EU-Startups Podcast

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.