fact that ‘you did a lot with a little’ of your pre-seed? Literally negative signal. People need to realise that it’s a new era of business building with looser capital markets and if you don’t play the game on the field you’re going to get wrekt.
There’s a visible trend among European founders today: raise early angel or pre-seed checks locally, build an MVP, show traction, and once there’s evidence of product-market fit - move operations or fundraising to the US, where capital and valuations scale faster. Is that now the default playbook or still the exception? And do you think that’s still necessary - or can great global companies now be built and scaled entirely from Europe?
Kinda feeding from the above. If your customers (majority 60%>) are in the US - and you’re not in the US - that is a massive problem. Hiring a remote sales team is excruciatingly difficult. Suck it up and move. Don’t spend 6 months picking the city. Move and if you need to move again then do it. Time is ticking.
I think it’s much more impressive for someone to have moved before raising anything as it shows real risk appetite. I wouldn’t have been able to raise my fund I if I hadn’t done that and I think the problem with doing what you described is once you start building a culture that culture is almost impossible to unwind.
You’ve said you like to back ideas that sit “just outside the edge of consensus.” Where do you think that edge is moving right now - what’s newly contrarian that wasn’t six months ago?
I think quantum is coming into the consensus more and more but people haven’t really figured out the 2nd order effective of what useful quantum computers will actually do - materials science + cryptography being the two main drivers.
I think CNNs ability to discern patterns invisible to humans will also bring about a pretty interesting wave of companies in the health, intelligence and maintenance. This will be pretty cool I think!
Also I think it’s going to be obvious that Starship will work in the next 12 months and a lot of people will start chasing space bags pretty aggressively.
+ old people. Demographic transition is going to be incredible gnarly and I’m investing against that trend in health and manufacturing but it’ll only really play out over the next 20 years.
What are some interesting founders or startups up and coming from Europe?
ElevenLabs the canonical example of the time - referenced by a friend working there lovingly as a ‘sweatshop’ - all the best companies are, and hey if you’re getting rich along the way who cares.
Helene at the Exploration Company is crazy impressive. I’d love to see that work and I think it will as a sort of quasi-neuvo Airbus with mega government involvement. We probably need a better launch business too - I wish our eccentric Billionaires had better hobbies - like Dyson, Ineos guy or Xavier Niel - l respected Daniel Ek’s roll of the game but I think he had to go back to focus on the shareholder value to have the dollar to keep doing what he wanted.
Proxima Fusion also very cool - fellas putting the German Gov over the coals to make it happen which I deeply respect + my biggest position (10%+ of the fund) is in Teton - again, I’m long the elderly. Killer team and in my view will be the sleeper biggest business to come out of Europe this decade.
You’ve backed AI teddy bears and space data centers - what’s the next category of ‘strange but potentially enormous’ you’re watching? And how do you decide which sectors or technologies to focus on - is it thesis-driven, founder-driven, or purely opportunistic?
Income inequality is continuing to rise, which is problematic alongside all the demographic transition bits I discussed.
But Bernard Arnault is probably right directionally that the top 10% of earners will continue to account for a larger percentage of spend in the next decade - pending some cataclysmic event/revolution - so I think things like antiquities / wealth transition is probably going to produce some pretty wild stuff. Quantum too ofc.
I talk to people all the time and read a lot - so it’s kind of pattern matching to opinion forming and then going out and seeing if that puts me in front of some interesting folks.
Looking back at the past year, is there a deal you regret passing on or a bet you misjudged, and what did it teach you about investing early?
I should have invested in this company called Juicebox - I loved both the founders, I had thought about the problem of recruiting a lot. I sent the product to some recruiters and they poo-poo’d it and I lost the sauce. One of the recruiters was working for Sequoia at the time who gave me a steer and like 7 months later Sequoia did a round at 10x the price I could have done it at.
Basically, expert input (other than to avoid things that are like actually fraudulent / wrong) is usually bogus at seed. You like the founders and directionally believe in the category or you don’t. It’s not that complicated.
Who else would you like us to interview here? Hit reply with your favorits!
Signals
Interesting deals
🇸🇪 Cytely (hardware-agnostic smart‑microscopy platform) - seed
🇫🇷 Karavela (brain modeling system designed for neurological analysis) - pre-seed
🇬🇧 Milvus Advanced (alt high-metal producers) - seed
🇳🇴 Physical Robotics (human-like industrial robots) - seed
we add more of those on Linkedin.
What would you invest in?
I have picked three early stage, seed level startups from Europe with intriguing odds for growing. You're the VC - who gets your term sheet?
Last week’s results:
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇬🇧 Briefly Bio - SAAS used for reproducing lab experiments in science (6%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🇫🇮 LumiDB - database system for storing, processing, and sharing LiDAR data at scale (60%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇳🇱 Verify - AI algorithms used for fingerprinting and tracking images and videos. (34%)
Let’s see your say this week - click on the link of your choice below - we’ll add the result next week.
What startup would you invest in?
Observations
Investors
Spain has been in the VC spotlight this summer - here’s a guide of the most important investors in Spain and their deals.
ditto for Italy w/ a cheat sheet with the Italian active investors and their deals.
Lakestar’s Klaus Hommels announced that from now on he/Lakestar will only focus on existing portfolio companies, as well as helping his team spin out their own ventures, such as new funds or startups.
a bit of head scratcher this one, as it seems a bit counterintuitive for a seasoned investor and one of Europe’s best to stop hunting at career peak (he’s still young at 58) and just tend on their prey - especially since we’re mid-way into a one-of-a-kind super cycle, when category leaders are being built. If you work as an investor, this is one of the best time to be in the market…
…unless something important made him decide go this way, of course - maybe he’s just tired of hunting after all or has other personal motives, and maybe this is just a temporary phase. Also mentioned they’ll stop raising new funds - fwiw, Lakestar has raised two sizeable funds in the past year, a $600 million multistage and a $265 million continuation one.
as a bit of a context, earlier this summer Hommels notably faced allegations of a potential conflict of interest with the NATO’s fund and Lakestar - he had to step down from NIF because of it per media sources.
Sequoia Capital’s COO resigned over its partner Shaun Maguire's public remarks which alienated the public community - he said that Zohran Mamdani, running for New York mayor, “comes from a culture that lies about everything,” and that “it’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda”.
Vinod Khosla says that now valuations in robotics startups were getting bonkers - ‘95% of those startups will lose money.’
Chamat dixit - vibe coding is a joke.
Marc Cuban is bullish on Europe - he wants in the local dealflow, of course.
VC inputs on current situation
part one:
Much of what we’re seeing today in the market is manufactured and/or empty speed: revenue/product velocity for a facsimile of momentum, sui generis, to generate hype, fundraising, and customers. But it can’t sustain and the center cannot hold because the work is not important.part two:
Every investor thinks their way of doing venture is obviously better than their peers' otherwise they wouldn't be running the strategy that’ve decided to pursue - so, should a seed fund manager be investing in some of the hotter, more expensive seed rounds?
Corp dev
Airbus, Leonardo and Thales were green-lit for a merger of significant parts of their space businesses into a single entity, aimed at creating a European champion in satellite manufacturing, services and systems -
the new venture is expected to be operational around 2027 and will not include launch vehicles (rockets) - the focus is on satellites, systems and services.
their edge is European security/sovereignty - i.e. secure satellite communication for military, government, and critical infrastructure - areas where the market (dominant) leader Starlink faces sovereignty pushback.
(one of) their problem is being technological sub-par as they’ll force onto the market an inferior product in the name of national security - the underlying tech is many-many cycles behind the Americans who’ve been operational since 2019. Not to count Bezos recent competitive push in the space.
all in all, it’s a high level catch up move pushed by the global political turmoil - defensive, hardly turning a weakness into a strength or into a market leading position, the best case scenario (which is a stretch) is producing a regional strategic player unlikely to count on the global market.
I wrote about it before, am quite skeptical on grounds of being inferior on funding, tech, talent to which you add complexity from different corporate cultures, national interests, and existing joint ventures. If the politicians pull their support, this business is dead on the water.
TotalEnergies was found guilty by a French court of law of having misled consumers with claims about its contributions to tackling climate change.
SAP already booked 85% of the 2026 revenue from selling AI - 2025 closed 11% increase in revenue and a 29% increase in net profit.
Tesla Model Y was Europe’s bestselling car in September, returning to the No. 1 slot for the first time in nine months.
Goldman Sachs will create an AI infra team that will lend more in the sector and find investors to buy that debt.
OpenAI doing ads is direct competition to Meta - ChatGPT will show ads based on the users chat memory and if you turn it off you lose all the “personalization”. Who’s up for the blackmail?
Other notes
Outside in
Here’s a reasonable European tech business context: as the EU just announced kicking off AI factories available for local tech startups, Pieter, a tech builder willing to jump on the sovereign wagon, was intrigued and tried to become a paying customer of one of advanced computing hosting centers. He failed badly.
disappointing is a mild word as it depends on your expectations, and long time tech startup ppl like myself have already become cynical about it (the EU ppl don’t love me at all 😋) - take it as yet another example of the same EU not understanding tech and wasting tax payers money in spite of claiming good intentions and being told repeatedly they’re doing badly.
they’re seemingly just deaf to the market input while orchestrating a play that only sounds good while humming it in the mirror - how’s that for a spectacular lack of PMF?
if you’re trying to build a tech startup and still expect the EU guys to take you to the promised land - I got news for you, and it ain’t good.
Strawberry’s crew tried this week to do a bit of comparative marketing on the back of OpenAI’s competing product - I get the why, but that’s rather amateur thinking for a pre-PMF startup, tech devel is a long cycle and nobody gets it right in the beginning, especially with a product that invents a new category.
love the confidence of a young ambitious team but claiming a superior product when you hardly have PMF, switching costs are low and are just a sprint iteration away - it ain’t really cool, you get the attention of a few days at the cost of respect. This is a first step in a long journey, and besides, browsers are not standalone products rather just another distro channel for (re)selling AI credits (Msft also launched something this week btw), and that’s not the time for marginal egos but for focus on real business cases beyond a solution in search of a problem - xoxo. :-)
Closing out
Trump pardoned Binance founder because he thinks he’s innocent in spite of a court of law saying otherwise - dude was convicted in 2023 of violating US anti-money laundering requirements and was barred from operating in the country.
users who receive products sent by Amazon to write reviews (Amazon Vine) must pay taxes on them - in Spain, that is.
for an Amazon Vine user earning between €35,000 and €57,000 in Madrid, the tax will be 35.9% of the value of the products. If they add up to a value of €1,000, they will pay an additional €359.
are the AI industry’s circular deals more like round-tripping, or are they more like vendor finance? Probably the latter.
when will quantum computing work? Not before 5-15 years.
Ireland is going backwards. Here’s how to get it moving.
Nike launched a pair of intriguing shoes including sensors they call neuroscience-based. Affordable too.
German elevator company pokes fun at Louvre heist.
the build of a first major city in the UK in fifty years - Forrest City looks cool, hope it will work out.
Catalonian town bans black cat adoptions during Halloween.
That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!
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