EU-Startups Podcast

Hosted by Thomas Ohr

Technology Entrepreneurship InvestingExplicit

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Episodes

198

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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About the show

The official Podcast of EU-Startups.com - the leading online magazine about startups in Europe.

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60 recent

October 22, 2026Episode 19935 min

How European BioTech is Changing Cancer Care

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.

October 15, 2026Episode 19841 min

The Glasses Helping the Blind See

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.

October 8, 2026Episode 19740 min

Where Podcasting Meets Venture Capital

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.

October 6, 2026Episode 19514 min

Building a Defence Against Drones

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.

October 6, 2026Episode 19613 min

Controlling Robots with Your Brain

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.

October 1, 2026Episode 19422 min

Inside the New DefenceTech Race

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.

October 1, 2026Episode 19314 min

What Europe Can Learn from Asia

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.

October 1, 2026Episode 19227 min

Turning Research Into Billion-Dollar Startups

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 Benjamin Tee, Vice President (Ecosystem Building) at NUSX, for a look inside the university's lab-to-market engine and NUS's push to build globally competitive DeepTech spin-outs. Prof. Tee has lived both sides of this world: as a researcher pushing new technologies forward - including years developing electronic skin and sensors that give machines a sense of touch - and as a founder trying to turn those ideas into companies. He shares what entrepreneurship taught him that academia couldn't, and how he decides whether breakthrough research should stay in the lab or has the potential to become a real company. With physical AI drawing increasing attention as AI moves into robotics and the physical world, Prof. Tee explains where the biggest opportunities lie over the next few years - and what working so close to the research frontier has taught him about how long DeepTech really takes to reach the market. Finally, we discuss what typically stops university spin-outs from reaching global scale, and what is still left to be done in the Singaporean innovation ecosystem.

October 1, 2026Episode 19120 min

From Google Glass to Dementia Care

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 Dr. Babak Parviz, DeepTech inventor and entrepreneur, best known as one of the founders of Google Glass and later as a leader of major innovation initiatives at Amazon. Today he leads NewDays.ai, a startup applying AI to dementia and cognitive care. Dr. Parviz shares what pulled him toward dementia after a career spanning some of the most iconic consumer technology projects of the past two decades - and why he felt this was a problem worth building his next company around. We talk about what NewDays is trying to make better for patients and families, and where AI can genuinely help today in one of healthcare's most human challenges. We explore why Europe and Asia - both dealing with ageing populations at scale - may become the most important testing grounds for new models of dementia care, and what a small company can do in healthcare that a tech giant sometimes cannot. Finally, we discuss whether Europe's more cautious approach to health data and AI regulation slows innovation or can actually help build better, more trusted products - and how AI's growing capabilities could change the way we detect, manage, and even think about dementia over the next five to ten years.

October 1, 2026Episode 19021 min

How to Win the Global AI Race

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 Dr. Orna Berry, Technical Director at Google Cloud and former Chief Scientist of Israel's Ministry of Industry and Trade, whose career spans national R&D policy, venture capital, cybersecurity, cloud and AI. We explore the themes from her A5X panel sessions: AI, systems and DeepTech for national innovation, and talent supply chains for AI, biotech and quantum. She shares what her different roles have taught her about what actually makes an innovation ecosystem work, and what separates countries that successfully turn scientific strength into economic impact from those that struggle to move beyond the lab. Dr. Berry explains where she sees the biggest bottlenecks today, what "the talent supply chain" really means, and whether countries can realistically build highly specialised expertise in AI, BioTech and quantum themselves, or whether the strongest ecosystems will depend on attracting global talent. Finally, having watched several major technology waves over her career, she offers her view on this AI wave — and what Europe can to do to turn its research strength into globally competitive DeepTech companies.