deal done for an undisclosed amount, in a public narrative framing it as a job offer, while OC remains open source managed by a not-for-profit org.

it looks like a strategic play for OpenAI - timing, scarcity of frontier talent, alignment to a revenue driver (agents), the risk of someone else getting Peter Steinberger on board. That makes it hard to imagine this being a modest transaction - while venturing a big number is speculative, it clearly wasn’t symbolic, you don’t acquire that kind of leverage and talent for pennies, especially not in the current AI cycle.

didn’t see too much local media coverage in Europe - mainly because media doesn’t really get the tech, it wasn’t served the typical PR materials to regurgitate and OC is not really a VC story that could sell attention.

the latter is interesting to note - this is a big VC miss, investors are in the business of financing quick growth and were hardly part of the OC conversation. Peter Steinberger was not on their radar to begin with because he’s an outlier not fitting conventional VC thinking, and when he did show, it was already too late. He also was not interested in dealing with VCs either, nor in building a huge company.

also notable, PS joined an American AI company and not an European one, a good reality check for Euro AI hyped up by tons of VC money and media coverage which kinda distorts the reality.

as a startup founder you don’t move to the US for the lifestyle or healthcare - you go there to find your tribe. Harder to find that here or even navigate this exploratory process in Europe, this is real talk.

as a side note, was actually reflecting about this with some folks earlier this week as we were analysing the local AI startup products - we’ve got AGI round the corner, and European output mainly consists of yet another AI assistant or better Linkedin scrapers, while selling tokens at loss. So much wasted talent and so little imagination, rather indicative of lack of ambition or just poor mentorship (in spite of being funded by top investors).

if you’re PS, is this your tribe?

one last side observation about our European AI bubble is an anecdote - Mistral’s Arthur Mensch keynote speaking at an AI conference in India this week was in an almost empty room, in contrast to what Sam Altman or Dario Amodei pulled off. That contrast isn’t about charisma - it’s about distribution, sales and centers of power. The global AI conversation still orbits a small set of American platforms, and they set the pace, the benchmarks, and the roadmap. Others are reacting to it - not exactly news that much of the European AI narrative is sustained more by sovereign ambition and regional capital flows than by global market pull.

Uber’s move is interesting to follow because I am still bullish on the emergence of pan-European super apps - Uber is such a product.

Revolut is probably the best-in-class super app in Europe today and I see little competition for it, though tackling the market from a different angle then Uber (consumer finance vs transportation).

both are building a high-frequency convenience layer on the phone - while Uber is a classic marketplace, Revolut has built a solid multi-product financial ecosystem with high switching costs.

directionally, I think that becoming someone’s bank is structurally more powerful, and hard to see a collision between the two - Revolut is positioned to expand outward, while Uber is positioned to deepen within mobility (see the self driving cars deals, including in Europe). Projecting a bit, it seems more likely that Revolut moves into Uber’s space (payments dominance) than Uber moves meaningfully into Revolut’s space (banking infra)

not set in stone though - see exhibit B. This week Grab, which is Uber’s nemesis in Asia, acquired NY-based fintech Stash Financial for $425 million - the Asians have been building a financial arm with digital payments, lending, credit, and bank services across Southeast Asia for quite some time. With Stash, Grab strengthened its financial layer to complement its broad user base and gets on the most direct collision path with fintech super-apps like Revolut.

not least, I was expecting more from Bolt, it’s an underdog with good odds to get into the above in Europe, but I guess we’re yet to see if they’re up for it. They’re prepping for IPO - had in 2025 a record $3B revenue out of $14B GMV run-rate, 2 years cashflow positive.

are data centers in space a VC business in Europe - who and why

the big risk of a 40m seed round solving for European defence

who is doing nuclear business in Europe atm

the active American investors in Europe

the hedge fund run by a 25 years old German researcher

the 2026 VC cheat sheet

Bpifrance spent a record €72 billion in France in 2025 - for comparison, VCs spent almost 11 billion out of 700 transactions in France in 2025, per our N9 data.

Klarna shares price dropped 70% since IPO - that’s more than sentiment, it’s a repricing of their core revenue and risk exposure. BNPL is a business of cheap capital and strong consumer spending and those times are gone. Discovering AI (like everybody else) doesn’t rewrite the balance sheet - a cost optimization is not transformation.

Polish Blik wants to be an important voice in the development of a European cashless payment system - 21m users in Poland, 3B transactions worth €104B last year, owned by local banks.

Anecdote - Stockholm is running on Claude. That’s a posit from an Anthropic sales guy so take it with a grain of salt.

Speaking of which - Anthropic’s Head of Sales position in France is remunerated with €375k brut (€190k net).

British startups prefer to use sub-optimal tools instead of hiring people - how’s that for risk taking on the island → “It’s scary to hire people, the minimum wage is so high and there’s so many additional protections”

Can Berlin become Europe’s most builder-friendly tech city in 24 months? I know many skeptical people about this.

The Swedish government has unveiled a national AI strategy.

OpenAI has started selling ads at $60 CPM - that’s a steep market entry.

The Chinese health system is superior to the French one.

ICYMI, viral shit on twitter last week → death of vertical software + something big is happening