EU-Startups Podcast

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.