Defence, security and resilience startups in Europe have grown 4x over the past five years, with funding now reaching nearly $9 billion as larger rounds start to emerge.

Sander Verbrugge, Partner at the NATO Innovation Fund, says the ecosystem is now producing companies with real revenue and scale. He argues the bigger issue is awareness.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:

https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

0:33 - Introduction to NATO Innovation Fund

2:11 - DSR startups funding growth and 4x increase

3:18 - What defence, security and resilience actually mean

5:31 - Why larger rounds are driving the ecosystem

7:20 - Key hubs across Europe and rise of new regions

9:04 - Where more funding is still needed

11:02 - How NIF evaluates and deploys capital

13:01 - Changing attitudes towards defence investing

16:01 - Specialist vs generalist investors in defence

18:00 - Portfolio examples and companies to watch

20:33 - Why awareness is Europe’s biggest challenge

Pay-by-bank is becoming a serious alternative to cards in Europe, as merchants look for cheaper and faster ways to process payments.

Lena Hackelöer, Founder and CEO of Brite Payments, says that shift is being driven by how expensive and fragmented payments are for merchants. She describes how Brite expanded into markets where demand already existed, while staying profitable early to keep control as funding dynamics changed.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:

https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

0:33 - Introduction to Brite Payments

1:32 - How pay-by-bank adoption has evolved

3:22 - Using AI to move faster internally

6:29 - Why Sweden gave Brite an early advantage

6:58 - Expanding across Europe

9:29 - Educating the market

12:24 - How early pay-by-bank still is

13:45 - Profitability and staying in control

15:31 - European sovereignty in payments

18:39 - What’s next for Brite Payments

Fuse Energy has already crossed $500m in annualised revenue and grown 10x.

Alan Chang, Co-founder and CEO of Fuse Energy, says the company’s real constraint is not capital but hiring enough great engineers. The business continues scaling in the UK energy market and is preparing to expand into new products and markets.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:

https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

00:00: Introduction and overview of Fuse Energy’s milestone growth in 2025

02:30: What drives customer retention and minimal churn

05:00: Talent as the primary growth constraint

09:00: Growth outlook for 2026 and expansion strategy

13:00: Recruiting worldwide and maintaining company culture amid scaling

17:30: Fundraising, profitability, and capital discipline

21:00: Views on European tech ecosystem and investing attitudes

24:30: Strategic bets on energy infrastructure and fusion

28:30: Energy consumption as economic proxy and complexity of climate goals

33:00: Founder mindset and operational challenges

36:30: Climate tech perspective and talent misallocation

41:30: AI adoption and closing remarks

Nebius AI is one of the most interesting, and underrated, European AI companies out there.

It was formed from the remnants of Yandex (the russian search browser that got hit with sanctions after the Ukraine War), and is now building the full-stack cloud for AI.

It is flying recently:

• $25bn market cap (up 220% YTD)
• Recently signed a $20bn deal with Microsoft

I chatted to their cofounder, Roman, to hear the story on how they're building Europe's fullstack of AI.

Carles is one of Europe's top investors and operators. His first investment as an angel was into Revolut.

More recently he was the first investor into ElevenLabs, where he ended up working at employee number 4 and owning GTM (he grew ARR to over $200m).

He's just launched his own VC - Baobab, which we get into.

AIApply is an AI-powered job-search platform that automates resume creation, cover-letter writing, interview preparation, and even end-to-end job applications through its auto-apply engine.

It frequently goes viral on socials, has an incredibly lean team (4 people), and is doing millions in revenue.

Leo is a serial entrepreneur and YC founder. He's now building Visum Labs - an AI & Data consulting & implementation company.

He's helping some of the leading tech companies in the world build and implement AI that has a meaningful impact on their business.

The team at Onstage run Europe's largest demo day. They get over 2,000 applications for 20 spots.

It's quickly become one of the leading events in Europe and has seen amazing success.

Demo day finalists have collectively raised more than £500m from leading VCs, with the likes of Scan.com (£60m) and Lawhive (£44m) becoming some of Europe’s fastest growing startups.

Today it's announced its £10m fund as it looks to become the YC of Europe.

The startup, founded in 2024 by Daniel Moreira, Felix Steinbrenner and Samuel M., has built an AI platform that helps pharmaceutical companies launch new drugs worldwide.It streamlines pricing, market access and regulatory workflows for drug launches by automating data extraction and insight generation, enabling faster decision-making across global markets.The company saw RAPID growth after launching, reaching six figures in ARR within a few weeks. Today it's announced raising a $2.75 seed round led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Pace Ventures, Saras Capital and Springboard Health Angels.

Peec AI is one of the standout European companies of 2025. It launched at the start of the year and has exploded:- Gone from $0 to $4m+ ARR in 10 months- Onboarded 1,300 brands and agencies onboarded (including n8n, Attio and ElevenLabs)- Added 300+ new customers every monthThe company launched in February 2025 and raised a seed round led by 20VC in July 2025.Today it's announced raising a HUGE $21m Series A led by Singular which we discuss in the episode.

The founders are ex-Revolut and have built a next-generation compliance platform for financial services powered by AI agents and real time data.

It's already onboarded some amazing fintechs, such as Wise, Tide and Mollie.

It's just announced raising a $10m round which we discuss on this episode.

Voize was founded by Fabio Schmidberger, Marcel Schmidberger, and Erik Ziegler, when the Schmidberger brothers’ grandfather moved into a nursing home, revealing the inefficiencies of healthcare documentation.

The Berlin-based company has since exploded:

• 75k nurses and care workers are using the tool with 95%+ retention
• 1,100 care facilities have implemented the tool
• Growing 3x year over year

Voize's voice-based platform helps frontline health workers capture and manage patient information as well as automate routine workflows, documentation and communication.

Today it's announced raising a WHOPPING $50m Series A funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from HV Capital, redalpine and Y Combinator.

Tobias is a successful founder-turned-influential VC, currently a partner at Antler in the Nordics.

Antler is a global early-stage investor present in 27 cities worldwide and has made over 1,500 investments across a portfolio valued at $5.7bn, including recent unicorns Lovable and Airalo.

Tobias is one of the most well connected people in the ecosystem.

AI adoption inside companies still looks far messier than the hype suggests, with teams using different tools, uneven security standards and little visibility into how AI is actually used day to day.

Justas Morkūnas, COO at nexos.ai, is building around that problem with a no-code agent platform designed to help companies move from prompt to outcome while keeping security and control in place, especially for the power generalists inside organisations who want practical results rather than complex tooling.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:

https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

0:34 - Introduction to nexos.ai

1:13 - Importance of security in AI tools

2:40 - nexos.ai's growth and funding success

5:26 - Preparing for the next funding round

6:42 - Discussing goals for 2026

8:20 - Importance of attitude in AI adoption

9:50 - Impact of AI tools on businesses

12:32 - Launching AI agents for productivity

13:28 - Optimizing AI delivery processes

14:05 - Building nexos with a strong team

15:29 - Recruiting talent in a vibrant city

18:13 - Key use cases for AI agents

DataSnipper has been the #1 fastest-growing company in the Netherlands for the past two years and in 2024, the company achieved unicorn status following a $100m Series B led by Index Ventures, valuing the business at $1bn.

The company has active users in 175 countries, 250 employees worldwide, and offices in Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo, and Kuala Lumpur.

European venture firm Backed VC has closed its third fund, Backed 3, at its $100 million cap, alongside making its 100th investment.The firm has a remarkable track record (5 unicorns) and it's first two funds are top performing funds in their vintage. I spoke to Cofounder and Partner Andre to get all the details of the fund.

Milos is the CEO and Co-founder of deepset - the Berlin AI company behind Haystack, a leading open-source framework for building secure, modular, and production-ready AI agents.

Deepset has raised over $30m and empowers organisations like the European Commission and Airbus with trustworthy, adaptable AI solutions.​

We discussed why Sovereign AI means more than just owning models - it’s about control, open standards, and infrastructure flexibility.

Discover how deepset’s journey, Berlin roots, and open-source Haystack help users move from consuming to orchestrating AI on their own terms, making truly sovereign AI a reality for Europe and beyond.

Boaz is a serial fintech operator turned founder. He's spent years building and shipping at some of the UK's leading startups.Then his mother lost 15% of her life savings to a scam. This led him to create Falkin - an AI powered set of tools to stop people getting scammed. The company just raised $2m from leading VCs.

Will is a Partner at Passion Capital, one of the UK’s most recognised early-stage venture capital firms with a long track record of backing European founders in B2B SaaS, AI, fintech, and emerging risk sectors.

Its portfolio includes Monzo, Marshmallow and Attio.

Will joined Passion Capital as a Partner in October 2023 after leading investments at Conviction VC and high-profile roles at Downing Ventures and Oxford Capital, where he built a reputation for identifying high-conviction bets in enterprise software and fintech.

Jonny is a serial founder with one exit under his belt. He's now building YASO - a UK startup enabling global brands to directly sell to consumers in China via social commerce.

The company just raised an $11m Series A to accelerate growth and take the company to the next level.

Callum is the CEO of one of London's most exciting Fintechs - WineFi.

The company is making fine wine a mainstream, data-driven asset class for private investors and institutions.

The company has raised millions from VCs, industry leaders and crowdfunders, and is already doing 7-figures of revenue.

Mark is the CEO Clearbank, one of the UK's leading Fintechs. The company has raised hundreds of millions, achieved profitability and surpassed £100m in annual revenue. The company works behind the scenes powering so many of the consumer focused-fintechs that people are familiar with (e.g. Revolut and Wealthify).

Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Adfin, a London-based fintech platform on a mission to simplify and automate payment collections for small businesses, professional services, accountants, and bookkeepers.The company is FLYING right now. It raised another €12.5m this year from existing investors Index Ventures and Visionaries Club.Tom himself is a serial operator in Fintech. He's had stints at Tink (acquired by Visa) as Worldpay.

Taos is a Partner at DMG Ventures - one of the UK’s most prominent media-backed venture funds - where he leads investments in consumer startups and supports portfolio scale-ups with unique access to mass-market reach.

He is also the co-founder of Onstage (formerly Focal), Europe’s largest and most influential startup demo day platform, which connects top early-stage founders with over a thousand active investors and has spawned companies now backed by Sequoia, Balderton, and LocalGlobe.

The $23B Wiz acquisition has become the largest venture-backed M&A in history, a milestone moment for the tech industry and the cybersecurity ecosystem. In this conversation,

Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures and an early backer of Wiz, reflects on the long relationship with the founders that began years before the company existed and why conviction in people, more than markets or products, continues to guide how he thinks about investing.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction to Scaling Europe show

0:36 - Guest introduction: Shardul Shah

1:40 - Importance of people in investment decisions4:08 - Assessing conviction versus delusion in investing

6:27 - Importance of ambition in industry growth

7:11 - Trusting intuition in investment decisions

9:30 - The role of founders in investment success

10:21 - Challenges of pattern matching in founders

12:51 - Evolving craft of decision-making

14:31 - Importance of trust in founder relationships

16:09 - Quick connections with entrepreneurs

18:20 - Key question for entrepreneurs on offers

Checkout.com is having an absolutely phenomenal year:

• $12bn valuation in an employee share buyback
• 30% net revenue growth in 2025
• On track to have its first full year of profitability

I chatted to their CMO to understand how they've grown so quickly and the plan for the future.

The Stockholm based company just announced a $9m round led by Emergence with support from Creandum.

I sat down with the two founders to discuss:

• Working with Anton Osika at Depict
• Getting Paul Graham as an angel
• How they're helping lawyers move fasterand much much more

Alex founded Fleet, the bootstrapped, profitable French startup now doing £30m of revenue.

He's also a scout for Sequoia Capital and one of Europe's few Super Angels. He's made over 100 investments with his top performers including Lovable (100x), Fyxer AI and Tandem Health.

This one is a BANGER.

The man behind 20VC was, for a change, the one in the hot seat. Hector, another VC and podcast host sat down with him at the Onstage Demo day to ask him everything you would want to know about him, investing, and content.

Xavier is a serial Operator (with stints at Uber, Deliveroo and Turo) and Founder.

His newest venture - Wonder Studios, is an AI-native film studio that aims to both incubate emerging talent and produce original IP, building an ecosystem that empowers a burgeoning community of AI filmmakers, traditional creatives, and technologists.

They just announced a $12m seed led by atomico which we broke down in this interview.

OpenAI has just announced a new data sovereignty agreement with the UK as well as its new browser tool - Atlas.

I sat down with their Head of Product to discuss these releases, the different between Europe and the US in AI adoption and how OpenAI defines their product roadmap.

The Onstage team hosted a hacknight. The challenge was to build something worth $1m in just 3 hours.

The teams did not disappoint. I interviewed the winners and the judges which included leading investors at Episode 1, Chapter One, Antler.

Amal is the Founder and CEO of Saturn - the AI platform used by over 2000 financial advisors to automate admin tasks.

It's just raised $15m (which is closed in 10 days) to go bigger.

The team are building an amazing company with real, sticky customers.

We chatted raising a round in 10 days, how they scaled to 600 customers in 2 years and mistakes made along the way.

Arnau is one of the co-founders at Throxy, a London based startup automating outbound sales ops for companies selling into traditionally hard-to-reach industries using AI agents and proprietary data.

The company went though YC, hit $1.5m ARR with just 3 employees, and just raised $6m from a leading SF Fund.

Tom is one of the most influential voices in European Tech.

He is a Partner and Head of Intelligence at Atomico, where he leads the renowned Insights team and is the founder and editor of the industry-defining “State of European Tech Report”.

Alan has grown from a small French startup into one of Europe’s most ambitious digital health companies, reaching €785M ARR and a €5B valuation after Index first backed the company in 2017.

Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures, reflects on that journey from the early investment to today and what it takes to build a company capable of scaling across markets and transforming healthcare systems.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:

https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction to Scaling Europe show

1:02 - Alan's impressive growth and valuation

2:10 - Expansion into international markets

4:40 - Signing contracts with French government departments

6:04 - Building scalable technology infrastructure

7:25 - AI's role in healthcare personalization

8:30 - Achieving operational profitability with AI

10:54 - Backing exceptional entrepreneurs in AI sectors

12:37 - Entrepreneurs making magic in tough industries

13:40 - AI as an enabler in complex sectors

15:01 - Assessing entrepreneurs and their commitment

17:10 - Importance of network density for entrepreneurs

Nikola is one of the smartest minds in AI and ML in Europe. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing from the University of Cambridge.

He's now the co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a London-based leader in conversational AI, specialising in advanced voice assistants for enterprise customer service.

It was most recently valued at $500m, but given that it's on track to $50m ARR by year-end it could be a unicorn soon.

If you liked it, please subscribe!

Perlego has raised $75m to built the Spotify for textbooks. One subscription - access to all the academic texts you could need.

They've now scaled successfully and are working with hundreds of universities in the world.Gauthier is a world class founder.

This is a great one. As always - subscribe for more!

This is the first tine I have ever interviewed an AI Agent. Jack and Jill are two AI agents that have been built to fix recruitment. Jack acts on behalf of candidates, helping them to find their dream job, while Job works for companies looking to find great talent. I chatted to Jack and the CEO Matt, who is a 3x founder having previously founded two companies (including Omnipresent, the large EOR company).They've just raised a $20m seed round from Creandum and are one of the hottest AI startups building in London right now.If you liked it - subscribe for more!

Victor Riparbelli is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, the world’s leading enterprise AI video platform. The company is doing over $100m ARR and is valued at $2bn+.

I spoke to Victor about the launch of Synthesia 3.0, their insane retention of 142%, how the company is performing and whether they will raise again soon...

Max has one of the most unusual stories in entrepreneurship. He led an investment and in a deeptech startup, then got more involved as an advisor and eventually became the CEO.

He now runs Again, a Copenhagen-based climate tech startup specialising in transforming CO₂ emissions into valuable, carbon-negative chemicals for industrial applications,

Founded in 2020 by Hedda Båverud Olsson, Sophie Wilkinson and Johan Jönsson, Lassie has developed an all-in-one pet health app where users can purchase insurance, file claims and get access to information to keep their pets healthy.The company is CRUSHING IT:🔥 The company is at a WHOPPING €70m ARR🔥 With 70 employees this means they're at €1m ARR per employee🔥 Growing 100% YoY I spoke to CEO Hedda about how they scaled while staying lean, hitting 70m and what's next for the company.

Dom Hallas is the Executive Director of the Startup Coalition, a leading independent advocacy group for UK and European tech startups, renowned for championing founder-first policy reform, industry lobbying, and ecosystem inclusion.

His work, and the organisation, have been TRANSFORMATIONAL in shaping UK tech.

We sat down to discuss what the Government needs to do to ensure tech can thrive.

Dimi has built Wondercraft into a $2m ARR business and very recently went incredibly viral for their launch video for Wanda - an AI agent on the platform that helps you create and edit video simply by chatting.

Dimi is an expert in the intersection of AI and Content and has amazing advice for those looking to either build content in the age of AI.

Sabba is the CEO of VEED.IO, the AI-powered online video editing platform transforming the way teams and individuals create professional video content.

The company bootstrapped to $5m ARR raised a huge Series A from Sequoia and is now at $40m ARR.

Maik has built an AI Decision Platform that is powering the largest banks and insurers in the world. The company went through YC during Covid, spent 3 years building their product and is now taking off. The company raised a $54M Series B led by Balderton Capital earlier this year, alongside their existing investors Index Ventures, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, Prosus Ventures, Visionaries Club

Large companies already run on thousands of APIs and internal systems, which makes connecting AI to the systems that actually run a business far more complex than it first appears.

Sean Blanchfield, Founder of Jentic, discusses why this integration challenge is becoming one of the biggest obstacles for enterprise AI and why he believes a new infrastructure layer will be needed to manage how AI interacts with enterprise software. With Jentic, he is building technology designed to securely connect AI agents to those systems and enable automation across complex organisations.

The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:

https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Sponsors:

SurrealDB: The multi-model database for AI agents. Check them out here: https://surrealdb.com/

Omni: The AI analytics platform trusted by fast-growing companies like Perplexity, Synthesia, and dbt Labs. Check them out here: https://omni.co/

Venture Comet: The platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Check them out here: https://venturecomet.com/

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction to Scaling Europe show

0:34 - Guest introduction: Sean from Jentic

1:23 - Jentic's role in AI enterprise integration

2:57 - Security risks with AI applications

5:26 - New infrastructure layer for AI applications

8:00 - Building a new platform for enterprises

9:22 - Scaling problems in AI integration

10:20 - Importance of API enablement in enterprises

11:07 - Overview of business foundations

12:05 - Challenges with point solutions in enterprises

14:15 - Future of workflow automation in AI

17:00 - Importance of workflow control

18:40 - Future of business processes and workflows

21:00 - Opportunities for AI in small economies

Enrico is an ex-operator turned amazing VC.

He's a partner a Lakestar, one of Europe’s most prominent venture capital firms, where he leads early-stage investments from Berlin, backing founders in deep tech, AI, fintech, and digital health across the continent.

We chatted to him about investing in Fyxer AI, how the VC model is going to change, European Space Tech and much more.

We also had a guest appearance from Daniel Metzler - the founder and CEO is Isar Aerospace, Europe's leading space company.

Jan is the CEO & Co-Founder @ Conduct, a London based AI startup that just raised $12m from Creandum.

The company was founded in 2024 by ex-Palantirians and has been in stealth for the past 18 months.

The company will be focused on modernising legacy ERP systems, which the trio saw as causing a massive burden for enterprise organisations.

Balderton Capital is one of Europe's oldest and most successful VC firms.

It's raised 12 funds and billions of dollars, and has invested in over 250 companies. 30 of which are unicorns.

I spoke to Managing Partner Bernard Liautaud and General Partner Suranga Chandratillake about the firm turning 25, its their biggest winners (Revolut), its biggest misses (Spotify) and where the firm is looking to invest next.

Both Partners are entrepreneurs and have built their own billion dollar companies so it made for a GREAT conversation.