Why Europe is Ahead on Impact

Wondercraft is an AI audio and video studio that makes it easy for anyone to create professional, business-ready content, bringing together the latest AI models across voice, video, avatars, images and sound. The London-based startup has raised $3.5 million in seed funding backed by Y Combinator, ElevenLabs and Steven Bartlett, and was founded by former Palantir engineers and a former Spotify executive. In this episode, I sit down with Fraser Bell, who took over as CEO of Wondercraft earlier this year. We talk about what that transition actually looked like behind the scenes, from the first conversations to taking the reins of a company he didn’t start. Fraser shares what it’s really like to be a CEO without being a founder: how he balances respecting the original vision with putting his own stamp on the business. We also dig into who’s actually using Wondercraft today, whether the momentum is coming from individual creators, small businesses or larger companies. We then get into the strategy: how the company landed backers like Steven Bartlett and ElevenLabs and how valuable their involvement has been beyond the money, and the big question facing every startup building on AI models: what happens if OpenAI, Mistral or another major player launches something similar tomorrow? Fraser also explains whether he’d consider partnering with or embedding Wondercraft inside one of those larger platforms, where things stand on a potential Series A, and how he thinks about the growing problem of “AI slop” - where the line sits between making creativity more accessible and simply adding more noise to the internet.

In this episode, we sit down with Károly Ludvigh, CEO and co-founder of ABZ Innovation, one of Europe's leading manufacturers of heavy-duty agricultural and industrial drones. Headquartered in Hungary, ABZ Innovation designs and builds drones for spraying, spreading, cleaning, and specialized industrial applications - combining high-payload hardware, modular architecture, and a European full-stack autonomy platform to turn drone technology into a practical automation tool for complex environments. With operations in more than 40 countries and a newly opened manufacturing facility in Szentendre that stands among Europe's largest civilian drone factories, ABZ sits at the heart of the continent's fast-growing drone and AgTech ecosystem. Károly's path to building one of Europe's most ambitious drone companies is anything but conventional. From his years in tech journalism to building drone systems as a hobbyist in a basement over a decade ago, his journey reflects a philosophy that runs through everything ABZ does: simplicity and reliability over hype. When the company set out to offer drone-based crop spraying, it discovered that the products available on the market simply couldn't deliver the dependability a sustainable business required - so ABZ built its own drones from the ground up. We explore what it takes to build technology for customers who need reliability above everything else, how farmers - often seen as working in a traditional sector - are embracing dramatic technological change, and how the war in Ukraine has reshaped Europe's drone industry, from manufacturing capacity to investment appetite and the push to build more technology locally. Károly also shares his perspective on dual-use and defence applications, Europe's quest for genuine technological sovereignty in drones, and what it takes to scale drone technology across more than 40 markets with wildly different regulatory environments.

In this conversation, recorded ahead of the MeOut Summit in Budapest, we sit down with Jack Mardack, co-founder of Oyster, the global employment platform that became one of only a handful of companies in the world to reach unicorn status while holding B Corp certification. Jack shares what he learned scaling Oyster, why he believes the perceived trade-off between financial success and impact is a design failure rather than an economic law, and what the role of Chief Impact Officer actually involves day to day. We also get into the bigger picture: why the ESG debate has become more ideological than useful, why the notable impact investing market suggests investors have already moved past that argument, and what it would mean for European capital allocation if investors started funding evidence of impact instead of claims of impact. Finally, we look ahead: whether Europe is measuring itself against the US on the wrong dimensions, what the European workforce could look like in ten years if we get better at connecting talent, capital, and opportunity across borders — and why Jack will be sitting down at the MeOut Summit in Budapest with the founder of Hungary's first B Corp. His book, 'Impact Unleashed: Building Businesses That Scale Positive Change', unpacks many of these ideas in depth.

In this Women TechEU Roundtable episode, three founders building Deeptech cancer companies in France sit down together for a candid conversation about science, scaling, and what it really takes to move a breakthrough from the lab to the patients who need it. Muriel Bardor (Alga Biologics), Inna Menkova (Allogenica), and Emily Fang (InFocus Therapeutics) each tackle cancer from a different angle: sustainable microalgae-based manufacturing for antibodies, allogeneic "off-the-shelf" T-cell therapies, and AI-driven generative chemistry to design small molecules that directly target RNA. Together, they represent a new generation of European innovators working across advanced therapies, regenerative medicine, and next-generation drug discovery. Beyond the technology, this roundtable digs into the harder questions every founder faces. Where is the biggest gap between great science and real-world cancer care in Europe today? What happens when the science looks promising, but building a company around it proves far more difficult than expected? The founders share their most difficult moments, what Europe's ecosystem does particularly well, where it still slows companies down, and what they wish someone had told them before turning their research into a business. Looking five to ten years ahead, the discussion explores which change could most transform outcomes for cancer patients and reflects on how the Women TechEU programme shaped their journeys as founders beyond the grant itself, from confidence and visibility to networks and access to the next stage of growth.

What if technology could give blind people the freedom of a guide dog - without the waitlists, the cost, or the care requirements? In this episode, we sit down with Cornel Amariei, CEO and founder of .lumen, the Romanian startup building smart glasses that help blind and visually impaired people navigate the world independently. Cornel's story starts at home. Born into a family where both parents live with locomotor disabilities and his sister with a mental disability, he saw firsthand how much technology can change a life - and how little of it actually exists for people with disabilities. He was programming at seven, building robots at thirteen, and running profitable companies before finishing high school, before eventually leading innovation in autonomous driving at Continental Automotive Systems. In 2020, he channeled all of that into .lumen, a company with one mission: replicate the benefits of a guide dog for the millions of people who can never have one. In this conversation, we go deep on the technology itself - how the glasses perceive the environment in 3D, plan safe paths, and translate the world into something a blind user can navigate confidently. Cornel explains exactly where the guide dog comparison holds up and where it breaks down, what blind users have taught his team of engineers and scientists, and what his own hands-on contribution to the product has been. We also talk candidly about the transition from research project to manufacturable product, why Romania's DeepTech ecosystem still faces barriers, and what needs to happen for assisted mobility technology to become truly mainstream.

In this episode, we sit down with Paul Bonnet, General Partner at 20VC, the London-based venture capital firm founded by Harry Stebbings that sprung from the extremely popular 20VC podcast. We start with Paul's path into venture - from equity capital markets and equity research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, through five years at DST Global, to joining 20VC in 2024. We explore how his days as an investor at DST Global shaped the way he thinks about investing today, and what drew him to a firm as unusual as 20VC, where the media platform famously came before the fund. From there, we dig into how 20VC actually operates: why the firm deliberately keeps a core team of just six people, how the media ecosystem changes deal sourcing, founder relationships, and access - and what Paul sees as the future of the firm and his own role within it. We also discuss the shifting landscape of tech media itself, as more venture firms launch their own podcasts, newsletters, and publishing operations, and ask what role independent journalists and traditional tech publications still have to play. Finally, Paul gets candid about the investments he's proudest of and why, the thinking behind his own public content - deep dives on companies, thought pieces, and cap table breakdowns - even alongside Harry's massive profile, what most worries him about venture today, and his advice for European founders who feel the continent simply doesn't have enough funding.

This is a special two-part addition, building on the back of the A5X conference series we published last week. Since the EU-Startups team could only stay for part of the event, we missed the Singapore Defence Tech Hackathon (SDTH) in person - so we're bringing it to you in a slightly different format. Instead of our usual deep-dive conversations, we sat down with the winners to hear how they built their projects and where they're heading next. The hackathon brought together teams assessed by a panel of senior leaders from the Singapore Armed Forces, Singapore's defence science and technology community, and industry. 22 teams competed in the three-month extended challenge, with MAELSTROM taking the top prize of S$10,000 (~€7,000). In this episode, we talk with Vaikesh Manimaran of MAELSTROM, a micro-missile system designed to take on one of the most talked-about threats in modern defence: drone swarms. Vaikesh explains how the idea evolved over three months of development, what makes defending against a swarm fundamentally different from dealing with a single drone, and where the hardest trade-offs appear when building something that needs to react in real time.

This is a special two-part addition, building on the back of the A5X conference series we published last week. Since the EU-Startups team could only stay for part of the event, we missed the Singapore Defence Tech Hackathon in person - so we're bringing it to you in a slightly different format. Instead of our usual deep-dive conversations, we sat down with the winners to hear how they built their projects and where they're heading next. The hackathon brought together teams assessed by a panel of senior leaders from the Singapore Armed Forces, Singapore's defence science and technology community, and industry. 39 teams competed in the two-day challenge, with NeuroMech taking the top prize of S$8,000 (~€5,500). In this episode, we speak with Wayne Lin of NeuroMech. Their project tackled a challenge that sounds straight out of science fiction: controlling an unmanned ground vehicle without using your hands. What makes the story remarkable is that the whole thing was built and demonstrated in just 48 hours. Wayne walks us through the two-day build, the problem NeuroMech is trying to solve for defence operators, and what his prototype actually allowed an operator to do. He also opens up about the hardest technical problem behind making a brain-computer interface reliable under hackathon pressure, and whether winning changed how he sees NeuroMech as a potential company rather than just a hackathon project.

Filmed at the A5X Conference, Singapore - This interview forms part of a wider series we filmed in collaboration with NUSX, who invited us to Singapore to speak with founders, investors and academics from across the globe about shared challenges, the developing bridge between Europe and Asia, and the lessons we can learn from each other. In this conversation, we sit down with Gary Ang, Professor of Practice in Defence Innovation & Applications at NUS Enterprise and a senior representative of the Strategic & Defence Technology horizontal, to explore dual-use innovation and the growing Europe–Singapore DefenceTech partnership. Having worked across defence, government, investing and now university innovation, Gary offers a distinctive perspective on why good defence technology so often struggles to move from R&D into real-world use. He unpacks what "dual-use" really means at a time when the label has become a major theme in Europe - what makes a technology genuinely valuable across both civilian and defence markets, rather than simply being marketed as such. We explore the strongest opportunities for Europe and Singapore to work together as Europe puts renewed attention on defence innovation, while Singapore has long taken a deeply integrated approach across technology, government and industry. For European DefenceTech founders looking at Asia, Gary explains what they need to understand about Singapore as a partner, a market and a gateway to the wider region. We also discuss how founders should build companies when their technologies are increasingly shaped by national security, export controls and strategic competition, what NUS must do to turn promising defence research into companies that attract capital and scale internationally — and what Europe and Singapore can each learn from the other's approach to procurement and scaling.

Filmed at the A5X Conference, Singapore - This interview forms part of a wider series we filmed in collaboration with NUSX, who invited us to Singapore to speak with founders, investors and academics from across the globe about shared challenges, the developing bridge between Europe and Asia, and the lessons we can learn from each other. In this conversation, we sit down with Professor Helmut Schönenberger, co-founder and CEO of UnternehmerTUM and VP Entrepreneurship at the Technical University of Munich, to explore what Europe and Singapore can learn from each other on university venture building and DeepTech talent. UnternehmerTUM has become one of Europe's best-known university startup ecosystems in its own right, and Prof. Schönenberger shares the hard-won lessons from two decades of turning strong academic research into companies that can actually scale. Having built that engine in Munich, he offers a direct comparison with Singapore - where the biggest differences lie in how universities support founders and commercialise DeepTech, and what each side does better. We dig into one of Europe's most persistent puzzles: world-class research that struggles to produce companies of comparable scale. Prof Schönenberger explains what he believes is still missing between the lab and the global market, and what European ecosystems could adopt from Singapore's skill at connecting universities, government, investors and industry. Just as importantly, he flips the question - what could Singapore and other Asian innovation hubs learn from Europe's strengths in engineering, industrial technology and long-term research? Finally, we discuss how European universities should compete for increasingly global DeepTech talent while building stronger bridges with Asia, and the role universities and innovation centres should play in helping European deep-tech companies expand into Asian markets.