We’re back for Year Three of our annual Deep Tech Showcase! 🚀

We are beyond thrilled to invite you to the 3rd edition of the Deep Tech Showcase, hosted by Frontier Deep Tech and Silicon Roundabout Ventures in collaboration with Mishcon de Reya.

This evening is all about the hard tech from UK and beyond: from robotics and semiconductors to quantum and synthetic biology, featuring some of the most exciting live demos.

What to expect:

• Live Demos: Have a firsthand look at the most exciting hardware and infrastructure being built in the UK and beyond.

• Networking: We curate the guest list to ensure a balanced mix of technical founders, investors, R&D leads and the key ecosystem players moving the needle in the ecosystem.

• The Frontier: Join us for unfiltered conversation with the ones pushing the frontier of what’s possible.

📍 When & where ? 11th June | London, UK

🎫 Secure your spot HERE

Space is limited, and we expect this year to be our most attended yet. We review applications daily and will confirm your spot as soon as possible.

Catch a glimpse of the energy from our 2025 edition

Let’s celebrate the next chapter of Deep Tech innovation!

Silicon Roundabout, Frontier Deep Tech & Mishcon de Reya

• Co-Investment Opportunities: [See LP-only section at the bottom]

• Portfolio Updates: Defence deliveries, NHS deployments, new hardware shipping, and fresh rounds across the portfolio

• Events: 🇩🇪 SuperReturn Venture, Berlin, 8–10 June

• Market Lowdown: Deep tech adoption always needs a catalyst - and today, like before, it’s defence

• GP Reflections Easter Special: The Marketplace in the Temple. On hype, meaning, and what venture capital is actually for

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

Thanks for reading Silicon Roundabout Ventures Community! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

We will be attending Super Return Venture 8th-10th June 2026 in Berlin! If you’re going to be there, reach out soon as we’re thinking about our side events already…

➕ New Announcements

💥 Silicon Roundabout Ventures has just led the Seed round into Cellbricks Therapeutics, which has raised in total over €10M.

We are backing this INCREDIBLE team alongside SPRIND - Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen and ACT Venture Partners.

Let us introduce Cellbricks:

Printing living human organs and tissues. You can literally go to their HQ in Berlin and touch the bio fabricated tissue yourself. They can even send you a photo of a bio fabricated "baby hand" if you want proof of their capabilities.

They are the European answer to Aspect (who recently signed a $2.6bn deal with Novo Nordisk). They are moving tissue printing into clinical reality by cracking the vascularisation bottleneck. By developing a proprietary bio fabrication platform to produce complex tissue structures with functional blood vessels.

Here is why we backed them:

🔴 The team is the best of the best. Alexander Leutner started this journey after donating a kidney to his brother. He leads the company as Co-CEO alongside Dr. Simon MacKenzie. The executive team is rounded out by industry veterans Kattayoun (Kathy) Kordy, M.D. and Michael Kring.

🔴 They are launching preclinical animal studies for an adipose tissue implant programme. This provides biological alternatives to synthetic implants for breast reconstruction. Currently targeting a $60bn total market.

🔴 The long-term vision is 3D-bioprinted viable human organs. The team is ultimately pushing toward full liver replacement.

🔴 Made in Europe:They operate a dedicated headquarters and R&D hub in Berlin, actively expanding into Boston. Where they will be working out of The Engine at MIT.

This is the exact type of critical physical infrastructure we need to fund.

Welcome to the family! 🚀

Performance Snapshot

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP II

Stay tuned for updates :)

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP

• Vintage: 2023 / Investments: 21 (closed)

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Fund Size: £5M

GP’s Angel Portfolio

• Vintage: 2020 / Investments: 17

• TVPI: 2X / DPI: 0.1X

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016 / Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

Deep Tech adoption always needs a catalyst

Normally it’s Defence. Today is no different.

We wrote in January that value is migrating back to the Physical Layer. In February we called it the shift from the Discovery Phase to the Execution and Sovereignty Phase. This month, the evidence is becoming undeniable: our deeptech bets continue to sign up real contracts and a thirst for sovereignty is often behind their clients’ interest.

Far from being a temporary hype, this pattern has consistently initiated large scale adoption for frontier technologies.

Take Aviation, for example, some of their biggest breakthroughs have often needed a military catapult to reach escape velocity. The jet engine is the perfect example. Sir Frank Whittle's design was rejected by the Air Ministry in 1929. It only became a reality when the war made it a sovereign priority. That defence funding subsidised the transition to the commercial flight era.

We saw the same pattern during the birth of Silicon Valley. Early transistors and the internet moved from academic and corporate R&D labs to global dominance because the space race and the Cold War acted as the trigger for large scale government grants and high-value customers.

Today, we are seeing similar patters, with the US DoD and DARPA-linked programmes seeking out startup innovation to fuel a revived American Imperialism 2.0, while European countries and NATO-bar-US allies are desperate to fund technological sovereignty. For true deeptech innovators and investors, the opportunity is there to catalyse the industrial base for future mass markets. Government grants and contracts provide the initial runway for commercial scale, while the renewed interest in ground-breaking technologies as opposed to digital tools that exploit earlier breakthroughs (e.g. SaaS and AI wrappers) at least for some investors and founders will likely lead to the creation of entire new categories of tech titans.

We see this reflected in our young but commercially growing portfolio: Still pitching, still demonstrating, but also delivering. To NATO armed forces, to NHS hospitals, to battery manufacturers, to data centres, to space missions.

The companies that moved early into hard problems are now the ones with contracts, products in the field, and real customers.

While there is no magic hack to translate the ease of ARR hockey sticks into deeptech commercial ramp-ups, we are finally starting to see the first early contracts turning into multi-million or even multi-tens-of-million sales.

Through these lenses, let’s dive into how the advanced technology landscape is evolving globally and locally across Europe.

Defence, delivered

Market Context: Counter-drone procurement is accelerating across NATO. The shift from evaluation to active delivery is happening in months, not years.

Portfolio Zoom: Origin Robotics started delivering BLAZE interceptor drones to Latvia, Estonia, and Belgium. This is the first NATO-codified autonomous interceptor drone in active delivery, equipped with a STANAG-compliant warhead module. The Belgium contract was signed during an official visit between Belgian Minister of Defence Theo Francken and Latvian Minister of Defence Andris Spruds.

CEO Agris Kipurs went live on BBC News to discuss the economics of drone warfare and how autonomous interceptor drones are reshaping modern defence. The team also successfully deployed both BLAZE and BEAK in Arctic conditions at -25C during Griffin Tech Days 2026 in Rovajarvi. In his words:

“There’s no substitute for this kind of environment. Lab testing is necessary. Controlled trials are necessary. But real learning happens when hardware meets weather.”

They completed integration testing with Robin Radar Systems’ IRIS C-UAS radar, validating the full detection-to-intercept chain, and won the FSDI Latvia Innovation Award for the second consecutive year.

The recent attacks on Iran by US and Israeli forces (and the subsequent Iranian response) has now created a renewed need for “anti-drone” technologies like the ones that Origin developed in Ukraine when the founders started the company and, lately, delivered to Ukraine via their Latvian contracts. For new companies needing to fund heavy R&D, these unfortunate needs are a 21st catalyst that mirrors the ones that reshaped computing (transistor, internet), energy (nuclear power), and aerospace (jet engine) in the 20th century.

Diagnostics Deployed

Market Context: The MHRA’s AI Airlock programme and NHS Innovation Accelerator are creating structured pathways for AI-as-a-medical-device. The companies that engaged early with regulation are now the ones with deployed products.

Portfolio Zoom: Panakeia published the largest real-world, multi-site validation for AI-based molecular profiling to date in npj Digital Medicine: 3,576 patient samples across three independent healthcare institutions, definitive results for over 8 in 10 samples, 93.83% agreement with standard laboratory testing. In their words:

“Every week of waiting is a week stolen from treatment. PANProfiler ends this. Minutes instead of weeks for MSI/MMR results. Precision medicine accessible to every patient, in every hospital, not just those near specialist centres.”

CEO Dr Pahini was selected as a 2026 NHS Innovation Accelerator fellow. PANProfiler Colorectal (MSI/MMR) and PANProfiler Breast (ER, PR, HER2) are both UKCA-marked and deployed in NHS hospitals. Panakeia is also part of the MHRA’s AI Airlock programme (phase 2). They presented at LSI USA, Digital Health Rewired at NEC Birmingham, and BioTools Innovator East Coast.

We recently interviewed her to highlight her path from academia to VC-backed medtech startup founder:

Hardware is shipping

Market Context: European deeptech is moving from prototype to production. The companies doing it fastest are the ones with integrated supply chains and real customers, not the ones with the biggest rounds.

Portfolio Zoom: Greenjets delivered products to customers, significantly expanded facilities, increased production capacity, and opened a Munich office:

“This growth reflects the momentum across the business and the progress we are making as we scale our technology and operations.”

They brought in senior hires from Reaction Engines: Dr Kathryn Evans as Business Development Director and Pat Nagle as Head of Programmes. Hiring across engineering, ops and manufacturing: greenjets.com/careers

SCI Semiconductor showed working ICENI silicon at Embedded World 2026 and won Best-in-Show in the Microcontrollers category. They won government contracts and appointed Dipesh Patel as Chair of the Board. At QCon London and the Civil Service Innovation Conference, the message was clear: “We can’t deliver the next generation of tech innovation unless we fix memory security, now.” EU Cyber Resilience Act compliance is becoming a major conversation for them.

Gama installed a 20kN vibration shaker in-house, cutting weeks off test campaigns for their Astrobrake deorbiting units:

“No more waiting for external lab slots. No more shipping hardware across the country. Faster iterations, faster delivery of more reliable products.”

They are also partnering with Aerospacelab on the IPERLITE hyperspectral mission, providing Astrobrake for end-of-life deorbiting.

Infrastructure is being built

Market Context: The photonics and battery supply chains are being built right now, backed by EU Chips Act grants, Innovate UK contracts, and private capital following the public signal.

Portfolio Zoom: Ephos continues expanding Fab-2, backed by the 41.5M EUR EU Chips Act grant, manufacturing glass-based photonic circuits for AI data centres. Their CEO noted the convergence with Musk’s Terafab announcement:

“Vertical integration in the chip industry strikes back. Fast recursive loops for improving chip design are just too important in the era of AI agents.”

Finchetto partnered with Pilot Photonics for their world-first fully optical passive network switch, capable of reducing power by up to 20x and latency by up to 40x. Won Innovation Product of the Year at Data Centre World Awards. Secured Innovate UK funding for a commercial pilot. Appointed Dr Drew Nelson OBE to the board. Doubled the team. Their CEO wrote in The Engineer UK:

“We may have missed out on the semiconductor manufacturing race, but many of those ‘left behind’ 180nm fabs are exactly what next-gen photonics needs”

Anaphite raised £1.4M for a dedicated LFP dry coating programme (Innovate UK grant matched by World Fund and Elbow Beach). They had three sessions at the International Battery Seminar in Florida and presented at InterBattery Seoul. Tesla confirmed dry electrodes are now in Cybertruck and Model Y, with Cybercab and Semi coming this year. McKinsey estimates dry coating could save 2-3 EUR per kWh in Europe.

Infiniti Recycling completed the pre-seed that we had initiated as a solo-cheque backing the founder, with £1.4M coming from Sustainable Ventures, Ascension, and us (again) at Silicon Roundabout Ventures, alongside angels. 97% & 93% of the world’s LFP Cathode and Graphite Anode materials respectively are processed in China, even the material mined or recycled in Europe. Infiniti are building the alternative.

Scaling the quantum stack

Market Context: The UK’s £2 billion quantum package included £125 million for quantum networking. The state is backing the infrastructure layer, not just the research.

Portfolio Zoom: Nu Quantum’s Carmen was featured across the DSIT announcement, quoted by Innovate UK, NSSIF, and Amadeus Capital. She told UKRI: “Patterns in classical computing tell us that this need [for networking] has always been there, and it’s a valuable problem to solve”. John Jarman presented “Entanglement Networks for Datacentre-Scale Quantum Computing” at OFC Conference. Nu Quantum is a finalist for Employer of the Year at the Cambridge Science and Technology Awards.

Haiqu closed an $11M Seed, led by Primary Venture Partners with Toyota Ventures doubling down. They hired Antonio Mei (ex-Microsoft Quantum) as Lead Product Manager and published the most complex publicly documented Quantum Lattice Boltzmann fluid dynamics simulation on real hardware: 15-step nonlinear on IBM Heron. Beta live at haiqu.ai.

Swisspod set a new hyperloop speed record at 115 kph with AERYS 1 at their facility in Pueblo, Colorado. They celebrated their 7th anniversary:

“We started in Switzerland with the world’s only infinite hyperloop testing track. We broke the world record for the longest hyperloop mission. Then we crossed the ocean to the U.S., built the largest hyperloop infrastructure, and broke speed records there.”

GP Reflections - Easter Special Edition

The Marketplace in the Temple: A Post-Easter Reflection for the High-Growth Era

This Easter, I found myself looking at the venture capital ecosystem through a lens ground from two very different stones. On one side are the Catholic roots I grew up with in Italy before drifting from institutional religion. On the other are the Buddhist insights I developed during a difficult “dark night of the soul” in my 20s.

The reflection was triggered by an unusual weekend. I attended a choral evening service in London with my family and, thanks to one of my daughter’s night wake-ups, I also spent the pre-dawn hour in deep mindfulness meditation. This personal intersection collided with a series of recent articles in the Financial Times that have been circulating in my mind: “How we gave up on forgiveness”, which built upon earlier ones from the same author: “Where have all the virtuous role models gone?” and “The culture wars have flipped”.

These thoughts lead to a question that we, as both builders and investors, cannot afford to ignore:

What is the true value of our hard work and the capital we shift as a proxy for accumulated work-energy?

If we do not integrate this questioning into our daily operations, the inevitable result is a total loss of meaning.

Historically, societies rarely survive a deep loss of purpose combined with economic stagnation. The Western Roman Empire fell in circumstances uncomfortably similar to ours today. In the Middle Ages, popular anxiety was channeled by the Papacy into holy wars. The Enlightenment eventually decayed into a colonialist decadence that fuelled the collapse of the British, French, and Ottoman Empires across two world wars. When the “Why” of a civilisation vanishes, the “How” becomes increasingly desperate and violent.

The “Just” Trap

We are currently living in the “Steroid Era” of venture capital. We have become obsessed with the hype of the “billion” while losing the meaningfulness of the “enterprise.” This has birthed a rise in religious lip service. We see leaders talking about “values” while their actions prioritise the destruction of competitors and the total burnout of human talent for the sake of a 100x return.

The FT articles I mentioned above noted the irony in today’s Silicon Valley poster-child, Elon Musk. Despite not being himself religious and his public pictures as a “Devil’s Champion” with an upside-down cross, he now uses his platform X to lambast moral sinners. His primary life goal has seemingly shifted from reaching Mars to a combative defence of “biological women, the west, Donald Trump, England’s race rioters and (…) Christianity.” It is the ultimate irony: high-profile founders and VCs finding a renewed passion for defending the “traditional temple” while they are busy setting up currency exchange booths in the middle of the sanctuary.

In general, in the tech industry, we now speak about Artificial Intelligence with a messianic fervour (“AGI”). We act as if startups are just their capacity to “explode” their ARR or just their capacity to hit multi-billion-dollar valuations. We treat founders as if they are just their capacity for 80-hour workweeks. This reductionism leads to “Kingmaking”, where mega-funds with dubious performance records use massive cash piles to bribe the market ahead of Product-Market Fit (PMF). They force extreme valuations that ignore every fundamental rule of business, as this seems to be the only thing that ultimately matters. Instead of “build and they will come”, it seems the industry is now obsessed with “raise billions at gazillion scale and trillions will flow”.

While I have moved away from Christianity, I still remember the Gospel account of the temptation in the desert, where Satan says: “All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me.” By reducing the genuine unleashing of human ingenuity –that creative potential to solve the world’s hardest problems– into a shallow cocktail of hype and hope for fast price-tag growth and returns, we are bowing to a master that cannot sustain us.

Building for the Future

The most successful long-term businesses, the ones that actually shift the needle for humanity, are those that refuse to bow to mere hype. There is a reason why companies built on over-hype like Theranos or WeWork ultimately collapsed, yet I am still typing this on an Apple computer, powered by TSMC-printed chips and sustained by a national energy grid incumbents. These are enterprises built on the financial hardness reality and the meaning of long-term visions.

In our industry, the “10X VCs” that actually justify the illiquidity and risk of this asset class compared to the Nasdaq are often not the mega-funds. They are the small, focused boutique teams that refuse to follow the hype or worship the dogma of the giants. Maybe without even realising it, they may just understand that honourable values and deep insight are not obstacles to growth; they are the only things that make growth worth having in the first place.

If we are going to use the language of “defending values,” we should start with the ones that are actually measurable in the long-term health of our civilisation:

1. Integrity over Hype: Building what works, not what sells for the next round.

2. Sustainability over Burnout: Creating businesses that can sustain the people who build them.

3. Humanity over Valuation: Recognising that capital is a tool for human progress, not an end in itself.

The marketplace has always been inside the temple. The question for us at Silicon Roundabout Ventures, and for you as our partners, is whether we are here to serve the spirit of the enterprise or if we are simply here to count the coins.

Are we still trying to reach Mars and build powerful machines to expand human horizons, or are we turning idols into gods and destroying the fabric of our civilisation as a byproduct?

Read more

PAHINI’S BACKSTORY: WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER BECOMING A PHD TURNED FOUNDER

For Pahini, the catalyst was a moment of profound clinical irony. While finishing her PhD at King’s College London - training as both a biophysicist and a molecular biologist- Pahini faced her own cancer scare. For a month, she waited for results from the simplest lab tests, the same ones she performed daily in the lab. She realised that while she was using world-class science to understand tumors, that research might not reach a real patient for decades.

“I realised that patients and their families need accessible solutions today, not ten years down the line”

After a postdoc at Cambridge, she joined Entrepreneur First (EF), found a co-founder with complementary AI expertise, and began the process of raising millions from top-tier VCs and institutions.

Proving that the jump from the lab bench to the C-suite can provide an amazing moat if executed the right way. In this article Pahini describes a set of strategic steps that helped her with the transition and navigation of the business environment.

If you’re sitting in a lab right now wondering if your research could be a company, here are the battle-tested DOs and DON’Ts from someone who has actually done it.

1. (DO) Solve a Problem, Not just a Technology

In the lab, Pahini saw that patient tissues were a finite, precious resource. Simply said, you can’t just keep going back to a patient for more “samples” to run tests. While most scientists would try to find a better way to process tissue, Pahini decided to solve the scarcity problem by moving to In Silico (AI) solutions.

Key Takeaway: Don’t force your wet-lab skills into a startup, identify a technical constraint in the real world and build a technology to bypass it. Identify the pain point first, the technology is just the tool to fix it.

2. (DO) Run the “Mom Test”

Pahini didn’t wait for a prototype to talk to clinicians. She went to the Chair of cancer screening programs and asked about their “unsolvable” problems. She didn’t ask “Do you like my idea?”, instead, she asked about their technical constraints. When she hit on the pain of tissue scarcity, the clinician made a high-stakes offer: “If you can actually build this, I will give you the data you need to train it.”

Key Takeaway: True validation is when the customer risks their own resources (like proprietary data) to help you build. If a customer offers you their hardest-to-get resource, you have found a product-market fit.

3. (DO) Optimise for Speed

When Pahini joined Entrepreneur First, she didn't wait for "chemistry" or a serendipitous spark. Instead, she approached the search with the precision of a data scientist. She built a literal leaderboard of every technical founder in the cohort, ranked them by AI expertise, and stress-tested three different pairings in just a few weeks.

Key Takeaway: She chose her co-founder because they were the pair that could “unlock things very, very quickly.” If your partnership isn’t producing results in weeks, it won’t survive for years. In a startup, speed is absolutely crucial.

4. (DO) Leverage Your “Academic Shield”

Pahini discovered a powerful social hack: the so called "Researcher’s Privilege." While a CEO or Senior Clinician will reflexively delete a sales pitch, they almost always have time to give "expert advice" to a scientist. By approaching prospects not as a founder with a product, but as a researcher seeking insight, she bypassed the gatekeepers.

Key Takeaway: Use your academic status as a Trojan Horse to learn the market’s pain points. By the time they realise you are building a company, they are already emotionally invested in your solution.

1. (DON’T) Overvalue the “How” over the “Why”

In the lab, precision is the ultimate currency. You’re trained to qualify every statement, cite every source, and never (under any circumstances) oversimplify. When Pahini first stepped into the boardroom, she brought that academic rigour with her. She found herself diving into the biophysical interactions of the tumor microenvironment, mapping out the cellular “how” with meticulous detail.

The result? A room full of glazed eyes and missed opportunities.

Pahini had to face a painful truth: she was pitching a thesis, not a business. Investors didn’t need a biology lesson, they needed a vision of the future.

Key Takeaway: Never talk about the “how” first. Get them excited about the “what if” (how many lives saved, how much money recovered) then prove you have the technical sophistication to deliver it.

2. (DON’T) Underestimate the “People” Factor

Looking back, Pahini’s biggest realisation was that she should have invested in Relationship Capital much earlier. Whether it’s a senior clinician who opens a clinical door, a mentor who brings a strategic opportunity, or an investor you’ve nurtured long before the pitch these human connections are the invisible engine of a startup.

After all during her hardest moments (like fundraising or navigating team changes) it wasn’t the science that saved the company, it was the trust she had built with her board and her investors.

Key Takeaway: You can have the best data in the world, but if your investors don’t believe in you, the company will fold. Your relationship with your co-founder and your team will determine your success more than your p-value ever will.

3. (DON’T) Fear the Co-Founder Split

In 2022, Pahini hit one of the toughest moments any founder can face: she and her co-founder realised they just weren’t on the same page anymore. Their paths were moving in different directions, and the tension was real.

Most people would have had a complete emotional breakdown, but Pahini kept her head. She knew the person across from her was hurting, too, so she acknowledged those feelings but kept the actual conversation focused on the facts and what the board needed to see.

Because she didn’t let the drama take over, she kept hitting her business goals. The result? She actually landed a major investment as a solo founder, even while the market was crashing.

Key Takeaway: Because she managed the split professionally and kept hitting business milestones, she secured a major term sheet as a solo founder during a market downturn. A split is a transition, not an end.

4. (DON’T) Be “Too Academic” in Communication

Pahini realised she was “crap” at commercial communication. She was too technical, too precise, and too slow to get to the point. She didn’t try to “fix” herself alone, she brought in experts who were exceptionally good at “translating” deep science into strategic business language.

Key Takeaway: Academics love nuance; founders need clarity. If your solution is meant to be accessible, your explanation of it must be conceptually accessible too. Don’t be afraid to hire your own “translators.”

5. (DON’T) Wait for Perfection use the “Proxy” Strategy

Pahini knew Panakeia couldn’t wait a decade for full clinical trials just to prove their value to investors. They needed to show progress now.

Instead of waiting for the perfect final result, they built proxies: smaller, faster wins that showed the tech was working. They focused on securing patents, hitting early clinical proof points, and running pilot evaluations with real-world partners.

These weren’t “the end goal,” but they were the evidence investors needed to see that the company was moving in the right direction.

Key Takeaway: Learn to be comfortable with the unknown. In a lab, you don’t publish until the data is 100%; in a startup, if you wait for total certainty, you’ll run out of money before you ever launch.

📚 The Founder’s Library: Resources for Scientists

The specific programs that powered Pahini’s transition.

Programs & Incubators

• Entrepreneur First (EF): The program where Pahini found her AI co-founder.

• Silicon Roundabout Meetups: Our Deep Tech community hub where Pahini first connected with and secured critical funding for Panakeia from us.

• Cambridge Ignite: Academic-focused entrepreneurial programs Pahini utilised during her time at Cambridge.

• Nucleate: Organisation Pahini mentioned that now support scientist-founders in ways that didn’t exist when she started.

• Innovation Forum: A global network she leveraged to bridge the gap between her research and the industry.

Below are the 9 most striking lessons learned from our conversation: from raising nine figures on a boat to the “invisible tax” of scaling a global giant.

1. Solve a Problem for, don’t sell a Product to the customer

Every great founding story begins with a “Why.” For the CMR founders, the pivot point came during a 2012 meeting in a pub. They realised the market was saturated with “Ferraris”, surgical robots that were technically impressive but prohibitively expensive and physically massive.

Existing robots didn’t do the range of surgical procedures that surgeons were actually demanding. The team didn’t set out to build the most complex machine, they set out to build the one that fit the practical, real-world workflow of the operating room.

The Lesson: True market disruption happens when you prioritise the surgeon’s actual needs, budget limitations and practicality over technical vanity.

2. The Power of Radical Skill Diversity

Traditional venture logic suggests that two founders are the “sweet spot.” CMR team ignored this, launching with five. In a field as complex as medical robotics, “one genius” is a bottleneck. The team needed mastery in embedded hardware, mechanical engineering, software, and data science simultaneously.

The Lesson: With hardware, many times, your greatest strength isn’t fast alignment, it’s the ability to “argue in a friendly way” to find the optimal engineering truth.

3. The Wooden Prototype Milestone

In the early days, before they had millions in the bank, the team built their vision out of wood. Today, that wooden prototype sits in the British Museum.

It couldn’t perform surgery, but it performed the ultimate task: generating conviction. It allowed surgeons to touch the joints and feel the ergonomics long before a single piece of medical-grade steel was cut.

The Lesson: Physicality is the antidote to skepticism. If an investor can touch it, they can believe it.

4. Navigating the “Capital Gap”

Frost is candid about a staggering reality: of the £300 million eventually raised, only about £20 million came from the UK. “I talked to dozens and dozens of VCs in the UK... I couldn’t raise the money.” His first major check came from Scandinavia, followed by capital from Singapore, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

The Lesson: If your local ecosystem lacks the “scale of capital” for your ambition, don’t waste time trying to change their DNA. Change your flight destination.

5. Conviction at Sea: Raising £100 Million on a Yacht

Fundraising is often romanticised as a boardroom activity, but Frost’s favourite story involves a RIB boat and a suit. While speaking at a conference in the South of France, Frost received a call from an existing investor asking when he was headed home. When he replied he was on the airport, the investor replied: “I’ll send a car to pick you up.” Still in his suit on a beach where he walked over the sand to a waiting boat. Three miles offshore, over ten hours on an investor’s yacht, he raised £100 million.

The Lesson: Be prepared to pitch anywhere. Capital follows conviction, regardless of whether you’ve had a change of clothes in the last 24 hours.

6. Leadership via the Joke Shop

Frost was known for visiting a local joke shop before company updates, once addressing his team dressed as a Christmas turkey another time as a Star. This wasn’t mere eccentricity, it was a strategic dismantling of hierarchy. By never having an office and making himself a “bit ridiculous,” he ensured the culture stayed open and energised.

The Lesson: Psychological safety within the organisation makes radical difference. When the CEO isn’t “precious,” the team feels safe to innovate.

7. The Trap of “Version 2”

In the race to the top, both investors and entrepreneurs suffer from “next-gen obsession.” Frost admits that while their first product was excellent, they were already fixated on the next iteration. “The right thing to do should have been a limited release of Version 1 before we went to a better Version 2.”

The Lesson: Clinical data from a “Version 1” in the real world is worth more than a thousand lab simulations of a “perfect” Version 2.

8. Seeking the Boardroom Sanctuary

“It’s a lonely journey as a CEO,” Frost reflects. He worked through four chairpersons, searching for one with whom he could share his core challenges with without fearing for his position. He now prioritises this “bridge” role for the companies he chairs, encouraging founders to lead with their worries rather than their slides.

The Lesson: Your Chair should be a bridge to your investors, not a judge.

9. The “Success Penalty” and Mental Absence

Frost speaks openly about his wife’s support through years of intense pressure. His regret wasn’t the hours spent working, but the “mental absence” being physically present at home while his mind was 3,000 miles away solving a robotics glitch.

The Lesson: Protect the support system that allows you to go the distance. When Frost eventually stepped down, his wife’s sadness lasted “about 20 seconds” before they headed to North Norfolk for birdwatching.

The CMR Blueprint: The Engine of Growth

Beyond the high-level strategy, CMR Surgical succeeded because of these moves as described by Martin:

• Insane Speed: They moved from a standing start to clinical use in a hospital in just five years a pace almost unheard of for such complex hardware.

• Ownership Culture: Key strategy to increasing ownership was distributing options widely across the entire company

• Commercial Borderlessness: Recognising the UK market was too small for their ambitions, the leadership and team was global from the beginning.

  

• Sovereign Industrialisation: 🏛️ The 2026 deeptech inflection — from discovery phase to execution and sovereignty; quantum networking; sovereign defence; AI’s energy and security crisis; industrial scale-up.

• Events: Dragon Chasers OG, Montenegro — 12–15 May.

• GP Update: 8 companies above $1M revenue; patience in deeptech and the Fund II trajectory.

• LP Private section: Co-investment Opportunities and Financial Update

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

Thanks for reading Silicon Roundabout Ventures Community! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Francesco will be at Dragon Chasers OG, Montenegro - 12th to 15th May 2026. If you’re an LP and might like to attend, reach out to us!

Portfolio Updates & Public Announcements

Our public portfolio tracker: https://siliconroundabout.ventures/portfolio

Leveraging our community to spot the very best of Europe’s talents before they go “global”, and write that super-early cheque that fuels their launch.

➕ New Announcements

No new announcements.

Performance Snapshot

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP II

Stay tuned for updates :)

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP

• Vintage: 2023 / Investments: 21 (closed)

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Fund Size: £5M

GP’s Angel Portfolio

• Vintage: 2020 / Investments: 17

• TVPI: 2X / DPI: 0.1X

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016 / Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

Sovereign Industrialisation: The 2026 Deep Tech Inflection

The end of 2025 and this first quarter of 2026 have confirmed a fundamental shift in the deeptech ecosystem: we have moved from the Discovery Phase to the Execution & Sovereignty Phase.

With just 1 fund vintage we saw defence move from being a “bold gamble” (LPs advised us to take off our deck in 2022-23) to a true propeller (as we predicted) for deeptech, manufacturing and resilience technologies in Europe.

The Opportunity: We are already seeing the birth of European contenders to the US’s Andurils and Palantirs. The strongest of these got started or trace their origins to before the recent hype. Tekever in Portgual is the most obvious example as a unicorn from this category that was founded in 2001. The Filter: We remain disciplined. While the market is currently starting to show sign of over-excitement, with AI-washed drone startups lacking technical moats going from launch to mega-rounds in months, our focus remains on the underlying infrastructure layer - companies with fundamental IP and integrated supply chains.

From Lab to NATO-Standard: For our early portfolio, 2023–2024 was defined by technical breakthroughs in the lab. The end of 2025 and now 2026, instead, are being defined by industrial scale-up and geopolitical hardening. Just as we ignored conservative feedback and moved early into defence because of the de-globalisation and technology trends we could see develop over the last decade, we will continue to choose long-term infrastructure bets over guessing what is or may become hot.

We believer patience will serve us and out LPs well. In the resilience and defence space, both dual use and defence proper players in our portfolio ultimately leveraged the same shift we spotted as investor to take deeptech breakthroughs to market faster. For instance:

• Nu Quantum: Secured a world-record Series A for Quantum Networking following national security linked funding.

• Origin Robotics: Scaled from prototype to active procurement contracts with several NATO governments in under 18 months.

Yet, we see this search for sovereignty from both investors and institutions play out at different level across our portfolio.

1. The Quantum Networking Inflection

We are seeing the “Quantum Winter” narrative thoroughly debunked. The focus has shifted from “Who has the most qubits?” to “How do we connect them?”

• Market Context: Global investment in quantum has crossed $50B, with a massive tilt toward distributed architectures.

• Portfolio Zoom: Nu Quantum’s expansion into Spain and their new Cambridge lab positions them as the “Cisco of the Quantum age.” By moving from theoretical networking to industrial-grade Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs), they are solving the scaling bottleneck that has plagued the industry. Complementing this, Haiqu is drastically lowering the barrier to entry with their hardware-aware OS, targeting a 1000x reduction in compute costs. Essential as the market moves toward Quantum-as-a-Service.

2. The Rise of Sovereign Defence

Autonomous systems are no longer just emerging, they are the new baseline for national security.

• Market Context: The autonomous drone segment is seeing a 15.8% CAGR, driven by a shift from hobbyist-grade tech to NATO-codified systems.

• Portfolio Zoom: Origin Robotics’ delivery of the BLAZE interceptor to Latvia, Estonia, and Belgium is a landmark moment. Being the first NATO-codified autonomous interceptor gives them a first-mover moat that is incredibly difficult for newcomers to bridge. Simultaneously, Archangel Lightworks is providing the un-jammable backbone for this new era. Their partnership with Eutelsat OneWeb proves that laser-based (optical) communication a viable path for secure, high-capacity global LEO networks.

3. AI’s Energy & Security Crisis

As AI models grow, the traditional silicon and software-only security approaches are hitting a wall.

• Market Context: The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) milestones in 2026 are forcing a rethink of hardware security.

• Portfolio Zoom: SCI Semiconductor is perfectly timed here. By delivering memory-safe (CHERI-enabled) microcontrollers, they are selling more than a chip - they offer compliance and resilience for critical national infrastructure. On the efficiency side, Finchetto is addressing the AI power wall. Their all-optical switching technology is no longer a luxury, but it is becoming a necessity for data centres that are otherwise reaching the limits of their local power grids.

4. Industrial Scale-Up & Hyper-Mobility

Deep tech is finally touching heavy atoms—iron and infrastructure.

• Market Context: The race for Green Iron and sustainable supply chains is drawing massive capital toward industrial automation and regional mini-mills.

• Portfolio Zoom: Sparkmate‘s transition to a Stage 1 factory with full process automation is a masterclass in de-risking. Achieving 3N purity iron in a single step undercuts traditional carbon-intensive methods. Meanwhile, Swisspod continues to lead the Hyperloop realisation phase, proving that high-speed, zero-emission cargo transit is a matter of when, not if, as they move from record-breaking missions to site-specific feasibility.

GP Perspective: Why 8 companies breaking above $1m in annual revenue is the Foundation

Our current Fund 1 performance reflects a portfolio that has matured through one of the toughest fundraising environments in a decade. We are seeing a flight to quality where companies with real revenue and industrial contracts (Origin, Astral, Ephos) are separating from the pack.

The fact that Ephos secured the first-ever EU Chips Act startup funding and Origin is actively delivering to three NATO nations, both in the nearly 40% of our 21 bets to date that broke above the symbolic $1m annual revenue, suggests that resilience, just like other trends we’ve been following for many years, are accelerating the path to market for deeptech / hardware entrepreneurs.

With 70% of our portfolio having already raised US capital (and therefore unlocking global funding for scale), we believe the long term trajectory for these deeptech infrastructure champions is one that points up and to the right. It will take longer than AI software plays. But, once again, we don’t believe venture capital to be an investment field you can rush.

LP Only Section Begins

Read more

Nigel Toon is an engineer who became one of the most successful chip entrepreneurs in the world. After top roles at Altera, he co-founded Icera (sold to NVIDIA for $435M) and led companies like Picochip and XMOS. In 2016, he started Graphcore, a unicorn startup valued at $2.8B that builds specialized chips to compete with NVIDIA. He now advises the UK Prime Minister on business and recently wrote the book How AI Thinks.

After the fireside chat with Nigel we extracted 5 lessons of building a deeptech giant from the ground up. In this newsletter you can find:

• How to split the resources between R&D and winning the customer

• Who to look for in corporates for efficient collaboration

• The ideal size of teams for scaling

• Why the goal of each CEO should be doing nothing

  ---

1. The 50/50 Rule

Technical founders often confuse a scientific breakthrough with a business. Spending 90% of your capital and mental bandwidth perfecting the Tech is a recipe for failure - and what often differentiates European and American deeptech companies. The US vs. EU Gap: American companies focus on product management, engaging with customers and refining the product roadmap equally as much as on the technology.

The truth is, if you’re spending majority of your resources solely on R&D, you aren’t building a company, you’re running a laboratory.

The Golden Ratio: At least 50% of your total investment - time, capital, and mental bandwidth must go into winning customers. - Nigel Toon

2. Be able to solve a problem with only your technology

Scale doesn’t come from being everything to everyone, it comes from being everything to the few key customers. The Strategy: Find a problem so specific that only your proprietary tech can solve it.

• Find the key customers.

• Obsess over them.

• Dominate that corner.

• Then earn the permission to win the whole market.

  ---

3. The Multiplier of 8 Rule for Teams

Scaling isn’t just adding heads, it’s about maintaining velocity. Nigel shares his experience with optimal organisational design also called The Multiplier of Eight.

1. The Unit (8 people): A single, cohesive cell.

2. The Growth Peak (64 people): The perfect size for a high-growth startup.

At 64 (8x8), you can still know every face, name, and function - everybody understands the values, mission and their place in the company. The moment you cross this threshold, the “magic” often breaks. You suddenly require layers of management and formal processes. The trick is to stay deliberately small for as long as possible. Lean mass is what allows you to move fast enough to get big.

4. Meet the “Problem Owners,” Not the “Innovation Department”

Your time is best spent in the trenches with your customers. However, you must be selective. Prioritize meetings with the people who actually own the problem and the budget to fix it and don't waste years in pilots that go nowhere.

• Avoid: “Innovation Departments” whose job is to look at new tech but rarely have the power to buy it.

• Seek: The engineers and managers whose daily lives are made miserable by the current limitations of the market. They are your true champions.

“Focus on who the actual decision makers are in the corporation and who the real people with real projects are” - Nigel Toon

5. The CEO’s Paradox: The Goal is Obsolescence

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the ultimate goal of the CEO is to do nothing. True scale is achieved when you build a system so robust and a team so aligned that the company no longer requires your input on daily decisions. If the gears stop turning the moment you leave the room, you haven’t built a company; you’ve built a high-stress job.

The reality ? Don’t worry that is never going to happen anyway and there will be enough fires to put out, rounds to raise and issues to solve.

The Bottom Line

Building a deeptech giant requires a rare blend of visionary arrogance (to believe you can beat the NVIDIAs of the world) and operational humility (understanding that executing that is exceptionally difficult and requires a lot). You can find the whole interview here.

• Upcoming Events: Notice of the team’s attendance at Super Return in Saudi Arabia on January 26–27, 2026.

• 2025 Year in Review: An analysis of the European tech “inflection point,” arguing that value is migrating from software/AI hype back to the “Physical Layer:” Next-Gen Computing, Energy Transition, and Strategic Resilience (Defense/Space).

• Performance Snapshot

• GP Personal Update: Announcement of Natalia joining the team as the new Head of Community and Operations.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

Thanks for reading Silicon Roundabout Ventures Community! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

We’ll be at Super Return in Saudi Arabia on the 26th and 27th Jan. If you’re a Founder, LP, or anyone else there and interested in catching up, reach out!

2025 Year in review: Europe’s Frontier Tech Opportunity

As we enter 2026, the European technology ecosystem faces a generational inflection point. While traditional venture capital remains fixated on a “late-cycle” software and AI hype, the next industrial revolution belongs to the Physical Layer:

Hardware Rules Software

The “ICT Revolution” was built on infrastructure and only in the last 20 years lived through a phase of “Software eating the world”. Many founders and investors believed some form of runaway recursion in AI would generate exponential progress and value in the next few years, but their beliefs are hitting a wall of physics: where general-purpose computing can no longer satisfy exponential ML energy demands. If 2023 and 2024 were the years when the “hype” exploded, 2025 was the year cracks started to appear.

In this context we see it just a matter of time before real value migrates back to deeptech infrastructure, specifically across three “arms races”:

• Next-Gen Computing: Moving beyond standard silicon toward novel architectures and even new forms of computation like quantum computing.

• Energy Transition: Leveraging collapsing costs in solar, wind, and battery storage to move us toward “electro-state” led economies.

• Strategic Resilience: A new era of “dual-use” defense and space technology, which in Europe is particularly felt as the company scrambles for sovereignty in the area.

Addressing the “Seed Gaps”

Despite growing interest, deeptech founders face a “hidden capital drought”. Current European VC is hampered by four specific gaps:

1. The Allocation Trap: 31% of deeptech funding is cannibalized by AI software, leaving hardware stagnant.

2. The Sovereignty Trap: 65% of European defense-tech funding currently originates from US investors.

3. The Spinout Tunnel Vision: Funds focus on university transfers, often ignoring the 66% of “wild” founders coming from industry.

4. The Time Fear: Investors prioritize quick software markups over the longer R&D cycles of deeptech, which often yields superior long-term performance.

The Path Forward

We see the story repeat: the best long-term rewards don’t come overnight. Bucking the trend and betting on truly long-term transformative cycles is where we want to play as a fund and as a community. In that respect, we believe that the future will be won by “vertical integration fanatics” and “hardware hackers” who can move atoms at the speed of bits.

By writing super-early cheques and leveraging technical communities, our objective for our new investment cycle starting in 2026 is to be the enabling first believer in the next ASML-level global leader to come out of Europe.

Stay tuned for our follow on research article on the specific trends we are seeing, our “build in public” manifesto, and the opportunity we seek to capture in Venture Capital.

Portfolio Updates & Public Announcements

Our public portfolio tracker: https://siliconroundabout.ventures/portfolio

Leveraging our community to spot the very best of Europe’s talents before they go “global”, and write that super-early cheque that fuels their launch.

➕ New Announcements

No new announcements.

Performance Snapshot

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP II

Stay tuned for updates :)

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP

• Vintage: 2023 / Investments: 21 (closed)

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Fund Size: £5M

GP’s Angel Portfolio

• Vintage: 2020 / Investments: 17

• TVPI: 2X / DPI: 0.1X

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016 / Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

GP Personal Update

A new beginning! I wanted to welcome Natalia as our Head of Community and Operations :)

She’s scaled a tech community in the CEE region and turned it a profitable business, before moving to Oslo and become a Sigma Square exec.

With her on board, we can focus on truly scaling up the operations with the Silicon Roundabout community and serve the most talented and promising deeptech founders in Europe as they launch their global titans.

Onwards!

LP-Only Section Begins

Read more

• Deeptech Demo Day Winners - Marama Labs takes the crown from 200 European deeptech applicants, with DiaMonTech and Impli as runners-up

• Thesis & Portfolio Deep Dive: Greenjets - The inevitable electrification of aerospace and why a team of Rolls-Royce defectors are leading the global charge for quiet electric propulsion for drones, shipping already to defence primes and neo-primes

• GP Update: Silicon Valley is Automating the Wrong Things - Why we need robots for physical labour, not chatbots for junior jobs

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

The Deeptech Demo Day - The results!

🏆 Deeptech Demo Day: We Have a Winner!

We have a WINNER for the crown of most impressive deeptech pioneer in Europe! After 120 VCs scored nearly 200 applicants, our judges have spoken.

🥇 Winner: Marama Labs (Brendan Darby, PhD)
On a mission to accelerate RNA therapy development with rapid and precise optical characterisation of lipid nanoparticles!

Tailed by a fraction of a point:

🥈 DiaMonTech AG (Thorsten Lubinski) - Developed a novel medical device which can measure blood sugar non-invasively - i.e. without pricking

🥉 Impli (Anna Luisa Schaffgotsch) - Delivering continuous hormone monitoring to women’s health

The rest of the finalists (who emerged as the best from 180+ applicants):

• Swisspod Technologies (Denis Tudor) - Physical AI company developing dual-tech solutions and autonomous vehicles for high-speed transportation at a fraction of the cost

• Edgify (Mitchell Goldman) - Revolutionising retail operations with Edge AI solutions to combat shrink and drive operational efficiency

• Arceon B.V. (Rahul Shirke) - Developed Carbeon, a proprietary material for extreme environments that disrupts the $5B graphite market

• TaiSan (Sanzhar Taizhan) - Making next-gen polymer electrolyte to enable sodium batteries 2.0

• VOLTA Structural Energy (Tommaso Randolfi) - Turns vehicle structures into load-bearing batteries

• Edge Aerospace (Jarosław Jaworski) - Building the cloud of tomorrow in orbit, the “most natural place” for AI

• Jonathan Air (Salvatore De Benedictis) - Powering a just world

• Sparkmate (Morgan P.) - Forging the future of steel manufacturing 100% electric and CO2 free

Big thank you to our finals’ judges: Sasha Vidiborskiy (Partner at Atomico), Martin Frost (Deeptech Unicorn Founder & Angel, CMR Surgical), Isabel Fox (Head of IR at Hoxton Ventures), and Sten Tamkivi (Partner at Plural).

With our incredible co-hosts at Frontier Deep Tech (Dr Cristina Esteban Pardo) and special thanks to our sponsors Mishcon de Reya LLP and PEM who made it possible.

Portfolio Deep Dive: Greenjets

The Rolls-Royce alumni building the propulsion backbone for electric aviation

Greenjets is currently one of the strongest performing Fund I investments.

But while they are now closing contracts with governments, defence primes, and scaleups heavyweights like STARK, they did not seem obvious (especially to investors!) even as recently as last year.

We first backed CEO Anmol Manohar and CTO Dr. Guido Monterzino in early 2023, when they were operating out of a trailer in Bedfordshire. Committing before they had even completed their company’s incorporation.

Two years later, they have expanded from a team of eight to a dedicated manufacturing facility with a global supply chain, and are on track to produce hundreds of engines in 2025.

This deep dive explains what they build, why the economics work, and why we are so bullish on the underlying technology trends they ride (and help bring to their natural conclusion).

What They Build

Greenjets designs and manufactures ducted fan electric propulsion systems for drones, UAVs, and eventually larger aircraft. Their engines look like miniature jet engines, not the exposed propellers you see on most drones.

The product lineup spans four engine families:

• Sycamore: small drones, optimised for efficiency

• Aspen: multirotors, optimised for vertical lift

• Hemlock: high-speed applications, cruise speeds over 540 km/h

• Alder: larger drones and future eVTOL applications

The core technical claim is that their ducted architecture delivers up to 93% noise reduction and 45% less power consumption versus open-bladed propellers of equivalent thrust. But what’s really insane about these numbers, is that they aren’t a mere theoretical calculation. They’ve instead been validated through work with the University of Cambridge’s Whittle Laboratory and demonstrated publicly at Farnborough 2024, by which point, mind you, Greenjets had only a few backers, including us and had barely raised their pre-seed.

Why This Matters Now

Drones are loud. Traditional drone noise sits in frequency ranges that humans find particularly irritating, which limits where and when they can operate.

Regulations are catching up. The EU has set noise limits for drones under 600kg. Wing (Google’s drone delivery arm) has clashed with Australian regulators over noise complaints. As the commercial drone market scales toward widespread delivery, inspection, and surveillance, noise becomes a regulatory and social license problem.

Greenjets solved this by applying psychoacoustics research to propulsion design. This means they don’t just make engines quieter in decibels; instead, they shift the sound signature to frequencies humans find less annoying. This is the kind of deep technical insight that comes from founders who spent years inside Rolls-Royce and Cosworth thinking about engine acoustics.

The Team

The founding team’s pedigree is unusual for a startup at this stage.

Anmol Manohar (CEO) spent four years at Rolls-Royce developing novel aircraft concepts and led the Rolls-Royce eVTOL programme. He later ran the electric propulsion division at Blue Bear Systems Research, the defence UAV integrator where Greenjets was incubated.

Dr. Guido Monterzino (CTO) spent eight years at Cosworth as a technical programme manager in aerospace propulsion. His PhD from Cranfield focused on UAV systems engineering, including work on BAE Systems’ Demon UAV.

In June 2023, they added Colin Smith CBE to their advisory board. Smith spent 40 years at Rolls-Royce, rising to Director of Engineering and Technology on the main board, where he was Chief Design Engineer for the Trent 500 (Airbus A340) and Trent 700 (Airbus A330). When someone of that calibre joins a seed-stage startup, it signals something about the quality of the technical work.

The team has recently expanded with Pat Nagle leading programme delivery and defence accounts, and Dr. Kathryn Evans as Business Development Director. Evans previously led aerospace at Reaction Engines and holds a PhD in turbomachinery from Cambridge’s Whittle Laboratory.

Commercial Traction

Greenjets has moved from R&D to revenue.

Farnborough 2024: Their partnership with Striekair produced the Sentinel UAV, which was the only drone to fly live at the airshow. The 3-metre wingspan vehicle demonstrated VTOL capability, quiet operation, and high-speed flight powered by Greenjets’ Sycamore engines.

UK MoD Contract: In late 2024, they secured an R&D contract with the Ministry of Defence to develop the HS125 (Hemlock variant) engine for defence applications.

MGI Engineering SkyShark: In July 2025, MGI publicly demonstrated SkyShark, a British-sovereign strike drone designed to deliver 20kg payloads at 250km range and 450+ km/h speeds. One variant runs entirely on Greenjets’ HS125 electric ducted fans.

Ricardo Partnership: They completed the InCEPTion demonstrator with Ricardo plc, a fully operational electric propulsion module for aircraft under five tonnes featuring an immersion-cooled battery system.

The company now supplies engines to airframe manufacturers across North America and Europe, operating in both commercial and defence sectors.

The Energy Economics Argument

We’ve written before about our thesis that electricity-powered technologies win not because they’re “green” but because they’re riding the winning cost curve. Greenjets fits this pattern.

Electric propulsion offers fundamental advantages beyond emissions. Fewer moving parts means lower maintenance. Instant torque provides better performance for hover and transition flight. Battery and motor costs continue to fall on predictable curves, and no fuel logistics means you can charge from grid or renewables.

The ducted fan architecture adds further benefits. By integrating motor, battery, and thermal management into a single nacelle, Greenjets simplifies airframe integration for customers, reducing development time and certification burden.

Competitive Landscape

The most direct competitor is Whisper Aero, a US company that raised $32M in Series A in 2023 to develop similar quiet ducted fan technology. Whisper has strong backers (Menlo Ventures, Lux Capital) and NASA connections.

But Greenjets has achieved comparable technical milestones with significantly less capital. They were first to market with a shipping product (Sycamore launched May 2023), first to fly live at a major airshow, and first to secure UK defence contracts for their technology.

The market is large enough for multiple winners. Advanced air mobility is projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2040, and different players will likely dominate different segments.

What Could Go Wrong

We’re not naive about the risks.

Market timing. The eVTOL and urban air mobility markets have been “five years away” for a while. If commercial applications don’t scale as projected, Greenjets becomes dependent on defence revenue, which is great now but may not be growing forever.

Technology scaling. Their current engines work. Whether the architecture scales to larger thrust classes for regional aircraft remains to be proven, and this is where the real transformative opportunity lies.

Competition. Whisper Aero has more capital. Larger aerospace primes could enter the market. A well-funded competitor with better manufacturing scale could compress margins. But so far Greenjets is both best in class and able to think beyond engines and provide entire solutions to go with them - and customers seem to love it.

Supply chain. They rely on manufacturing partners, and as volumes increase, supply chain execution becomes critical.

Why We Remain Bullish

Greenjets has done something rare: delivered real products to real customers while raising modest capital, then secured a very strong $7m Seed with an internal-only top-up that was snapped up in weeks at an even higher valuation. They went from a trailer to Farnborough main stage in under two years, and they’ve attracted talent and advisors that don’t typically engage with companies at this stage. Effectively shipping atoms at the speed of bits. Their last round closed in early 2025, led by Tanglin Venture Partners with participation from Spacewalk VC, 7percent Ventures, z21 Ventures, and MD One Ventures.

Defence demand is accelerating. The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated the strategic importance of drone technology, and NATO allies are racing to build domestic manufacturing capability. Greenjets’ NATO-sovereign supply chain is increasingly valuable in this context.

We backed them early because we believed the team could execute in a technically demanding space. That thesis has been validated. The next chapter is scaling production while expanding the product range, which will determine whether they become a generational aerospace company or a successful niche player.

Either outcome works for our fund model. But we’re betting on the former.

Portfolio updates

How we think about portfolio construction:

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

No new additions.

Markups

A recap of our markups: (latest round)

• Greenjets Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed)

• Nu Quantum Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• Infiniti Recycling Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Angel round)

• Haiqu, Inc.: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed)

• Anaphite Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• Panakeia Technologies Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed+)

Notable performers preparing for a follow on round:

• Origin Robotics - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in defence contracts closed (Latvia and Netherlands)

• SpiNNcloud Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in contracts closed (US and Europe)

• Astral Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in annual revenue and word’s first breeding of tritium in a commercial reactor

• Ephos - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in annual sales crossed in 2024; also the first startup to receive EU Chips Act funding: secured 41m EUR to build the world’s most advanced photonics fab for glass-based chips

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 21

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 0 → Fund 1 fully deployed! :)

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 2X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

GP Personal Update

It’s now quite clear to me that Silicon Valley is obsessed with automating the wrong things.
I asked on LinkedIn: Who’s brave enough to tell the VCs?

The reflection was mostly based on the ever more pressing issues coming with an ageing and less fertile population: and so I realised it’s increasingly more obvious that we are pouring billions into the wrong stuff. Ie. “mainstream AI” (fancy autocomplete) to automate junior coding, copywriting, and customer service [1][2].

Basically, we are actively eroding the entry-level white-collar jobs our university graduates actually want and are trained for.

Meanwhile, we have a massive labour shortage in the physical world that software cannot fix.

We are leaving the most pressing needs unaddressed.

- Blue-collar automation?

- Specialist heavy industry work?

- Physical infrastructure repair?

We need more robots and physical machinery to advance these sectors. We need to replace dangerous and breaking manual labour, not junior creativity.

China gets this.

They are not distracted by the LLM echo chamber. They are racing ahead in industrial robotics and physical automation [3].

They are building the machines that will build the future, while San Francisco argues about whether a chatbot is sentient.

Europe has a fighting chance here.

But only if we stop treating everything coming out of the Bay Area as gospel [4]. Our strength has always been in engineering, hardware, and industrial application. We need to double down on that.

The current obsession with an all-powerful AGI replacing PhDs and human genius is a distraction. In the short and medium term, it is likely destined to fail [5].

It is only leading to more commercial products that automate what we need the least. And most economic benefit will probably be scooped up by incumbents rather than startups
(read: I’m long Google and short OpenAI, but neither will replace high level human thinking in a genrailised and fully autonomous fashion any time soon)

Let’s get back to building things that matter.

As per the investors, I believe most won’t realise this until the AGI promised by OpenAI and Co won’t materialise. By then of course it will be too late to avoid a massive crash. [6]

But hopefully from the ashes we will be able to build back, if enough founders and contrarian investors are willing to think differently.

👇 Sources

[1] https://intuitionlabs.ai/articles/ai-impact-graduate-jobs-2025
[2] https://blog.unrulycap.com/the-depopulation-trade-an-unruly-thesis/
[3] https://xpert.digital/en/china-39-s-robotics-offensive/
[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/business-building/our-insights/europes-deep-tech-engine-could-spur-1-trillion-in-economic-growth
[5] https://towardsdatascience.com/stop-worrying-about-agi-the-immediate-danger-is-reduced-general-intelligence-rgi/
[6] Trillion-Dollar Crash:

Silicon Roundabout Ventures Community

Trillion-Dollar Crash

Francesco Perticarari - September 2025…

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7 months ago · 28 likes · 8 comments · Francesco Perticarari

• Our events - Invites for you to our Slush side events and The Deeptech Demo Day

• Portfolio Deep Dive: Swisspod - Eight months after investment, they’ve built the world’s largest hyperloop test facility in Colorado. Why passive infrastructure changes everything - an insight into our investor mind.

• New Investment: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] - We backed this steel reinvention company relocating from France to Hong Kong. LP co-investment opportunity still open up to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

• The Energy Economics Reality - Why electricity-powered technologies win not because they’re “green” but because they’re riding the winning cost curve.

• Deeptech Demo Day Finals - November 25th live event featuring the top 10 European deeptech companies raising pre-seed to Series A selected from 200 applicants.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

The Deeptech Demo Day - September to November 2025

100 VCs scored nearly 200 applicants from our European deeptech community to pick the finalists! Our event co-host, Cristina from Frontier Deep Tech, just announced them. Now it’s up to our 4 judges to pick a winner live. If spotting deeptech trends is your thing: join us to watch the Finals live on November 25th - register here: https://lu.ma/zijex7xx

Slush, November

We are once again attending Slush (Helsinki, November 19th+20th) and will be hosting a Breakfast for those interested in Data and AI use within VC. Sign up here!

We’re also running a Solo-GP roundtable on Tuesday as part of Slush’s UK House at a fabulous hotel near the main station. Only a few seats left. Only for soloGPs and LPs backing them ;)

Portfolio Deep Dive: Swisspod

The Tubes Rising from the Desert

You may remember when we spoke about Swisspod upon investing, and Francesco’s love of trains 🚂 and his visit to Lausanne

Standing on the windswept plains of Pueblo, Colorado, as massive steel tubes rise from the dusty earth like some alien infrastructure, it’s hard not to feel the gravitational pull of the future.

This sprawling 43-acre elliptical track-soon to become America’s second-largest vacuum chamber-bears little resemblance to the beaches of Costanza, Romania, where Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor once hawked t-shirts to help support himself and his family while studying.

Yet both spaces represent the same relentless human drive: to create something from nothing, to build pathways where only barriers existed before.

Science Fiction becomes Fact?

Eight months ago, we invested in Swisspod Technologies. Since then, they’ve built the world’s largest hyperloop test facility in Pueblo, Colorado - 1.6 kilometres of actual steel tubes, not AI renderings. Governor Jared Polis visited in December 2024 to see what’s becoming America’s second-largest vacuum chamber.

They’ve also been selected by 100+ VC scorers as one of the top 10 deeptech companies in Europe and will be pitching at our Deeptech Demo day!

This is worth paying attention to, given the hyperloop sector’s struggles. Virgin Hyperloop pivoted to freight only. Hyperloop TT went quiet. Others have exited entirely. Yet here’s Swisspod, welding tubes in Colorado with state backing.

We believe it comes down to 3 things. Besides having a voraciously ambitious (but also technically brilliant) polymath as founder and CEO, and besides its technology capacity to be deployed without the hyperloop vacuum (more on this below), Swisspod’s unique tech and business thesis insight are riding what we see as an inevitable technology “train”. Pun very much intended. They are riding the right energy and underlying supply chain train, which also underpinned our backing of Greenjets in the aerospace/defence sector and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in the steelmaking world.

What They’ve Actually Built

The company operates two test facilities. LIMITLESS in Lausanne, Switzerland - a scaled circular track where they’ve run 82 tests in low-pressure environments. MATTERHORN in Pueblo, Colorado - the full-scale facility that will complete its 1-mile loop in Q2 2025.

The technical achievements are specific: speeds scaling to 488.2 km/h, distances scaling to 141.6 km, all in 50 millibar pressure. Fast iteration and real-world testing, rather than theoretical studies. You can compare it to SpaceX blowing up rockets to get one finally in orbit, rather than building a business on spreadsheets, renderings, and industry assumptions.

Colorado loved this and backed it with $900,000 in state tax incentives. El Paso County added $1,041,609. In return, Swisspod will be creating 107 manufacturing jobs in Colorado Springs. When states write checks before ribbon cuttings, they see economic development potential.

Why The Economics Are Different

Swisspod’s approach differs fundamentally from other hyperloop attempts. Their linear induction motor technology puts complexity in the pod, not the infrastructure. The track is passive, essentially dumb metal rails.

This changes the cost structure entirely. Swisspod projects under $20 million per kilometre. For context: Spain and France spend €18-25 million per kilometre on high-speed rail. Germany spends €71 million. The UK’s HS2 has reached ~£200 million per kilometre.

At those ratios, the UK could build London to Edinburgh transport at Swisspod’s cost for what they’re spending on 50 kilometres of HS2.

The Business Model That Works

Virgin Hyperloop needed billions in infrastructure before generating revenue. Swisspod doesn’t. They can generate revenue from pod sales and leasing before any commercial track exists. Companies buy pods to test at the Colorado facility. Each customer becomes locked into the eventual network.

They’re starting with freight, specifically their SWIPT system - urban pods for smaller payloads and line pods for pallet-scale cargo. No passenger certifications needed. No station infrastructure. Just fast cargo movement.

Who’s Engaging

Several stakeholders have shown concrete interest. Peru’s Instituto de Ingenieros de Minas del Perú invited them to present - mining companies need efficient transport through challenging geography. Etihad Rail gave them the main stage at their Global Rail Transport Infrastructure Exhibition in Abu Dhabi. The Swiss government continues funding through Innosuisse, with EPFL and HEIG-VD as ongoing partners.

Felix Porsche invested personally after meeting CEO Denis Tudor at Richard Branson’s Necker Island event in April 2024. Board members include Prof. Michael Horodniceanu, former NYC Traffic Commissioner and MTA Capital Construction President.

They’re also part of the Muspell Consortium, which secured €3.5 million from the European Innovation Council to develop thermal energy storage systems - addressing heat management in low-pressure environments.

The Challenges

No country has hyperloop regulatory frameworks yet. This is both the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity. The first country to create standards owns the global framework, like the US did with aviation or the UK did with railways. Whoever moves first sets the rules everyone else follows. That’s why Colorado’s engagement matters beyond just tax incentives.

Competition is real and already operational. Aurora launched commercial autonomous trucking Dallas-Houston in May 2025. While limited to specific corridors, they’re generating revenue today.

Capital requirements remain substantial. Even at $20 million per kilometre, a 200-kilometre commercial route needs $4 billion. But that’s why we invested early - to help them prove the technology works so institutional capital follows. The Colorado facility demonstrating full-scale operations, changes the funding conversation entirely.

The Path Forward

Swisspod has signed an MoU with the Indian government and TuTr Hyperloop for technology licensing. They’re in discussions with mining companies, rail authorities, and logistics providers. The 1-mile loop completion in 2025 enables full-scale demonstrations.

Their retrofit capability matters. They can run on existing rail at atmospheric pressure - not full hyperloop speeds, but still faster and cheaper than traditional rail electrification. This opens immediate markets without waiting for vacuum tube infrastructure.

The founder and CEO, Denis Tudor, sold t-shirts on Romanian beaches to support himself and his family while studying. He got to EPFL, won Elon Musk’s hyperloop competition, and earned the world’s only doctorate in Hyperloop Electrical Energy, Optimal Design, and Operation Strategies. Now he’s building in Colorado with government backing.

Rail infrastructure companies command multi-billion dollar valuations because they own critical transport networks. Swisspod is not interested in stealing market share as much as creating a new transportation category. When you can move cargo at 400 km/h for less than the cost of traditional rail, you don’t need people to buy into your dream to win contracts.

Most importantly, they’re building. Not just presenting and promising. Welding steel in Colorado while others write white papers. That’s the difference we see between this and every other hyperloop story. Failures will happen along the way. But as long as they stay on track, their unique technology and founder approach will continue to give them growing margins and cost advantage not only against other hyperloop startups, but against traditional HS rail.

We believe they stand a significant chance of giving this industry its Tesla or BYD moment.

Portfolio updates

How we think about portfolio construction:

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions (+ COINVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY)

We invested in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], a French company that relocated to Hong Kong, reinventing steel with low-cost, electric, sustainable tech.

They blew us away as we discovered them in our community, and we invited them to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] just finished their [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]kg reactor POC and are targeting a 2026 HK pilot able to generate $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]M/year. In line with our views on energy and technology compounding rates being critical for large-scale deeptech success (see our deep dive on Swisspod, above), we believe steel will soon get its Tesla moment. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is one of maybe 2-3 global contenders that we deem credible to shape it.

Tech edge:

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] electrolysis: 6.7% tech improvement rate, 57% less energy, direct renewables, modular

• Any ore grade accepted, fully automated, no hydrogen headaches.

• Beats coal, hydrogen, and molten oxide incumbents on cost/flexibility.

Market angle:

• 1.95Gt steel/year, 19% of the global economy, 8% of CO₂ emissions. $300-400B needed for the green transition.

• Modular economics drive cost parity by 2030 - well ahead of legacy players.

Positioning:

• First-mover, compoundingly improving tech, regulatory tailwinds, supply chain fit, and strong learning curves.

Bottom line: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] step-change in economics and renewables integration puts the old steel cost base on notice. Latest: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Markups

A recap of our markups: (latest round)

• Greenjets Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed)

• Nu Quantum Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• Infiniti Recycling Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Angel round)

• Haiqu, Inc.: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed)

• Anaphite Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• Panakeia Technologies Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed+)

Notable performers preparing for a follow on round:

• Origin Robotics - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in defence contracts closed (Latvia and Netherlands)

• SpiNNcloud Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in contracts closed (US and Europe)

• Astral Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in annual revenue and word’s first breeding of tritium in a commercial reactor

• Ephos - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in annual sales crossed in 2024; also the first startup to receive EU Chips Act funding: secured 41m EUR to build the world’s most advanced photonics fab for glass-based chips

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 21

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 0 → Fund 1 fully deployed! :)

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 2X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

GP Personal Update

Since my early days in computer science, I discovered that AI (we called it Machine Learning then) was 2 things:

- Incredibly more powerful than I thought

- Incredibly more dumb and inherently stupid than I thought

In the post-ChatGPT world, I ultimately believe we have exactly the same state of affairs.

Meaning: I believe there are opportunities for those willing to see past the hype and current bubble (yes, yes, yes we are in a bubble) and embrace these 2 assumptions.

What would you build if AI weren’t intelligent, nor will it be for years to come? But it was also extremely powerful... And in a way that power is becoming more and more of a commodity?

Think about that.

Almost every venture capitalist, tech analyst, and retail investor I’ve encountered recently shares the same unwavering conviction: Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is the biggest value creator tech has ever seen, and getting in now, often at “any valuation”, will lead to the investment of a lifetime.

At Mobile World Congress earlier this year, I warned that finance had likely broken innovation and the AI hype was mostly misplaced. Yet, despite mounting evidence since, public markets continue to strike record highs, while in VC WhatsApp groups I’m part of, 9 out of 10 companies mentioned involve AI or “agentic” platforms.

I believe this to be a mistake.

My analysis, as both a Computer Scientist reviewing technology fundamentals and a Venture Capitalist studying historical parallels, suggests that we’re heading instead for a major bear market within the next 3-18 months. While a crash may help true progress and reward those who dare to be real contrarians, there will be real casualties. Financial for sure. Political, almost certainly.

Abstract Summary

This essay will analyse the risks of overhyping mainstream AI trends, current market dynamics, and the reasons investors consistently misprice innovation. It reviews overlooked opportunities and methods for finding long-term “alpha” returns, proposing the “Warsaw PhD Blueprint” to identify high-impact companies beyond short-term hype cycles. We will then discuss likely endgame scenarios for the present AI frenzy and techno-economic cycle.

What we do as investors will dictate whether we make or lose fortunes. What we do as a society will determine whether we usher in an age of genuine prosperity or perpetuate a dystopian cycle of speculative booms, busts, and rising inequality.

Few will hear this now. My hope is that a few may be enough and that more will, once the train wrecks.

The Technical Reality of AI: A Systematic Breakdown

To understand why industries and markets consistently misprice breakthrough technologies, we must examine what they’re actually pricing. Current large language models (LLMs) excel at pattern recognition and text manipulation within their training distribution: writing coherent prose, translating languages, generating functional code. These capabilities have genuine commercial value and explain initial excitement - I use Claude and GPT myself, both professionally and to help with personal searches.

But serious limitations arise when early enthusiasm meets commercial reality. A 2025 MIT study found that 95% of corporations gained zero measurable return on generative AI. Swedish scale-up Klarna dramatically U-turned on plans to replace staff with AI after poor results; METR found AI tools even slowed skilled engineers despite perceived speed gains. This matters because LLMs today aren’t expected to be merely useful, but to unleash superhuman general intelligence and billion-dollar outcomes for platforms repackaging them.

In June 2025, Apple researchers delivered what LLM sceptic Gary Marcus called “a knockout blow for LLMs” with “The Illusion of Thinking”: “reasoning” models face “complete accuracy collapse” beyond a certain complexity, with “no evidence of formal reasoning.”

The findings were brutal: “Adding even a single sentence that appears to offer relevant information to a given maths question can reduce accuracy by up to 65 percent.” Researchers concluded: “There is no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two can give you a different answer.”

Despite critiques about benchmarks and token limits, Apple’s core findings stand. A key rebuttal was even meant as a joke, while serious analyses confirm LLMs routinely fail with changed problem structure, regardless of context. Earlier work by the same team also shows these models rely on pattern-matching and memorization and not genuine reasoning. So, despite some caveats, the study highlights AI’s struggle with robust, generalisable understanding.

Independent research confirms this pattern-matching ceiling, chronic hallucination, and unreliability:

• Fluid-intelligence ARC-AGI-2 benchmark: humans ≈ 75%, GPT-4o 19% (Zhang et al., 2025)

• Simple graph-colouring: nine frontier LLMs mis-colour ≥ 60% (Chen et al., 2025)

• Clinical diagnostics: “none-of-the-above” probes halve accuracy from 80% to 42% (Bedi et al., 2025)

• 30—70% hallucination rates on unanswerable questions, intrinsic to autoregressive decoding (Wu et al., 2025)

Thus, evidence keeps piling up and showing that mainstream AI‘s capabilities are more about optimisation and prototyping than problem understanding and revolutionary disruption.

Latest Models Underwhelm, Resources Skyrocket

While larger models do show performance gains, these are becoming more modest while energy costs and infrastructure needs rise super-linearly. OpenAI released GPT-5 in August 2025, which was estimated to require >10 GWh to train and several kWh per million tokens at inference, whereas the human brain functions on ≈ 20 W all day.

GPT-5 was hyped as the “great leap forward,” with Sam Altman predicting it would deliver AGI, if only they could raise and spend enough money on compute power.

Instead, benchmark gains were “marginal at best” across nearly every metric, even losing to Grok on ARC-AGI-2 reasoning. In maths tests like AIME 2025, GPT-5 Pro’s lead over previous models was minimal. Users also noticed that the emperor had no clothes. Noah Giansiracusa, associate professor at Bentley University, called the launch “underwhelming,” saying improvements were “much more marginal than I would’ve hoped”.

With models already trained on most data on the Internet and data centre electricity outpacing some national grids, piling compute onto autoregressive large models looks an increasingly costly route to get mere incremental improvements in real reasoning.

AI bubble deniers claim that future models can ingest synthetic data and private records like medical files, and that LLM progress still continues “exponentially” on certain metrics like independent runtime length. Yet even their own data shows these gains are actually either linear or sub-linear, not exponential. Meanwhile, both research and user experience increasingly show that longer runtime, adding synthetic data, and pure model and data scaling all show practical limits that are inherent in the way AI works and won’t be fixed with more compute power.

This is the pattern I predicted in my MWC keynote: diminishing returns from throwing more capital and compute at fundamentally limited approaches.

FOMO-Driven Investment

Meanwhile, FOMO-driven funding props up an industry that’s growing like a dangerous house of cards:

1. VCs and cloud providers invest in foundational model companies, which then burn through that cash in cloud spend while selling at a loss

2. Future growth projections on that spend send cloud provider stocks higher, justifying more investment (probably why some analysts don’t see the bubble yet)

3. Capital gets reinvested into infrastructure projects and application layer companies, which mark up VC bets and boost foundational model revenue, despite these too having negative economics and relying on funding to stay afloat

4. Revenue and investment circle, with future projections staked on unsustainable metrics and AGI promises that look ever more elusive as performance gains plateau

Goldman Sachs defends the data centre buildout as a productive infrastructure investment. But productive for whom? By which year?

When hyperscalers like Oracle and Microsoft both invest in and consume from the same infrastructure, and a few unprofitable companies like OpenAI rely on fundraising to fulfill obligations, revenue becomes circular - and the system extremely fragile.

Mark Zuckerberg candidly admitted the rush may be just a speculative bubble: “there’s definitely a possibility, at least empirically, based on past large infrastructure buildouts and how they led to bubbles”.

His rationale: tech incumbents accumulated so much cash in the last 20 years that FOMO is now a bigger driver than optimal investment calculations. “If we end up misspending a couple hundred billion dollars - Zuckerberg continued - that’s going to be very unfortunate obviously. But I would say the risk is higher on the other side… If you build too slowly, and superintelligence is possible in three years but you built it out were assuming it would be there in five years, then you’re out of position”.

Elon Musk predicted Grok 5 to deliver AGI by the end of 2025. Should this claim also fail, as our technical analysis suggests, it will become harder to defend limitless AI explosion in the near future. At least without further breakthroughs in fundamental research and infrastructure architectures, which will require much longer timelines to emerge.

The Financial Forces Behind AI Speculation

This technical reality (powerful yet limited tech tools misrepresented as almighty revolution) and a FOMO-driven gold rush create the perfect setup for a market bubble.

What I described as far back as 2022 as a “functioning alcoholic” cycle has only intensified: bigger funds demanding bigger tickets demanding bigger valuations demanding bigger stories, such as Marc Benioff saying that “Generative AI is the most important tech of our lifetime” or Marc Andreessen branding AI “a universal problem solver”.

The numbers tell the story. Nine US firms control half of all venture capital raised, with 75% of all US venture capital in 2024 going to just 30 firms and AI startups consuming over half of all funding. OpenAI, days after its flagship model’s lukewarm reception, increased its valuation to half a trillion dollars, matching Mastercard and Netflix. Early-stage startup valuations are also setting new record highs.

Public markets mirror this distortion. The S&P CAPE Ratio sits at 39, approaching the 40-42 dot-com record. The Total Market Cap over GDP has shot above 210%. The Mag7 account for nearly 35% of the entire S&P 500, with the 5 largest 4.9x more valuable than all small-cap stocks combined - concentration exceeding dot-com bubble times.

Remember 2021’s meme stock rushes and dubious reverse mergers? It’s all back. From IPOs for unprofitable companies to SPACs (even the “SPAC King” returns after losing investors’ money). Meanwhile, retail investing hits all-time highs whilst PE and VC funds offload stranded assets to retail investors via continuity funds.

Yet surprisingly, expert consensus remains this time it’s different. Economists don’t see crashes coming. Investment houses remain bullish. National Security joins the AI party. Analysts agree: markets are ultimately heading up and right.

Not only that, but productivity will soar, and we’ll all be out of jobs (but universally wealthy) because AI and robots will handle everything.

The few who disagree mostly worry about AI going rogue. In that scenario, machines still take over most human activities by 2027 or thereabout, but we then get wiped out or end up in a Blade Runner dystopia.

Following mainstream financial news, you’d think slot machines are open and everyone’s raising bets to win big. Market consensus says AI is where money will be made like never before.

The Historical Pattern: Markets Always Make the Same Mistakes

Rather than an anomaly, this behaviour matches exactly what you would expect in a late techno-economic cycle environment, as well as in the phase before a golden age of stability is reached.

Economist Carlota Perez documented this pattern in “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital“. Perez recently noted: “I have not seen a golden age happening without a crash.”

Over two centuries show that mature technology innovation, like containerisation in the 1970s, make the tech obvious and the whole market rushes to invest in it and adopt it - triggering speculation, overcapacity, and severe downturns. Today’s AI frenzy has arrived late in the ICT technology cycle and also lacks any “surprise arbitrage”, as incumbents move in quickly, investors cram in, entry valuations surge, and rampant competition destroys margins.

The transition from technology “installation” to “golden age” is also chaotic and characterised by bubbles and busts, as demonstrated by the Great Depression during the Age of Oil, Automobiles, and Mass Production (1908–1971). Unlike previous cycles, the current ICT era hasn’t delivered a clear golden age of widespread prosperity; therefore, repeated bubbles, social tensions, and inequality remain dominant. Meanwhile, capital keeps chasing speculative waves (dot-com, great financial crisis, web3, AI) without genuine techno-economic integration.

Since today’s AI frenzy bears hallmarks of both late-cycle technology bubbles and installation phase speculative excess, conditions mirror the S&P 500’s largest declines (1873, 1893, 1929, 1973–74, 2000) with the two concurrent factors sharpening risk.

The setup is therefore in place for a harsh valuation reset, funding drought, and an ensuing bear market potentially rivalling the Great Depression or the 1970s.

Perez herself noted that, while AI as a whole will continue to help technology advance and potentially even “lay the groundwork for breakthroughs in biotech, nanotech, and other fields that may be at the centre of an eventual sixth revolution”, it does not represent a novel disruptive revolution itself.

Therefore, besides the technical limits to current AI systems, we must also consider that even when past innovations have proven useful in the long run, investors and industry consistently fail to correctly predict where and when value actually accrues, provoking hype, bubbles and crashes.

The Technology Improvement Curve Framework

The problem with most investors is that they follow financial news and hype instead of academic research on technology trajectories. MIT and Santa Fe Institute studies demonstrate instead that technology improvement rates, measured by price-performance, energy density, or manufacturing yield, predict long-term winners far better than market consensus.

This framework explains seemingly counterintuitive outcomes across technology cycles. Two lessons stand out:

The Amazon lesson: Long-term cash-flow and operating leverage improve as infrastructural moats compound when taking risks as contrarian pioneers, even trading early profitability for market expansion.

The Tesla lesson: EV makers gained an advantage over automotive incumbents because battery energy density was improving 7-10% while internal combustion plateaued. Tesla, BYD and NIO prevailed over incumbents or Nikola’s hydrogen trucks, because batteries were on faster learning curves than mainstream technologies or fuel cells.

As Jeff Bezos noted in his 1997 shareholder letter, “we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way.” While critics at Slate called them “Amazon.con”, Bezos was betting on the Internet expanding faster than retail incumbents could adapt, while building a proprietary infrastructure and offerings that no other direct competitor thought necessary; meanwhile, now defunct companies like Pets.com were busy spending on marketing to win customers’ “mind share”.

Today, it’s AI application layer startups who compete for “mindshare”, but infrastructure plays are no longer contrarian as everyone builds similar data centres for similar models.

The hard truth is that advances in core technology are more powerful than following investor trends. Be cautious of rapid revenue growth when losses grow even faster, and sceptical when infrastructure bets seem obvious. Prioritise research papers over CEO hype.

As Bill Gates noted in 1996, “People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten”.

Where Real Innovation Is Happening: The Warsaw PhD Blueprint

Moving beyond market consensus dynamics, historical analysis confirms that trillion-dollar companies rarely emerge from obvious places or follow consensus paths.

Looking at past ICT sub-cycles, most game-changing companies weren’t obvious initially. Apple raised $250,000 for a third of the business after credible VCs passed. NVIDIA’s $2m seed was a speculative founder bet, rather than a hot round at crazy valuations. Bezos struggled to raise the first $1m for Amazon, with investors asking, “What’s the internet?”

Today, with capital and information globally accessible, and the main tech hubs saturated with AI startups and investors, seeing through the hype requires openness to even more unusual origins.

I call this the “Warsaw PhD Blueprint”.

The Warsaw PhD Blueprint recognises that, today, breakthrough companies may very well emerge from:

• A PhD in a lab far removed from startup hotspots. Important breakthroughs often happen where you least expect them. Think DeepMind from London academic research when expert systems like IBM Watson were the AI rage, ASML as an unlikely Philips R&D spin-out, DeepSeek surging from China when nobody expected it.

• Problems incumbents abandoned. Large corporations under-invest in technologies cannibalising revenue streams. They are more afraid to lose battles in an obvious field than to take risks and swim against the tide. The innovator’s dilemma forces them to maintain direction while ignoring disruptive niches.

• Ignoring VC mega-trends. Whilst everyone chases AI applications, the biggest opportunities require solving fundamental physics, chemistry, or engineering problems that can’t be wrapped in venture-friendly software metrics. Leading investment brands managing large AUMs must prioritise deploying capital at scale, leaving low-consensus areas underexplored. Even SpaceX wouldn’t exist if a younger Musk had taken the consensus path and kept building internet companies.

• Lean, globally-minded hustlers. Non-consensus companies have harder starts, so winners must have their “backpack half-packed” to conquer customers and find backers globally. Incidentally, this has never been more possible: Israel proved this by building locally while raising growth capital from and exiting to the US. These opportunities can generate true alpha for the investors who can spot them before consensus catches up.

This blueprint worked for every previous technology cycle, and is even more critical now: as the seeds for the next techno-economic paradigm will likely be born alongside the maturity phase of the current one.

Interesting Trends Outside of the AI Mania

So, while most investors and Silicon Valley builders continue to focus on a late-cycle technology development with the wildest expectations, let me propose some alternative trends worth exploring:

1. Europe’s Deeptech Renaissance. Currently dismissed as a tech backwater to Silicon Valley, Europe is increasingly producing companies leveraging world-class technical hubs and scaling globally. Europe excels in deeptech, such as quantum computing, advanced materials, synthetic biology, and space technology. DeepMind was European before Google’s acquisition. Cambridge’s Nu Quantum demonstrated the world’s first commercially viable quantum networking unit. TSMC couldn’t manufacture the world’s most advanced chips without Dutch ASML’s lithography machines.

   

1. Industrial Manufacturing 2.0. Companies like ABB led markets for over a century without disruption. Now opportunities exist for rebuilding infrastructure with novel materials and advanced computation - predictive maintenance and self-optimising systems rather than chatbots. Pioneers like SpaceX (vs Airbus), Tesla (vs traditional automakers), and Anduril (vs Raytheon) prove rewards can be huge.

2. Computing Beyond Silicon. Moore’s Law is ending, forcing alternative architecture searches. Quantum computing approaches commercially meaningful advantages in some areas. Neuromorphic architectures, Photonic semiconductors, and Edge computing may define the next paradigms. Just as gaming-focused GPUs found unexpected synergy with deep learning algorithms, the next paradigms may arise from entirely new architectures meeting currently half-forgotten algorithms.

   

1. Energy Infrastructure and Abundance. Despite massive renewables investment, fossil fuel consumption hit new records in 2024. Companies solving this at scale (fusion, advanced reactors, revolutionary batteries) will enable compute abundance for true machine intelligence and new types of manufacturing. China’s dominance is accelerating Western innovation pressure, making abundant energy generation a critical 21st-century battlefield. Blockchain and tokenisation may find an unusual but suitable application in international exchanges of energy, compute power and resources that don’t require governments or third-party trust mechanisms.

2. Space and Defence Disruption. Launch costs continue dropping whilst Ukraine demonstrated how $500 drones disable multimillion-dollar assets. This reshapes military procurement whilst opening aerospace and space-based manufacturing to private capital. Expanding beyond the limits of our planet could at some point be part of a novel industrial revolution altogether.

   

These are just a few of the massive opportunities that sit outside what your typical “YCombinator” startup would be building, and which defy the current investors’ fetishism with vibe-coded companies. They are also valuable lenses for assessing public companies beyond the AI sector.

The critical factor is seeing past bogus trends that don’t lead to true breakthroughs or are likely to bottleneck when cheap funding or resources run out, and instead spotting accelerating trends like lithium-ion batteries and Moore’s law in the past, which completely reshape competitive balances as they compound.

The Coming Reset and What Follows

Given the technical limits of current AI progress and the matching historical patterns, the cycle of hype will likely continue until a crash becomes inevitable.

Billions will be pledged, funds raised, and valuations increased, despite lacking technological or commercial means to fulfill promises in meaningful timelines.

Autoregressive AI approaches will hit scaling limits, doubt will creep into collective sentiment, funding will falter, adoption will slow. As Sir John Templeton said: “Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”

We may already be past peak euphoria, since public market investors almost unanimously believe stocks are over-valued but continue piling in.

Unlike the internet bubble, however, a full-scale AI bubble burst could touch everything from real estate to data centre construction to consumer products, due to sector interconnectedness and tech being far more global. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta alone will spend a staggering $750 billion on data centres by 2027, with Morgan Stanley forecasting total global spending reaching $3 trillion by 2029. When this spending cycle reverses or if unprofitable major infrastructure customers like OpenAI fail to raise enough money to meet liabilities, impact will be severe.

As seen in the 1920s and 70s, speculative bubbles often trigger increased inequality, social unrest, even dictatorships and major conflicts. Fear replaces speculation, investment dries up.

Industry data shows the dot-com bust scared LPs from markets, bled VC firms dry over decades, made exits rare, and triggered long bear markets.

We’re already living through many of these issues as the world de-globalises, meaning an AI crash could have far worse consequences than the dot-com one.

Replace FOMO with FOND

But collapse creates opportunity. As the market recalibrates, capital and talent will shift toward new breakthrough waves.

AI, like railways, container freight, or the internet, will become a standard optimisation tool - likely draining value from AI companies but boosting those who integrate it effectively.

The challenge will be to avoid the disruption and social divisions we witnessed in the 1930s. We should not forget to develop long-term AI Safety plans and to push for policies to channel technology progress and investment into fair, green and inclusive growth for everyone, not just a handful of “AI leaders”.

Instead of asking “How can we raise bigger rounds to win customer mind-share?” or “How to out-invest my competitor’s models?”, we should obsess over:

• What technology paradigms will make current approaches obsolete?

• Which companies will leverage technology breakthroughs to disrupt seemingly untouchable business verticals?

• Where are the unsexy infrastructure and energy problems bottlenecking everything else?

• What long-term compounding trends haven’t industries and markets priced in?

We should obsess over fundamentals: spotting hyper-driven, exceptionally smart and bold entrepreneurs who don’t fear going against accepted wisdom, backed by unique insights into long-term technology trends.

Even within AI, let’s not forget that machine intelligence existed before genAI and will continue to exist after a potential crash. The challenge is to avoid justifying speculation for the sake of greed and fear, and instead focus on long-term impact and value for society. Whether it’s leveraging AI or any other technology wave.

Ultimately, we should replace FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) with FOND (Fear of Not Daring).

As we saw with BioNTech, a German-Turkish couple working from the middle of Europe developed technologies solving a global pandemic crisis. In the case of Exscientia, a Welsh professor started with £2k initial investment and went on to develop the world’s first computationally designed drug entering human trials.

Incidentally, cheaper, more powerful computing and manufacturing will let resourceful “Warsaw PhD”-type founders build technology moonshots with less capital.

Capital constraints in Europe or Asia may also drive stronger unit economics than in Silicon Valley, creating opportunities for both non-consensus founders and smaller, early-stage investors.

Case in point: Through my VC firm, I backed a novel steel-making company integrating AI capabilities from inception, and an aerospace propulsion startup using it for manufacturing before LLMs made it popular. Another investee of mine proved Europe’s resourcefulness by generating commercial revenue from nuclear fusion through finding new use cases besides building power plants. Meanwhile, in China, humanoid robotics made news for hitting strong revenue growth despite significantly lower funding than US counterparts.

It’s too early to say if these companies, specifically, will be successful, but the critical notion is that most long-term winners won’t be AI players but AI “exploiters”. IKEA became a billion-dollar business using containerisation’s advantages for a high-volume, low-cost strategy without capturing value from containerisation itself.

The Next NVIDIA Won’t Be Built on GPUs

Here’s my prediction: The next half a century will see a machine intelligence and energy abundance revolution, but it won’t necessarily come from AI startups raising the biggest rounds from the biggest US VC firms.

It may instead emerge from the intersection of novel computing architectures that solve the energy/performance crisis and take us beyond current deep learning paradigms, energy breakthroughs, advanced manufacturing building complex systems at scale, and space tech, biotech, and nanotech that help us transcend natural limits.

The next NVIDIA, therefore, won’t be led by a Silicon Valley AI guru nor trained on hordes of GPUs. It’ll be built by someone solving the fundamental physics problems that may even make GPUs obsolete.

For investors, there will always be some “beta” returns by backing consensus teams that solve obvious problems with big rounds. But true long-term alpha, especially if we enter an extended bear market, lies in backing entrepreneurs tackling hard engineering challenges that need patient capital, deep expertise, and a contrarian vision.

Of course, this prediction has a degree of uncertainty. Maybe current AI leaders do build some runway intelligence explosions before the market turns on them. Maybe world leaders follow Carlota Perez’s advice, restrain casino economics and help spread prosperity from the ICT boom, instead of letting inequality and societal divisions get out of control. We should prepare for either scenario.

The job of risk investors, however, should be more than following greed and fear narratives just because everyone else is.

Our job should be financing enterprises bringing meaningful change.

Future bear markets may remind us that venture capital’s true origins were backing the whalers and explorers nobody else would fund.

While everyone else mourns the death of the AI dream, I’ll be looking for the Warsaw PhDs quietly making it obsolete.

For those investors daring to join this expedition, it could be a journey worth a lifetime’s dedication.

Edit 12/12/2025: Adding a further source on the physical computational reality behind the “trillion dollar crash” HERE

Francesco Perticarari is General Partner at Silicon Roundabout Ventures, a deeptech VC firm based in London and investing across Europe. He has a background in computer engineering and built the largest deeptech meetup community in Europe.

• Co-Investment Opportunities: 💸

  • [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] raising an internal round; [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] stretching its Series A towards $60m (LPs can invest via SPV); [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] opening Series A after [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]; [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] raising Series A to scale Europe’s first [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] supercomputer.

• Portfolio Updates: 🚀

  • Ephos secured EU Chips Act support; Origin Robotics closed defence contracts and was named among Europe’s DefenceTech startups to watch; Archangel Lightworks showcased its optical ground station and met the UK Space Agency CEO; Swisspod advanced its US hyperloop proving ground and presented with Etihad Rail; [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] delivered record-scale simulations with IBM, GSK and Quanscient; Finchetto profiled for breakthroughs in optical switching; Anaphite expanded into South Korea through Intralink partnership.

• New Investments:

  • ➕ Final Fund I investment signed in a steelmaking company, announcement coming soon

• Events you can join / meet us at:

  • 📅 Alpha Summit in London on 4 September with the fund nominated; Silicon Roundabout Ventures FO/Exited Founder Dinner in Turin on 1 October with Riccardo Zacconi; Deeptech Demo Day on 25 November with applications open and 60+ VCs confirmed.

• Market Lowdown:

  • 🛰️ Google, TVA and Kairos to power data centres with the Hermes-2 SMR from 2030; NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs now in fab with a silicon-photonics processor; Starship completed its tenth test flight with successful re-entry and splashdown.

• GP Update:

  • Recap on the portfolio, a reflection on risk-taking, and plans for Fund II

NEWS: If you’re a Limited Partner and missed Francesco’s email to you containing our first Letter to Limited Partners, you can get a copy [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

And please do book a call to discuss the next steps after the fund completes its final investment (wrapping up as we type): via Calendly [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]. (And a massive thank you for all the LPs who’ve booked since last month and already recommitted / re-upped! 🙏)

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

(1 x Pre-seed / 4 x Series A)

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

✅ Internal round to support [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]+ revenue contracts over the next 12 months.
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] valuation; [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] raise [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Founding story:
[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] turned his house into a chemistry lab to build Europe’s first chemistry-agnostic, scalable battery recycling.

He’s that type of super obsessive person able to spot unusual long-term tech trends and “drive through walls” to make things happen. Now supported by operations and advisors support ensuring he nails the chemistry and GTM compliance (eg ex-Britishvolt/Johnson Matthey). Plus our full backing.

Breakthroughs:

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Why now:

• Only European direct recycler with commercial-ready platform

• Perfect storm: EV waste surge, new gigafactories, regulatory & reshoring tailwinds

• 2 pilots in place, contracts to follow—unlocking meaningful 2026 revenue and stronger position for Seed

• Founder with unique blend of precision robotics senior position at unicorn deeptech scale-up, leaving it all to follow his obsession.

Deck: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (note: may be oversubscribed)

Given our fund doesn’t have a follow on strategy post Seed, we’ve agreed to take up our pro-rata with [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Why I’m excited:

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s ground-breaking work in quantum [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

• Their approach to building scalable [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Round / SPV Update:

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is raising their Series A on the back of being the first company in the world to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Raising [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is leading [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] as co-founder and CEO and building the only [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] that hit scale tapeout in the world (and even powers one data centre).

They have sales with their first model including to the US and are launching a new version that completely obliterates competitors’ performance and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Yet, what we find most interesting is that if the LLM paradigm slows down, they are best positioned to empower other algorithms and architectures much better than [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Key Wins:

• Deployed world’s largest [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Shipping first systems 2025, with [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Tech: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Strong early traction in defense, robotics, and pharma as [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] bottlenecks hit [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

If LLMs alone aren’t the way to AGI (we don’t think they are), then something like [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in the next 10-30 years may be the perfect [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] to take us closer to it.

We can as usual pass our pro-rata to our LPs via SPV if anyone is interested. We can also organise a meet the founder call like we did for [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], just drop us an email reply or whatsapp.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

While not in a rush to raise, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is having conversations with Series A investors to lock in a round while their traction soars and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] becomes inevitable.

We’ve already introduced them to a couple of investors who were keen to have a chat with [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], the founder.

Recent highlights include the massive [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Portfolio updates

How we think about portfolio construction:

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

We’re wrapping up fund 1 with an investment in a steelmaking company.

Final reviews completed and we are writing the cheque as we type.

Stay tuned for an announcement soon.

And if you’re a science and techno-economic geek as we are, here is an interesting paper that was key to our investment thesis into the company to keep you busy reading.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Alpha Summit - September 4th

Our fund has been nominated for a category award at the LP/GP AlphaSummit by AllocatorOne in London.

If you’re also attending, don’t be a stranger and drop us a note!

:)

The Deeptech Demo Day - September to November 2025

Date: Finals broadcast live on November 25th - register here: https://lu.ma/zijex7xx

Our annual flagship event brings together the most promising deeptech startups with leading investors in a focused, high-impact format.

We OFFICIALLY LAUNCHED the startup and VC applications, with 60+ investment firms already on board.

Please DO Re-SHARE, LIKE and COMMENT to support our LinkedIn campaign: HERE.

You can also register to watch the finals at the link above.

LP Dinner - Turin, Oct 1, 8-10pm

We're hosting an invite-only dinner with Riccardo Zacconi (King/Candy Crush) as our guest speaker for exited founders and family offices during Italian Tech Week. Discussion will focus on identifying technology opportunities outside mainstream venture trends and examining what comes after the current AI cycle.

Register here (approval required): https://luma.com/yz2oee62 (only apply if you fit the criteria)

Markups

A recap of our markups: (latest round)

• Greenjets Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Angel round)

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed)

• Anaphite Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs](Series A)

• Panakeia Technologies Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Notable performers preparing for a follow on round:

• Origin Robotics - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in defence contracts closed (Latvia and Netherlands)

• SpiNNcloud Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in contracts closed (US and Europe)

• Astral Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in annual revenue and word’s first breeding of tritium in a commercial reactor

• Ephos - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m in annual sales crossed in 2024; also the first startup to receive EU Chips Act funding: secured 41m EUR to build the world’s most advanced photonics fab for glass-based chips

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 20

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 4

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Archangel Lightworks

Archangel Lightworks demonstrated significant market presence through their participation at SmallSat2025, where they presented their poster "Towards Increased Adoption of Direct to Earth Optical Communication" at board D-6. The company showcased their TERRA-M miniature Optical Ground Station, which measures just 1.1M tall and 0.7M in diameter, offering high-speed data transfer up to 10 Gbps with secure, license-free communication capabilities. The technology promises deployability advantages with software-defined interoperability across multiple standards.

The team met with UK Space Agency CEO Paul Bate at the UK Space Conference to discuss how their technology adds communications resilience to critical infrastructure, with the UK Space Agency's support being instrumental in developing their world-leading deployable laser communication systems.

Swisspod Technologies

Swisspod achieved significant market presence through their invitation by Etihad Rail to join the Global Rail Transport Infrastructure Exhibition & Conference alongside world leaders shaping high-speed travel. The company showcased progress on hyperloop technology and highlighted their work on the world's largest hyperloop infrastructure project. Their ambitious 1-mile closed-loop track construction is advancing rapidly, which will unlock endless possibilities to push hyperloop technology to new performance limits.

The company's hyperloop proving ground is taking shape in the United States, demonstrating international expansion and technological advancement. Swisspod's focus on building "a world where distance no longer limits dreams" reflects their strategic vision as they advance hyperloop technology across America, positioning themselves as leaders in next-generation transportation infrastructure.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

At IBM Quantum Partner Forum 2025 in London, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] presented their collaborative project with GSK and IBM Quantum researchers, executing one of the largest electronic-structure Hamiltonian-dynamics simulations to date using [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] execution and middleware methods.

Origin Robotics

Origin Robotics was featured in EU-Startups' "The Frontline of Innovation: 10 European Defence Tech Startups to Watch in 2025." This recognition positions them as a leader in Europe's evolving DefenceTech landscape. The company is expanding into new European markets with their flagship product BEAK while seeing strong traction for their newest system, BLAZE - a counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) interceptor.

Finchetto

Finchetto have a great interview in Blocks and Files, where Mark explains their approach to network switching beyond electrons into photons. Their technology addresses the core challenge that light cannot be stored by using "light controlling light" principles with optical destination encoding.

Anaphite

Anaphite achieved strategic international expansion through partnership with Intralink to strengthen presence in South Korea and accelerate the battery industry's shift to dry coating technology. This partnership positions the company in one of the world's most important battery manufacturing markets, leveraging Intralink's expertise in Asian market entry.

CEO Joe authored content in Auto Tech News discussing cost-saving benefits of their Dry Coating Precursor technology.

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

Google, TVA, and Kairos are teaming up to power data centers with the Hermes-2 small modular reactor to supply its data centers with carbon-free power starting in 2030.

NVIDIA confirmed its Rubin GPU and Vera CPU are in fab at TSMC alongside a silicon-photonics processor designed to handle future AI data center workloads.

Starship completed its tenth test flight, with the vehicle surviving high-energy reentry and making controlled splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico.

GP Personal Update

We’re off to the races once again.

After we shared our Letter to Limited Partners and started to book calls, we already secured £1.25m in pledged commitments and about another million that may be confirmed soon. All from existing LPs we’ve spoke with.

In parallel to that we received strong interest and even DD progression from a few selected LPs we’ve been engaging and will be working with these to co-anchor our first closing alongside you all, dear LP family.

For now we prefer to focus only on relationships we’ve already built and referrals from our existing LPs and founders, so if you do know someone who would be a good fit for our next fund drop us a line.

If we haven’t had a chat to speak yet and you won’t make it to the AlphaSummit, please feel free to grab a call slot with me via Calendly [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

The journey has taken me from washing dishes, mopping floors, waiting floating tables and even selling fruit and veg on taking bigger and bigger risks to make Silicon Roundabout Ventures happen.

I reflected on this journey of work, risk and grind on LinkedIn, and I’d love to have you all on board for Chapter 2 as the chats so far seem to indicate :)

Your deeptech chief of VC hustle, Francesco✌️

• New portfolio company – Why we backed and immediately doubled down on [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], building the computing backbone for satellites.

• Portfolio updates – From EU Chips Act wins to ESA contracts, quantum milestones, and hyperloop breakthroughs.

• Co-Investment Opportunities: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Market lowdown – Grid-forming batteries replace fossil fuel inertia in UK’s first fossil-free grid stability test.

• Upcoming events – Alpha Summit in London & Deeptech Demo Day 2025 finals.

• Open roles – Engineering and product positions across quantum, robotics, and photonics.

• GP’s personal note – Why we think AI is slowing down, and where the real breakthroughs will come from.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Portfolio updates

How we think about portfolio construction:

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

Building the computing infrastructure up in Space

Space Edge Computing | Luxembourg | Angel & Pre-Seed Rounds

Over this summer, Silicon Roundabout Ventures has invested $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]-based company building high-performance computing infrastructure for satellites, as part of their initial start-up round, then immediately doubled down for their pre-seed.

This investment targets picks and shovels long-term needs for the fast-growing in-space computing market, starting with a critical "missing middle": commercial LEO operators who need off-the-shelf cloud-class performance without scarifying reliability or paying for custom-built defence-grade clusters.

Market Opportunity

The space edge computing market sits at an inflection point where on-board computing shifts from supporting subsystem to primary payload. Our diligence reveals a clear gap: legacy vendors like [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] sacrifice performance for heritage at premium pricing (~$1M per system), while emerging NVIDIA-centric players struggle with power consumption and radiation tolerance. The addressable market for commercial-grade space computing is projected to grow from $500M in 2025 to $3B by 2033, driven by increasing autonomous satellite operations and real-time data processing demands.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]'s heterogeneous, cluster-ready architecture targets commercial constellation operators who represent the highest-volume segment currently underserved by existing solutions. They’ve started with the least fancy but most critical components: Switches, Data Processing Unit (DPU), and clusters, all reliably served by a “just works” software stack. Over time, their approach of “shipping fast”, get real customer feedback, and keep on iterating despite the hardware and flight constraints, may well prove to be a winning strategy, in an industry where Moore’s law effects lag Earth by about 7 years.

Strategic Positioning

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] operates with three competitive advantages:

1. Technical: Heterogeneous computing approach avoids single-vendor dependencies that plague competitors only focused on repackaging NVIDIA or similar chips.

2. Commercial: $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in the pipeline, which we believe the team to be able to close very fast, proving market validation that match our 2 customer reference calls.

3. Strategic: Clear path from profitable subsystem sales to space-based data centre services as market evolves.

The team's acquisition-savvy background and systematic approach to building market presence positions them to become the de facto leader in space compute infrastructure.

Investment Thesis

This represents our thesis on picking category-defining infrastructure companies early. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] combines proven founder execution, validated customer demand, and positioning at a market inflection point where space computing becomes mission-critical rather than supplementary, and a critical enabler for the expansion of in-space industries.

We're backing a team that understands how to build sustainable competitive advantages through spotting the right underlying technology trends, customer relationships, a “ship fast” culture, and flight heritage, rather than speculative technology bets or attempting to rush long-term product development in what is still a nascent market.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Alpha Summit - September 4th

Our fund has been nominated for a category award at the LP/GP AlphaSummit by AllocatorOne in London.

If you’re also attending, don’t be a stranger and drop us a note!

:)

The Deeptech Demo Day - September to November 2025

Date: Finals broadcast live on November 25th - register here: https://lu.ma/zijex7xx

Pitch all the investors that matter in one day. Our annual flagship event brings together the most promising deeptech startups with leading investors in a focused, high-impact format.

Pre-register for 2025 right now:

• Startups: Apply to Pitch

• Investors: Investor Signup

Markups

A recap of our markups: (latest round)

• Greenjets Limited: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Seed)

• Nu Quantum Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• Anaphite Ltd: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Series A)

• Panakeia Technologies Limited:[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs](Seed+)

Notable performers preparing for a follow on round:

• Origin Robotics - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in defence contracts closed (Latvia and Netherlands)

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in contracts closed (US and Europe)

• Astral Systems - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in annual revenue and word’s first breeding of tritium in a commercial reactor

• Ephos - $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in annual sales crossed in 2024; also the first startup to receive EU Chips Act funding: secured 41m+ EUR to build the world’s most advanced photonics fab for glass-based chips

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 20

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 4

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum hosted Hermann Hauser (Arm co-founder) at their Cambridge HQ and strengthened partnerships with Infineon's quantum division and CERN for their White Rabbit technology integration, advancing their position in quantum networking infrastructure.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

New entry and already kicking asses! [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] secured ESA contract for high-speed communication systems and 3-year [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] Defence Ministry deal. Selected for EU Business Defence Accelerator with first Data Processing Unit qualified for February 2026 launch and August US delivery.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Successfully qualified first [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] drag sail module for SpaceX launch post-summer. Expanded to 18 staff including ex-SpaceX Starlink engineer joining September, focusing on large deployable space structures as critical infrastructure.

Ephos

Ephos achieved a landmark milestone by becoming the first startup to receive an EU Chips Act grant, securing €41.5M ($49M) as part of a €105M ($123M) total project investment. This positions the company alongside industry giants TSMC, Infineon, and STMicroelectronics as recipients of this prestigious funding mechanism designed to strengthen European semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.

The grant will support construction of Fab-2, Ephos's second fabrication facility dedicated to manufacturing ultra-low loss and fast-switching integrated photonic circuits on glass substrates. These chips target the rapidly expanding AI data center market, where they enable faster data transfer while significantly reducing energy consumption. The company completed this achievement less than a year after finishing construction of Fab-1, demonstrating remarkable execution velocity in the deep-tech hardware space.

Archangel Lightworks

Appointed Scott White as Chairman bringing optical communications scaling experience. CEO presented at UK Space Conference on space-ground communications while showcasing TERRA-M deployable optical ground station technology.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] named World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2025, joining the ranks of previous honorees including Google, PayPal, and Palantir Technologies. Achieved largest quantum CFD simulation to date (64x64 grid, 16 qubits) with Quanscient, advancing toward quantum advantage in aerospace applications.

Anaphite

Partnered with Intralink for South Korea market penetration in battery manufacturing. CEO increased thought leadership presence while scaling operations with Quality Engineer and QC Analyst hires for growing customer demand.

CEO Joe Stevenson discussed on Auto Tech News the cost-saving advantages of Anaphite's Dry Coating Precursor technology.

Swisspod Technologies

Swisspod Technologies accelerated its US operations with preparations to launch AERYS1, their first capsule deployment in America at PuebloPlex, where they built what’s already become the world's largest hyperloop infrastructure.

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

Scotland's 200-MW Blackhillock battery facility has successfully demonstrated the world's first grid-scale battery commissioned for grid stabilization services. Using advanced grid-forming inverters, the facility provides synthetic inertia and short-circuit current capabilities traditionally supplied by fossil fuel generators, proving that power electronics can replace spinning machinery for grid stability. This breakthrough supports the UK's goal to demonstrate fossil-free grid operation by end of 2025…

Asks & Portfolio Roles 🙏

As always, if interested or you know a fit, please reach out!

• Nu Quantum is hiring a Product Manager - Optical and Photonic Systems and a Mechanical Engineer in Cambridge

• Origin Robotics has multiple engineering roles open including Control Systems, Electronics, Embedded Software, and Mechanical Design Engineers

• Ephos is hiring for Photonics, Electronic, and Process Engineers

GP Personal Update

LinkedIn now thinks I’m an AI perma-bear.

Oh well, so much for it.

But for you all going deeper with these reads and not stopping at the headline, here the nuanced view:

On August 1st I sent out our first official “Letter to our Limited Partners” where I forecast a likely scalability wall to the current AI development.

Already at the Mobile World Congress in March, I pointed out that the narrative that shoveling resources and money at current AI architectures and algos won’t necessarily yield the leap forward we need for the next stage of machine intelligence.

When GPT-5 came out, its underwhelming results prompted skeptics like Gary Marcus to summarise just how bad a news this is for the current approach.

On this, I see no reason to disagree.

The more evidence builds up, the more I think we will hit more and more of a plateau and a wall on the current technology and economics cycle, before we have truly unlocked the power of a truly generalised human-like or even super-human machine intelligence.

Is this certain?

No. And I wrote here before that even probably exaggerated accounts like ai-2027.com should be taken seriously if there is even 1% chances that the opposite will materialise and we get a runaway system we can’t control.

Does this mean I’m bearish on AI?

Hell no! We backed infrastructure companies IN the field.

But I do think the industry is chasing the wrong returns in the wrong way and with too much money.

If we are correct this will only expand our opportunities to back fundamental breakthroughs.

And if we are not, it seems now that we will now have at least enough time to notice this, since clearly the pace of a mainstream AI capabilities HAS slowed down significantly with the progression from say GPT-2 to 3 and then now from GPT-4 to GPT-5

We remain attentive to where the underlying technology is going.

Time will give us more indications on where we are actually heading.

But we continue to believe, first and foremost, that a new infrastructure leap will be needed for AI to keep on advancing.

That’s where we ultimately want to be the best-in-class investors —and one of the space we work hard to support with out community.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• New deal in the fund: We invested in Kaikaku.ai (the “Tesla of restaurants”); full-stack robotics, live revenues, and a truly, truly outstanding founder profile.

• Portfolio re-ratings:
  – [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] internal top-up at 2× last price → 4X MOIC on our entry.
  – [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] Series A priced → 3X MOIC.
  – Six companies already >£1 m ARR.

• Pipeline & co-invest: room for value-add LPs in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (subject to CEO) plus two upcoming Seed rounds—email if interested.

• Events: meet Nu Quantum CEO Carmen Palacios-Berraquero on [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] .

• Company highlights this month:
  – Archangel Lightworks shows TERRA-M optical ground station at ESA.
  – Greenjets hires ex-Reaction Engines BD Director and unveils new brand.
  – Nu Quantum launches world-first rack-mounted Quantum Networking Unit and forms Quantum Datacenter Alliance.
  – Astral Systems breeds tritium in-house—a fusion first.

• Market pulse: IBM targets fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029; fusion TAM forecast $40-80 bn by 2035.

• GP Update: From Ancient Troy to The First Electrostate.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

Portfolio updates (NEW: Updated Link with more live info!)

Here is a snapshot of the current portfolio.

How we think about portfolio construction:

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

Kaikaku.ai —The Tesla of Restaurants: Vertically Integrated Robotics & Data Restaurants Driven By A Glass Chewing Founder

We approached Kaikaku when they weren't actively raising. The tip came from one of our portfolio founders, Kylin, founder of Hippos Exoskeleton, and someone we rank amongst the most exceptional generational founders we’ve ever backed.

In hindsight, we took too long to have the meeting.

This was due to our skepticism for the business segment. After all, several startups and incumbents failed to bring a robotic revolution to restaurants and food production, including a Silicon Roundabout community startup from the last decade, Karakuri, which was backed in 2019 by great VCs like Hoxton –and which ultimately failed like everyone else in the cut-throat, low margin food industry.

But in the end, we did reach out for a meeting, and we were truly blown away by Josef, the founder.

Lesson for next time: if someone you rate exceptionally high suggests a meeting with someone they think to be exceptional, you jump on it and do it quickly.

The combination of founder background, technical execution, and contrarian market positioning warranted exception-level diligence. And compelled, indeed, we were. Thankfully Josef could do with some more cash, so he was happy to let our standard ticket in to let us have our target ownership, after referencing our GP with 2 of our portfolio founders.

The Food Obsessed Glass Chewer

Josef Chen embodies the archetype we've learned to back: domain expertise from a previous life trauma converted into an obsessive huge vision and systematic technological advantage and manic detail-oriented execution.

Since age 6, he worked in his parents' Chinese restaurant in Austria, developing intimate knowledge of operational pain points that franchise operators face daily. In fact, this experience made him hate the food world. All he could think of was making money online and escaping this hell: at 13, he built one of the world's first Bitcoin faucets reaching 150,000 users—demonstrating early systems thinking and revenue model innovation. He eventually went on to work for a PE fund, Proterra, whose GP ended up being of Kaikaku’s early angels.

But what made Josef pivot?

In his own words from our last long meeting: by venting his anger at his parents a couple of years back, they told him that making him work in the restaurant was the only way for them to spend time with him, as running the place was absorbing them full time.

This realisation not only brought him immediately and intimately close to the emotional trauma they went through, and so do all small restaurant owners globally, but also sent him down a rabbit hole of a reflection on the future of human connection through food, which he extensively writes about on the company’s website and in his blog, with multiple takes including on the consequences of AI.

The drive and obsession and what Josef made out of his life journey is what drove us closer to a cheque, combined with an extremely focused and detailed technical execution that’s not just about building a product, but an entire full stack operation that’s bigger than any individual piece.

Maybe this will also fail in the food industry.

But if there is one person who can solve technology for restaurants and food, we believe this person to be Josef Chen.

The Tech

Unlike competitors pursuing piecemeal automation (burger-flipping robots, sushi rollers), Kaikaku built a complete vertically integrated stack from hardware to software to cloud infrastructure. Their food assembly robot processes 300-400 bowls hourly, replacing 4-5 employees at 26-second assembly times—achieving human accuracy through 2+ years of real-world iteration in their "living laboratory" restaurant.

The SpaceX comparison is apt: by manufacturing components in-house using 3D-printed food-safe parts, they achieve 95% cost reduction versus traditional conveyor systems ($100 vs $2,000+ per foot). Sub-daily hardware iteration cycles enable rapid optimisation impossible with traditional 3-month metal component lead times.

Besides the food production, we were blown away by the level of precision they are going through in assessing, predicting, monitoring and working on.

From the aromas people should smell in the restaurant to correlations between weather or locations and consumption by the hour, and including just-in-time supply chain and production planning driven by data models and their in-house full stack software suite, all the way to the layout of the furniture in the restaurant and to how waiters should serve and what should people use screens for in the ordering process.

Nothing is left to chance or unstated assumptions.

Market Validation Through Real Operations

Common Room, their Russell Square restaurant, serves as continuous product validation. Daily repeat customers over 30-day periods demonstrate utility beyond novelty. Critically, 95% of customers ignore the robotics, focusing on food quality and experience—validating genuine value creation rather than gimmick positioning. Elderly customers comprise core demographic despite technology assumptions, citing "genuine care", “great taste”, “catchy venue brand”, and "non-transactional experience."

Business Model Differentiation

The franchise strategy targets structural economic advantages: 5-10% of GMV capture versus 0.1% for traditional SaaS models. Recent enterprise distribution agreement covering 50,000+ locations provides immediate scaling pathway. Three-phase approach: (1) owned restaurant validation, (2) franchise licensing, (3) restaurant acquisition mirrors successful franchise models where operators capture significantly higher revenue percentages. If Kaikaku can achieve their modelled margin improvements of over 30%, through sales improvement as well as cost cutting, this business could even scale through debt and restaurant rollups. They are currently working on bowl food, but there is no reason their team and robots can’t adapt to sandwiches, pizzas or wraps.

Our GP tried the food himself when assessing the restaurant and mystery shop on various customers live, and he rated it substantially better than Mexican London chain Tortilla, or “health conscious” fast food chain Leon.

Team Assessment

8-person core R&D team including 3 "10x engineers," PhD molecular biologist/Michelin-trained chef, and operations manager with McDonald's franchise experience. The distributed team prioritises iteration speed over traditional credentials—manufacturing wizard discovered through hospitality job platforms, exemplifying hidden talent arbitrage Josef systematically exploits.

Regulatory and Market Tailwinds

UK restaurant sector faces acute labor pressures: 78% turnover rates, 20-30% revenue consumed by labor costs, 9.8% minimum wage increases in 2024. Only 36% of operators meet profit targets. Annual labor savings of ~£300K per robot versus equipment costs of "few thousands" demonstrate compelling unit economics. The stats are equally worrying across the globe, especially in the US, where small food shop owners can’t compete with large chains, who often also struggle with specific locations.

Risk Analysis

Primary execution risk: single-location validation insufficient for franchise scalability proof. Well-funded competitors (Sweetgreen's $173M Spice acquisition, Bear Robotics' venture backing) possess superior marketing reach. Restaurant automation requires perfect reliability across food safety, mechanical systems, customer experience—areas where many predecessors failed despite significant funding.

Market timing risk: early-stage adoption with unclear winner-takes-all dynamics. Franchise expansion may be premature given competitive intensity from better-capitalised players.

Investment Rationale

Our investment targets exceptional founder executing contrarian vertical integration strategy in massive addressable market.

Real-world operational validation differentiates from laboratory-based competitors. The combination of proven technology, franchise economics, and Josef's systematic approach to solving childhood industry trauma justifies backing despite early execution stage.

Fund return scenarios viable through franchise scale (100+ locations generating £50M+ annual revenues) or strategic acquisition by restaurant operators, food tech players, or automation companies seeking proven restaurant robotics platform. We don’t see this business being acquired for a couple of hundred millions. They may well end up failing, but if they succeed, whether fast or slow, they are shooting for a multi-billion market cap. We believe this founder can pull it off.

Fund Impact Projection

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] x+ return achievable if Kaikaku becomes the McDonald's of robot-powered restaurants. $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] exit scenario would return the fund assuming 50-60% dilution. When we enter a company we really favour the pre-seed terrain where a $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] exit can be a fund returner at similar dilution levels, but we found Josef’s personality, work ethics, tech results, and team building capacity to just be too exceptional not to back.

The funding supports product refinement, business model testing (rollup strategy vs selling the full stack to smaller restaurant chains), and manufacturing scale-up—critical milestones for proving scalability beyond single-restaurant proof of concept. If the company can validate these, we expect a Series A to be above $100m. The business is actually generating revenue through their restaurant location, by true paying customers, which is not the goal of their restaurant, but helps the small team increase their cash position.

Play Yourself With Their Full-Stack Ambition

In the spirit of going above and beyond just building a robotic product that makes food, Josef, recently announced their own AGI. Or their ironic take on AI with an “Artificial Gastro Intelligence” platform.

Have a play with Epicure, the world’s most advanced culinary model, powered by actual science of how food ingredients are paired.

Inspired by IBM's now abandoned "Chef Watson", Epicure builds on two key recent papers:
- "Flavor network and the principles of food pairing" by YY Ahn, Sebastian Ahnert, James Bagrow, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2011)
- "FlavorGraph: a large-scale food-chemical graph..." by Donghyeon Park and Kim Keonwoo (2021)

Try their recipe generator at the above Epicure link and have a go pairing flavours and generating recipes in seconds for free. No paywall, no sign-ups.

If you’d like to hear Josef explain the business, here is great video from early this year.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

There may be space for a couple of value-add co-investor from our LPs in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] current round (subject to CEO approval). Two other portfolio companies are preparing for their Seed round.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Nu Quantum - Meet the CEO | [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

A unique opportunity to engage directly with Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, quantum physicist and Co-Founder & CEO of Nu Quantum.

Nu Quantum is a UK-based company pioneering quantum networking infrastructure to enable scalable quantum computing.

Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Cambridge, they’re developing what they call the Entanglement Fabric™—a modular architecture that connects quantum processors into powerful distributed systems.

Their technology includes: Qubit-Photon Interfaces (QPI) to link different types of quantum bits (qubits) into a unified network. Quantum Networking Units (QNU) that act as the backbone for entangled communication between processors. A focus on qubit-agnostic design, meaning their system can work with various quantum hardware platforms.

Nu Quantum is backed by funds such as Amadeus Capital, IQ Capital, and Silicon Roundabout Ventures and has raised over $66 million in funding, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

They collaborate with data centre providers, quantum hardware companies, and government agencies to push the boundaries of quantum computing. If you're exploring emerging tech or investment opportunities in quantum infrastructure, this one’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Carmen Palacios-Berraquero is the business’ Founder & CEO. She’s a quantum physicist and a driving force behind the company’s vision and partnerships.

Markups

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] has received formal offers from internal investors to raise an inter-round financing at twice the valuation from the last round. We believe this is fair as they increased their revenue to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] and looking to grow further this year, and are well on track to hit their milestones for a much larger Series A that could double or triple valuation levels from here. We are therefore in the process of marking our investment up to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

• [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is closing their Series A, having already closed the main tranche of the round. This is a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] markup on our investment.

Both include dilution and are therefore boosting our fund to nearly [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], but what’s more important, we now have 6 companies with revenue exceeding $1m.

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 19

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 3

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Archangel Lightworks

Archangel Lightworks continues to strengthen its leadership and expand its presence in the space communications sector. The company recently welcomed Scott White as the new Chair of their Board, bringing valuable experience from building and scaling multiple optical communications companies.

The company showcased its TERRA-M Optical Ground Station technology at the European Space Agency's Scylight Conference in Dublin, where Owain Pryce-Jones presented the latest developments in their proliferated Space-to-Ground laser communications capabilities.

Greenjets

Greenjets has made significant progress in team expansion and brand development this month. The company welcomed Dr. Kathryn Evans as their new Business Development Director, bringing extensive experience from her role as Head of Aerospace at Reaction Engines and a PhD in turbomachinery aerodynamics from Cambridge University's Whittle Laboratory. Her expertise in both commercial and technical strategies for breakthrough sustainable aviation technologies strengthens Greenjets' commercial capabilities.

The company also launched a major rebrand, revealing a new logo featuring interlocking Gs that form spinning arrows symbolising a Greenjets fan in motion. This rebrand coincides with a refreshed website designed to better communicate their mission and showcase their high-performance electric propulsion systems. Greenjets continues to demonstrate their technology at major industry events, including DSEI Japan 2025, where they exhibited their electric propulsion solutions for defense applications.

Infiniti Recycling

Infiniti Recycling has been highly active in business development and showcasing their direct recycling technology for lithium-ion batteries. The company successfully exhibited at MOVE 2025, one of the world's leading mobility events, in London's ExCeL Centre, where they showcased their novel direct recycling technology designed for gigafactory waste streams and demonstrated their ability to recover active materials efficiently and sustainably.

The team has also been participating in the Autobahn accelerator program in Stuttgart.

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum has achieved a major commercial milestone with the launch of the world's first modular, rack-mounted Quantum Networking Unit designed for datacentre-scale quantum computing. This enables dynamic entanglement distribution between quantum processors, allowing multiple quantum processors to operate as a unified, more powerful system. The QNU represents a critical step in moving quantum networking from laboratory demonstrations to commercial infrastructure, achieving impressive technical specifications including up to 99.7% entanglement fidelity, 300 ns control latency, and MHz entanglement attempt rate while maintaining datacentre-ready design with standard rack-mounting and air-cooling.

Developed under the UK Government's Small Business Research Initiative and featuring collaboration with CERN for White Rabbit timing technology integration, the QNU launch demonstrates Nu Quantum's leadership in scaling quantum computing systems beyond current physical limitations. The company is simultaneously organising the inaugural Quantum Datacenter Alliance (QDA) Forum on June 26th in London at Battersea Power Station, bringing together key industry players to address quantum computing infrastructure challenges.

Anaphite

Anaphite is participating in the Advanced Automotive Battery Conference (AABC) in Mainz this week, with COO Alex Hewitt and Head of Cells and Electrodes Dr Alex Madsen representing the company. Recent coverage by The EV Report highlighted the significant cost advantages of Anaphite's technology, with Dr Jennifer Channell noting that dry coating both anode and cathode can save approximately 2% of the total cost of a battery-electric car—savings that become "genuinely transformative" at mass production scale of millions of vehicles.

Origin Robotics

Origin Robotics continues to advance their defence technology capabilities with the development of BLAZE, an autonomous high-explosive C-UAS interceptor designed for modern battlefield applications. This man-portable, rapidly deployable interceptor is equipped with an HE fragmentation warhead to defeat fast-moving aerial threats including loitering munitions and hostile UAVs.

Astral Systems

Astral Systems has achieved a historic milestone in fusion energy by becoming the first commercial fusion company to successfully breed tritium using their own fusion reactors. During a 55-hour deuterium-deuterium fusion irradiation campaign in March, the company successfully produced and detected tritium in real-time using a lithium breeder blanket, addressing one of the most critical challenges in making fusion energy commercially viable. This breakthrough was accomplished in collaboration with the University of Bristol and supported by the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Fusion Industry Programme.

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

IBM announced on June 10, 2025, its roadmap to build the world's first large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The IBM Quantum Starling is expected to perform 20,000 times more operations than today's quantum computers, with computational requirements that would demand more memory than a quindecillion of the world's most powerful supercomputers. The roadmap includes key milestones with IBM Quantum Loon (2025) for testing qLDPC code architecture and IBM Quantum Kookaburra (2026) as their first modular processor combining quantum memory with logic operations, marking a crucial transition from physical qubits to logical qubits for practical quantum computing applications.

New market analysis released in May 2025 projects the global fusion energy sector could reach $40-80 billion by 2035 and exceed $350 billion by 2050 if key technological milestones are achieved. The projections coincide with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieving its eighth successful ignition experiment in April 2025, delivering a record 8.6 MJ of energy yield. With private fusion companies preparing to demonstrate working reactors throughout 2025 and over $7 billion in private investment since 2021, the sector continues to accelerate toward commercial viability, supported by major infrastructure investments including the UK's £2.5 billion commitment to the STEP fusion power plant project.

GP Personal Update

Merhaba!

I took a week-long break to reconnect with my family after 4 months of late night work, early raises, and traveling everywhere to meet founders around Europe and some handpicked LPs for our next fund.

We picked Turkey, where we’ve never been, and I’m super thankful to all my friends in VC land who spoiled me with tips on where to go from Istanbul down and back across the Aegean cost and western inland.

But as I was enjoying visiting Troy’s, Pergamon’s, Smyrna’s or Helicarnassus’ ruins with little Catalina on my back and my better half next to me, and as I was refreshing my lyceum memories of the lines that shaped our culture, from Homer to Thales and from Anaximander to Heraclitus, I suddenly fell into a Chinese rabbit hole.

Not physically, I didn’t trip on any China-made pottery that somehow traveled the ancient silk road that connected Constantinople and Bursa to Asia, but mentally, as I realised the old adage “Gradually, then suddenly” is always true of technology cycles and becoming now quite evident when it comes to the EV revolution and energy.

I traveled for hours on with a full EV. No need for oil. Energy produced by massive wind and solar farms visible everywhere you go in Turkey, which is also (contrarily to most of the political West, like Germany) doubling down on Nuclear, which the country admittedly doesn’t have live on the grid just yet.

And if the tourist who doesn’t read about energy trends globally may be surprised to find this infrastructure in Turkey, with wind farms popping up everywhere, fast chargers along all roads, and trucks loaded with solar panels heading off to a new site, you must be really living under a rock not to see what’s happening with China becoming the world's first “electrostate”—an economy where electricity's rising share of total energy use drives fundamental transformation. Ex The Family’s Nicolas Colin wrote quite compelling about it as he links it to the economic theories of one of my favourite technology financial historians (if you can call her that), Carlota Perez.

Meanwhile, ex TechCrunch European legend Mike Butcher, scooped on China’s BYD announcing a deal with Octopus Energy in Europe to turn domestic EVs into a fleet of grid balancing batteries, rather than being mere juice takers.

Instead of overwhelming the grid, like the petrol-heads in the automotive industry used to say while laughing at Tesla early on, EVs and data-driven automation are creating a new grid that’s not just a passive mesh of cables carrying electrons from source to consumption, but becoming a “smart” infrastructure that’s becoming embedded with its deployment, from vehicles (who are destined to be ever more autonomous and electric) to data centres (which are driving massive energy needs but also who can orchestrate how energy best flow in massively digitised networks).

For context, China added more solar capacity in a single year than the United States has in its entire history. In 2023, China installed approximately 216.9 GW of new solar capacity, surpassing the cumulative total installed by the US up to that point, which was about 175.2 GW according to BloombergNEF estimates. They also jumped ahead of everyone else in nuclear fission, and while still lagging behind on AI reasoning and semiconductor capacity, as the cost of AI and compute approaches the cost of energy, they are already reducing the distance by leveraging their energy lead to mitigate individual chips shortcomings.

This technology and production capacity shift has a very striking parallel with the revolutions that helped overturn empires in ancient times all the way to Victorian Britain and the Ottomans before WWI.

As technology investors, we may be in a very peculiar phase where global powers are transitioning just as we struggle to reach the final (golden) age of the digital revolution period and possibly seeing the onset of the future cycle (still to be defined).

The consequences may be more dramatic than we could foresee only a few years back.

Last updated: June 2025 | By Francesco Perticarari, Silicon Roundabout Ventures

My Journey from Venture Capital Outsider to Solo GP –Brutally Honest Guide

When I started this journey five years ago, I had no idea how many times I'd fail before finally closing my first, £5 million VC fund.

I tried syndicates (failed), a multi-partner fund with government LP money (failed again), and nearly gave up multiple times.

But here's what I learned: if you really believe in what you're building, the path will reveal itself –you just need to be stubborn enough to keep going.

This guide contains everything I wish I'd known when I started.

It's based on my live 2024 AMA with Dave Neumann, now an LP at Schroders and back then a FoF investor at Molten Ventures, where I got brutally honest about the highs, lows, and practical realities of raising your first fund, especially in Europe.

I'll keep updating this as I learn more by building Silicon Roundabout at the intersection of community, science and venture capital investing, and as I launch future funds.

I’ve summarised the questions asked and answers given (including some from Dave with his LP hat), and made this guide. And if you’d like to watch the AMA recording, here it is unfiltered for you:

If you’ve got any question not answered here and you’d like me to add it to this Public AMA/FAQ:

• Just shoot it over at the email below in the resource section. I’ll do my best to answer it by updating this blog and let you know when it’s live!
  

• Equally, if you’d like to flag resources for me to list here, do let me know about them and I can add them.

Quick Answers: The Questions Every Emerging Manager Asks

Q: Where do I begin as a first-time fund manager?

Start anywhere and embrace failure. I tried syndicates first (failed convincing angels to do deep tech deals quickly enough), then government funding (failed - they wanted big funds with multiple partners), before settling on a solo GP approach with angel capital. Start anywhere, be willing to pivot, and if you feel it's the right thing, don't give up.

Q: How do you find your investment focus?

For a fund to exist, you need the self-belief that you might have a good chance of being a one-of-a-kind success. First, invest your own money to test your thesis. Then decide: are you generalist or specialist? I chose deep tech because of my community and technical background. Your focus should combine personal conviction with unique positioning. And you should never stop iterating on that thesis. Venture Capital is really a business of connections and finding common values, and it should also be about contrarian bets that turn out not-so-contrarian after a few years… A strong and deeply personal and unique thesis is where you can start to be different from basically being an ATM machine with a Patagonia vest.

In my case I find that writing it down helps. Sometimes I share part of the findings publicly too, and that’s useful for people to know what you stand for.

Q: How can solo GP decision-making be robust without an IC?

I write investment memos and hold IC with myself. The process of writing memos and doing DD means I turn down opportunities. I believe individuals often make better decisions than groups, especially with limited information at early stages. More people don't necessarily make better decisions - that's why corporates rarely out-innovate startups. I use AI to help collect and standardise the DD notes, but I find value in writing a much shorter memo and decision recommendation myself, as part of my thinking process. I think that is part of the job we should not look forward to having AI replace: our own thinking and reflections.

I’d also recommend having an LPAC. I hold mine regularly and I find value in holding myself accountable to experienced investors from a former founder now a multi-millionaire to a professional FoF GP.

Q: How did you raise from LPs?

Focus on angels, family offices, and private capital - not governments or traditional institutional LPs for Fund I. I used networking at conferences (never paid for tickets except community-driven events though as I found most of the value for new managers to be in the “hustle outside of the room”), leveraged my existing deep tech community, posted regularly on LinkedIn since 2022, did cold outreach, and asked for introductions. The key is finding "LP fit" - LPs who get your vision without extensive explanation. I also kept iterating on the fund-product, on figuring our my VC “product-LP fit” and in how I market that to people who’d ask for more info (always qualified and always via reverse solicitation, of course).

In the past I also shared the deck that got me to first closing:

You can find more on VC decks here: sifted.eu/articles/first-time-vc-pitch-decks

And here: alexanderjarvis.com/resources/collections/vc-pitch-deck-collection

I also sat down with Ertan Can from Multiple Capital (who later joined our LP family too!) to go through our LP updates and get live feedback:

Plus fellow emerging soloGP Annelie Ajami from Anamcara shared some really honest takes on how it was to raise her fund a couple of years back: medium.com/anamcara-capital/raising-a-fund-on-your-own-some-insights-in-hindsight-294b7d9c1549

My very first fund deck and attempts to pitch as an engineer with thick glasses and an annoying tone full of “uhm” and “ehms” was THIS ugly:

And this silly:

One of my LPs recently looked for it in his inbox and we laughed so hard, then he stopped flicking and said “ok, let’s stop, this is giving me eye cancer”

😅

There was also some good stuff on the raw thesis and ideas. So I started putting it out there anyway. The whole process of building the firm was pretty much “in public” from day -1, with Jonathan Sibilia who used to run the FoF at Molten Ventures telling straight what he thought had potential and what didn’t make much sense to an LP:

In the end, through feedback, writing more personal angel cheques in a more diligent and systematic way, and even my own personal growth I learned how to convey the message more compellingly.

I got the brand to actually sync with what I was saying. Ultimately everything matters but you can’t wait for perfection to start talking to people! I think it got pretty spot on just by focusing on my core story and the USP of our community brand and network:

So in a nutshell, how I really closed LPs was because I kept showing up and made a good enough case to the “right fit” investors that I had a shot at building a 5-10X fund.

If you’re emerging there is really no reason to shoot for less. Neither for your own time and GP commit risk, nor for their time and capital.

Q: What was your lowest point and how did you overcome it?

When questioning "how am I going to get there?" - feeling like my management fee would be too small and wondering if I was making the wrong choice. I overcame it by focusing on carry potential rather than management fees, accepting the smallest viable fund size, and having my wife kick my ass when I wanted to give up. This is much more a patience and resilience game than a skills game.

Q: How long from first contact to LP signing?

Fast commits happened in 2-4 weeks (existing network), typical individual LPs took 3-6 months, family offices 6-12 months. My biggest individual check came from someone I met the day before they committed. FoFs? A basket case. You need to be in their box/target, when they have money, and go through a lengthy process. My only proper FoF (and they are focused on emerging managers to not exactly a typical one) knew me for 3 years by the time they invested, and Molten’s FoF was part of a VC firm and the partner there knew me for 2 years (also giving me feedback on all the crappy ideas I had about larger funds or syndicates, before landing on the “right fit” fund strategy for me).

The best sales happen fairly quickly - if you're explaining too much, they're probably not the right fit. But FoFs are a beast of its own.

You also get a lot of nos, but that’s part of the game:

You eventually also gets some amazing backers who built companies and literally made the history of tech! Those will make up for all the others:

Q: What do LPs love most about emerging managers?

LPs who invested asked questions about my community, founder relationships, and vision for deep tech - not fund mechanics or spreadsheet metrics. They wanted to understand what I saw in the market and why I was uniquely positioned to capture it. They focused on differentiation and authentic relationships over track record. One of my fund 1 LPs said it best: “I don’t care about your track record –I want to know you’re the first go-to brand/person in VC for great founders in your thesis scope”

Q: How do you run operations as a solo GP?

Keep it lean. I outsource fund administration, legal, and accounting. My biggest early expenses were legal setup (I used a personal Monzo loan initially trusting my guts that I will launch and close the fund –don't try this at home!), compliance, and basic operations. Focus your time on finding companies and supporting founders, not administrative tasks. Vauban (now Carta) and using a simple UK on-shore LP/GP structure with my own RVECA registration at the FCA directly was a setup that in 2023 costed me relatively little to launch, and it kept costs low ever since, but without any sacrifice on the LPs I can work with or the investments I can make. Tech is disrupting venture. Use it at your own advantage and try not to overcomplicate things. Do ask a lot around. The RVECA licensing for example is not well known in the UK, but just because most VCs use an expensive Appointed Representative firm doesn’t mean it’s the only way.

Do your own homework.

Resources and Templates

Fundraising Essentials

Target LP Categories for European Emerging Managers:

• High-net-worth individuals (£50K-£500K tickets)

• Family offices (£250K-£2m tickets)

• Specialized fund-of-funds (Multiple Capital, Molten, etc.)

• Ex-founders and entrepreneurs in your sector

• Other emerging managers (micro-LPs £5K-£25K)

Fundraising Timeline Expectations:

• Fund setup and legal: 2-3 months

• First closing: 6-12 months from start

• Final closing: 12-18 months total

• LP commitment to signing: 2 weeks to 6 months

• (Plus a preparation period of barking up the wrong tree and failing along the way: 1-3 years if you’re lucky and don’t give up)

Essential Documents:

• Investment memo template (I write one for every deal more or less following this skeleton)

• Fund pitch deck (see examples below)

• LPA and fund documents –get good lawyers, but DON’T OVERPAY for it –basic and clean > fancy. Leverage your most sophisticated LPs and THEIR lawyers for initial feedback and suggestions, before you engage yours to re-write parts.

• Due diligence questionnaire responses.

• Fund financials and model. Here is the one I used for fund 1. But it was a bit clunky and I’m working on simplifying it and using more dynamic modeling through a software coded interface for the next one.

Great Resources I found online

Signature Block over in the US has some fantastic resources to get started:

signatureblock.co

The deck that got me to first closing:

More VC deck tips: sifted.eu/articles/first-time-vc-pitch-decks

A lot more decks here: alexanderjarvis.com/resources/collections/vc-pitch-deck-collection

LP communication tips:

Great Emerging managers sharing their journey or thesis:

• Annelie Ajami from Anamcara : medium.com/anamcara-capital/raising-a-fund-on-your-own-some-insights-in-hindsight-294b7d9c1549

• Stefano Bernardi on being transparent online (He inspired our open-source website): https://unrulycap.com/rule-breaking-website

• Sarah Drinkwater from Common Magic: https://medium.com/@sarahdrinkwater/raising-common-magic-i-be2529ddec46

Next Steps for Emerging Managers

Before You Start:

1. Invest your own money to test your thesis

2. Build authentic relationships in your sector

3. Establish thought leadership through content/community

4. Map potential LPs and start relationship building

During Fundraising:

1. Focus on LP fit over LP size

2. Be prepared for the smallest viable fund size

3. Don't explain too much - if they don't get it quickly, move on

4. Use momentum and deadlines once you have traction

Want to Connect?

This guide will evolve as I learn more building Silicon Roundabout and preparing for Fund II. If you're an emerging manager or LP with experiences to share, or if you have questions not covered here, reach out:

• LinkedIn: Francesco Perticarari

• Email: francesco [at] siliconroundabout [dot] ventures

• Community: Join our deep tech events at Silicon Roundabout » siliconroundabout.ventures

This guide is a living document. If you found this helpful, please share it with other emerging managers or LPs who might benefit or may want to share links and resources.

What would you add to this guide? Drop a comment below with your questions or experiences - I'll incorporate the best contributions into future updates.

Watch the Full AMA with Dave –formerly at Molten Ventures

Dave Neumann from when he was FoF investor at Molten and I covered everything from starting out to why they decided to back Silicon Roundabout. If you prefer watching to reading, this is the link:

📺 Watch the complete 1-hour AMA here

The conversation covers my complete journey, including the failures I don't usually talk about in PR interviews and Dave's perspective on what makes emerging managers interesting to fund-of-funds.

My Complete Journey: The Unedited Story

This is the full transcript from our conversation, cleaned up for readability but keeping all the messy reality of building a fund from scratch.

Getting Started: Finding Your Path (And Failing Forward)

The first step is actually to just start anywhere. For me it took a little bit of mastering the courage to go out there, but I've been testing different things and eventually landed on the fact that a fund was a sensible option.

My background is computer science and my day job was software engineering through most of the last decade. When COVID hit, I had to figure out what to do next. I knew I wanted to do something with the Silicon Roundabout community I'd been running –this huge deep tech meetup that's now expanded across Europe.

Out of this community, I realised we were seeing very disruptive early stage companies building extremely interesting technologies. I started angel investing, then wanted to scale it up. I tried to do some syndication first and actually failed at that –I couldn't convince angel investors to do deeptech on time for rounds for meaningful amounts where you could charge fees per company.

Then I tried to do a fund and the easiest LPs to find in Europe were the governments.

I spent time with them and they drilled into my head their agenda: you need to raise a big fund with lots of partners and lots of track record. I even got British Business Bank support for the idea, but it was going to be a UK fund with other partners –it felt like building a cathedral around something simple.

I failed again.

So I went back to square one and looked at emerging managers. LPs, including Jonathan from Molten, were pointing me toward: "you're so convinced about this, why don't you start with angel capital as a solo GP?" Eventually I got comfortable with that.

This is my long-winding way to say: start anywhere and embrace failure. I would be very surprised if you succeeded with the first idea that comes to mind. You're only going to find out if you stick with it long enough, embrace that you're going to fail, and keep pivoting.

Finding Your Investment Focus and Special Sauce

When I look at a startup, I think "is this going to be one-of-a-kind success?"

That applies to funds too.

For a fund to exist, you need at least the self-belief that you might have a good chance of being one-of-a-kind success.

If you don't have anything super special and just want to invest, I'm not sure we need so many funds around the world.

If you want to join the fight of elbowing each other for LP checks, are you sure that you really believe in what you're investing in? That's your investment thesis.

I think you're not an investor if you're not actually investing yourself –putting your money where your mouth is.

First, choose your focus personally where you're putting your money.

Then figure out what makes you uniquely qualified to scale it into a fund. Use that to make your firm thesis, which is different from your personal investment thesis. Your investment thesis is what you'd be investing anyway. Your fund thesis is “your investment thesis + your fund strategy = a good investment for an LP”.

For me, that was the community and deep tech focus.

I even had to let go community sponsors who wanted B2B SaaS companies because I was doing events just for deep tech.

You need that level of focus and commitment.

Solo GP Decision Making: Why I Believe Individual Decisions Beat Committees

The first thing is that I write my investment memos and have an IC with myself.

Obviously, if I have conviction by that point, unless I develop split personality, the result is pretty much a given. But the process of writing memos and doing DD means I turn down opportunities.

Who says that to make better decisions you need more people?

My personal answer –and I wouldn't do this otherwise– is that more people don't make better decisions, not necessarily.

That's why corporates can rarely out-innovate startups and end up buying them –too many people in “cc”.

In venture, especially in Europe in the past, consensus-driven investment is actually wrong.

The best firms are non-consensus. Lowercase Capital was a solo GP fund and best one of the best performing funds on record. So many solo GPs and angels have insane track records making high-conviction bets.

If you've got your strategy right and your portfolio construction is sound, and you follow your investment process, I don't see why a single person should make worse decisions than a group.

Individuals make better decisions in many cases, especially with limited information like seed stage.

The LP Fundraising Reality: It's All About Fit and Persistence

You don't have a fund until you have LPs.

Not all LPs are created equal, just like not all funds. In my case, I failed a lot initially talking to the wrong types of LPs.

I remember someone from Adeo Ressi’s VCLab told me "you can't be talking to just fund-of-funds; they're never going to give you money." Even Molten is different because of how it was born and what Dave mentioned )at the start of the AMA webinar) about their strategy.

The biggest categories that work for emerging managers: angels, family offices, private capital.

I found that two types of ex-founders worked well for me: non-deep tech founders interested in sector exposure who liked the entrepreneurial spirit, and people in similar spaces who wanted to help the fund grow.

I think LPs are your clients, not the startups.

Startups are more like suppliers –they're giving you equity that you're selling as your product. If you don't have clients paying fees and carry, you don't have a business.

What worked for me was a mix of networking at conferences (I never pay for tickets except community-driven events), leveraging my existing community, social media (LinkedIn since 2022), cold outreach, and introductions.

But this is much more a patience and resilience game than a skills game.

Your fundraising skills grow if you stick with it.

Overcoming the Low Points: When Everything Feels Impossible

It was hard. Really hard. When you're questioning "how am I going to get there? Is this the wrong choice? My management fee is too small. Why am I even doing this?"

Go back and think: are you doing it for management fee or carry?

If you're doing it for carry, a three to five million fund should be enough to give you millions in a few years if you really believe it.

That's what I told myself.

The advice that saved me came from Reece at Concept Ventures: this is much more a patience and resilience game than a skills game.

If you're happy to keep going until it works, you might raise.

The question is: do you want to do it or not?

My wife was crucial here.

Every time it got really hard, she'd mirror back: "You've gone through so much - what do you believe in? Wake up, don't give up right now."

She kicked my ass and I went back to it.

The Fundraising Process: What Actually Works

I found that if I had to explain too much, it wouldn't be the right fit.

The best sales happen fairly quickly. Looking back, you can sense synergy early –it doesn't mean it always goes through, but there's usually initial alignment.

For example, with Molten, despite being institutional and doing heavy DD, there was initial synergy.

I had my biggest individual check from someone I met the day before.

Then I had people I'd known forever who kept saying "nearly closing, nearly closing" and never closed.

Some of the biggest frustrations: people saying they'll invest £500K, then £200K, then £100K, then £50K, then nothing.

If something's going to happen, especially with individuals, it needs to happen quickly.

The smallest fund size you can go with was crucial advice.

Post-first closing when the market was crashing, I was prepared to close at £3M fund when I was at £2M closed.

That gives you strength because you're genuinely telling people the truth –you will close.

(Big shout out to Stefano Bernardi at Unruly Capital for the above tip!)

What LPs Actually Care About: Beyond the Spreadsheet

The people who invested asked completely unrelated questions to fund spreadsheets.

Jonathan from Molten asked about founder relationships, how I built the brand, what I see in deeptech. With one angel-LP I had a conversation about China, the future of venture –all vision and market, not fund mechanics.

I started seeing a pattern: people who invested were interested in the community, vision, what I saw in the market, why I launched this, how far I was prepared to go.

They focused on detecting something unique through conversations about founder relationships, politics, how you build things.

If you try to put Fund I on a spreadsheet - if someone says "come back when you have DPI," they're not serious.

Chris Sacca didn't have track record when he started. The EF guys did a 17x fund on their first test. You need questions that get into those qualities you cannot represent on spreadsheets.

Building Operations as a Solo GP

I committed £100K to my fund (including fees), in part from paying myself almost nothing in management fee, part from savings. I took massive risk and paid the initial lawyers with a Monzo loan (don't try this at home! But I believed I'd make it back up and that Europe needed more deep tech advocates.)

For operations, I outsource fund administration, legal, and accounting. Focus your time on finding companies and supporting founders, not admin. My annual costs are manageable within the management fee, and I limit board seats to stay focused.

Why Molten Invested: Dave's LP Perspective

From Dave Neumann, Molten Ventures:

Molten's main thing with our fund-of-funds is understanding who has different deal flow to what we already have. If we back 63 GPs, we want to understand: do you have deal flow that's different or better?

When we started speaking with Francesco, because of the network and community he built, it was clear his investments would become interesting for us.

The validation was that Francesco is very good at finding entrepreneurs that might be overlooked or companies that are too technical, or being a partner to bigger seed funds when finding great companies.

For us, investing in Francesco validated that he has the gravity pull of great founders and capability of finding and winning them over.

• New Portfolio Markup: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] up 10% following extension of Seed round at higher valuation

• Co-Investment Opportunities: Slots available in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] and 2 other portfolio Seed rounds

• Upcoming Events: SuperVenture Berlin (June 2–4), Basel Investor Forum (June 17–18) — Francesco & Ralph attending (invite links below 👇)

• Portfolio Highlights: Origin Robotics deploys BEAK systems in the Netherlands + unveils BLAZE interceptor; Panakeia hits 7/8 targets, ASCO-bound; Anaphite showcases in Stuttgart + fundraises for Safe Passage; Nu Quantum wins Tech Company of the Year + launches Quantum Datacenter Alliance; Finchetto featured in Future of Compute map for 98% energy savings

• Market Update: “Production Capitalists” redefining deeptech capital stacks; Anthropic warns 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs at risk from AI; US DoD flags China’s deeptech fusion in space race

• Hiring: Gama Space actively recruiting (including Chief Engineer role)

• GP Update: The 25/7 hustle. Europe at a cross-roads. We may very well be early and right… and doubling down.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

Portfolio updates (NEW: Updated Link with more live info!)

Here is the public snapshot of the current portfolio.

We overhauled our website to offer a direct and live view of our portfolio, directly from our live Airtable database. Stealth companies are anonymised, but overall stats include everyone.

Check it out!

How we think about portfolio construction:

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

No new additions in May, but we are in deep DD with 4 companies.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

There may be space for a couple of value-add co-investor from our LPs in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] current round (subject to CEO approval). Two other portfolio companies are preparing for their Seed round.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

June, SuperVenture Berlin

Ralph and Francesco will both be at SuperVenture Berlin from June 2nd to 4th. We’re also planning a side event and as always are co-hosting the side-event whatsapp group for LPs and GPs going. Join the group if you’re planning to go and let us know if you fancy to help organise the side event :)

Whatsapp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ByfH4PTKhgB3BvBhRbWGDr

We are also running an LP only lunch which we are co-hosting with Hello Tomorrow and Riceberg Ventures

Basel Investor Forum | June 17–18, 2025

Francesco will be attending the Basel Investor Forum during Art Basel week. If you're planning to be in town and would like to catch up, drop him a line — always happy to connect.

Details here: baselinvestorforum.com

Markups

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] has been marked up 10% due to the recent extension to their Seed round at a higher price.

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 18

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 4

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Infiniti Recycling

Infiniti will be presenting at STARTUP AUTOBAHN in Stuttgart on June 5, as part of the Plug and Play / EIT Urban Mobility showcase. The event includes speakers from Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Bosch, and Formula E, alongside 30+ startup–corporate collaborations across mobility, advanced manufacturing, and sustainable materials. Full agenda here

Origin Robotics

Origin has begun deliveries of its BEAK systems to the Netherlands, marking its first deployment with European partners. The deal was executed in collaboration with BSS Holland and signals they are able to sell to multiple NATO countries.

Separately, the company has unveiled BLAZE — a man-portable, high-explosive interceptor for counter-UAS operations. Designed to neutralise loitering munitions and hostile drones in contested environments, BLAZE adds a new layer to Origin’s autonomous defence stack.

Panakeia

Panakeia continues to make strong progress across clinical, commercial, and regulatory fronts. The team met 7 of their 8 targets this month, with one partially completed. Highlights include early traction with major distribution partners, advancing international customer negotiations, and regulatory recertifications.

🔬 Clinical & Commercial

• Submitted a bid for colon cancer in the UK and entered commercial and legal negotiations in India, as well as in contract negotiation for a distribution partnership with a major pharma company.

🛡 Regulatory

• Passed ISO27001 & ISO13485 audits with recommendation for recertification

Panakeia is attending the ASCO Annual Meeting 2025 in Chicago, U.S. where CEO Pahini P. will be discussing validation results from the company’s AI-driven profiling tool, PANProfiler Colorectal. The abstract is available online here

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum has been named Technology Company of the Year by the Cambridge Independent Science & Technology Awards.

They’re also leading the launch of the Quantum Datacenter Alliance, with the inaugural forum set for June 26 at Battersea Power Station. Speakers include representatives from Google, PsiQuantum, MIT, Infineon, and more. Registration is open:

https://www.qda.global

Finchetto

Finchetto was named one of 69 UK startups to watch in AlbionVC and Beauhurst’s Future of Compute Market Map. Their all-optical, fully passive network switches are designed for AI and HPC workloads and cut power consumption by up to 98% compared to current electronic alternatives.

Following Eric Schmidt’s recent warning that AI could consume 98% of global electricity, Finchetto is positioning its tech as part of the solution: enabling data centres to scale compute without scaling energy use.

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

A new essay from Venture Desktop explores how asset-heavy frontier tech companies — from battery manufacturing to aerospace — are shifting away from equity-heavy growth models. Instead, they’re blending structured debt, project finance, and securitisation to scale physical infrastructure fast. This shift is giving rise to a new breed of investor: the “Production Capitalist” — part VC, part financier — who can unlock capital efficiency and help founders master the capital stack from day one. Debt meets deeptech…

Venture Desktop by Brett Bivens

The Rise of Production Capital

This post is co-authored with William Godfrey, CEO of Tangible, which builds technical infrastructure for sustainable asset-based lending…

Read more

a year ago · 89 likes · 7 comments · Brett.Bivens and William Godfrey

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, has issued a stark warning that artificial intelligence could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years, potentially pushing the U.S. unemployment rate to 20%. He emphasised that sectors such as technology, finance, law, and consulting are most at risk due to rapid AI advancements. Amodei criticised both the government and tech industry for downplaying these risks and urged proactive measures to address the impending employment challenges.

China is accelerating its use of frontier technologies in space, blending artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing to transform itself into a global leader in the final frontier, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Defense. These technologies are central to Beijing’s efforts to secure strategic dominance in global space infrastructure.

Asks & Portfolio Roles 🙏

Gama Space are hiring for multiple positions

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] are hiring a Chief Engineer

GP Personal Update

We should not accept the status quo in Europe. But neither we should deny the current state of reality.

This month was a tour-de-force for me across Europe.

From organising a breakfast with UK government officials and defence stakeholders (picture above) to flying to Krakow, Poland, to build bridges with the eastern European ecosystem (thanks to the NATO Innovation Fund and Expedition Ventures for the support in making it happen), passing for a Moroccan de-tour mingling with some of the most interesting VC minds in the continent, both GPs and LPs.

In between, 12 lab visits and 5 technological deep dives, which are now informing the 4 deep DDs we are undertaking in potential investees and the investment thesis for our last 3 investments to make and future ones once we raise a new fund.

Recently one of our LPs mentioned that from the outside, it’s easier to spot the work we do in networking with fund investors than our work as investors.

In reality, I sat down to do some maths this morning, as a sanity check for both me and the transparency I want to build with you, my LP believers: By looking at just the calls/events time, we only spent 17% of this time on LP relationships. Of course adding in the deep work, this would sink much lower because most of that work is fund operations and investment.

But despite this imbalance, we’ve now started to receive interest for our next fund. Which we are not even raising yet, but at this point I believe fairly confidently will be a product we are keen to launch in the autumn to unlock the huge opportunity I see now so clearly in front of us.

An opportunity we would not be able to see, if it wasn’t for the huge family and personal sacrifices I am making to push hard for all this work visiting labs, traveling across Europe, and shutting myself in my little upstairs dungeon to square the ever morphing equation of:

fundamentalTechnologyTrends+communityInsights+exceptional(founder∗marketfit)=nextCompanyToBack

Europe is at a cross-roads. The world is at a fundamental junction.

I am not a politically correct person in voicing my views: if Europe doesn’t hurry up in creating a truly unified VC and startup market with the UK in it, driven by capitalist principles and pension LPs, rather than governments forcing an artificial fragmentation, it will lose the battle of scale. Period. I don’t like this scenario, so I’m actively working with folks like the UK All Parliamentary Group for Defence and The EU Inc to build an alternative. But I accept this is a moonshot project. And so I am currently hedging this with a strategy that now solely focuses on startups thinking (commercially) US-first. They may leverage European projects like grants and defence spending ramp ups, but their eyes are set on growth fueled by the US market (as customers and as source of growth capital). It used to be a nice to have, now it’s a hard line for me in my investment thesis. As we type, our porfolio company Ephos is shipping chips to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in the U.S., [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] relocates from Spain to L.A., and Hippos Exoskeleton signs up clinics from East to West coast.

As per the world side, it’s too early to tell, but it seems that we were both early and right in defence (2 of our startups continue to win contracts in the space), early and right in photonics (NVIDIA and Huawei have now made the paradigm switch inevitable), early and right in the energy infrastructure needed to power the AI and robotics world (Anaphite is on the cusp of a major customer milestone in the battery space after successfully closing Series A, while Astral Systems sold their first fusion reactor as a neutron source), and early and (hopefully) right in quantum (quantum advantage in a practical use case is closing in with underlying trends pointing to a likely breakthrough this very decade.

We live at a time where on the scary side, our survival isn’t guaranteed. Because frankly there are 3 Arms Races going on (AI-Computing, Space-Defence, and Energy). But if we don’t accidentally wipe ourselves out, and I believe we have more chances not to do so if we thread carefully, then the above trends we enjoyed riding with our first fund and captured in various shapes with our community approach, will now unleash a host of fundamentally ground-breaking companies and a host of follow-on trends I am carefully studying. This is the excitement that knocks me out of bed in the morning and drives me to build and invest!

And I can’t wait to share it with you all, all over again :)

• New Portfolio Addition: Invested in Swisspod Technologies, Swiss hyperloop leader with proprietary linear induction motor technology cutting deployment costs vs traditional rail ($20M/km vs $71M/km in Germany)

• Co-Investment Opportunities: Space available for value-add co-investors in 3 portfolio companies

• Upcoming Events: NATO Innovation Fund dinner (Krakow, May 12), DragonChasers retreat (Morocco, May), SuperVenture Berlin (June 2-4)

• Fund Performance: Fund 1 [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] currently invested [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] across 18 companies

• Portfolio Highlights: Origin Robotics secured €4.5M EDF grant; Panakeia study in Nature's Top 25 papers; Anaphite raising £10.4M Series A; Ephos crossed $1M in sales; VyperCore launched VyperLab platform achieving 5x acceleration

• Market Update: AWS unveiled first quantum computing chip architecture; Novo Nordisk CRISPR therapy showed 90% reduction in liver disease; Cerebras Systems announced WSE-3 with 2.6M cores

• Hiring: Multiple portfolio companies actively recruiting (Gama Space, Ephos, Nu Quantum, Origin Robotics)

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

Portfolio updates

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]* is a snapshot of the current portfolio.

*Link to a private Airtable base with a list of all portfolio companies and include the company’s name, short description, why we invested, URL, and category.

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

We welcome Swisspod Technologies to the Silicon Roundabout family

Standing on the windswept plains of Pueblo, Colorado, as massive steel tubes rise from the dusty earth like some alien infrastructure, it's hard not to feel the gravitational pull of the future.

This sprawling 43-acre elliptical track-soon to become America's second-largest vacuum chamber-bears little resemblance to the beaches of Costanza, Romania, where Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor once hawked t-shirts to help support himself and his family while studying.

Yet both spaces represent the same relentless human drive: to create something from nothing, to build pathways where only barriers existed before.

Today we announce our investment in Swisspod Technologies: the Swiss-American hyperloop leader transforming transportation with groundbreaking propulsion and levitation technology.

Far from the speculative moonshots that have plagued this sector, Swisspod has already demonstrated technical validation that separates fantasy from imminent reality: In December 2024, Governor Jared Polis joined Denis to unveil the first 200 meters of hyperloop tubes at PuebloPlex –the initial phase of what will become the world's largest hyperloop testing facility by the end of this quarter.

This 1.6km closed-loop infrastructure spans 174,000 square meters, equivalent to 25 football fields, and represents the pragmatic engineering approach that drew us to this opportunity.

Swisspod's proprietary linear induction motor technology enables vehicles to operate with passive infrastructure, dramatically reducing deployment costs compared to both traditional rail systems and competing hyperloop designs. During recent trials at their Swiss facility, they achieved speeds that scale to 488.2 km/h in a full system-impressive technical validation for a company targeting the $37.9 billion hyperloop market expected by 2033.

What particularly impressed us is the founders journeys, particularly that of their CEO: from the scrappiness of selling t-shirts as a teenager to the obsessive and relentless dedication over many years to reinventing logistics –holding one of the world's only doctorates in hyperloop systems from EPFL.

The whole team exudes exceptionalism and hyper-competitiveness, most having contributed to winning as students Elon Musk’s hyperloop competition before leaving the academic world behind to launch Swisspod. Their complementary skills and in many cases years working together is the opposite of people who just met each other. The leaders are also obsessive and relentless about learning and improving: constantly asking the right questions and marrying great ambitions with self-awareness on what’s still left to achieve for them to build a multi-billion enduring company.

Founder DNA

Denis Tudor brings exceptional hyperloop credentials:

• Led his university team to win Elon Musk's Hyperloop competition in 2019.

• Authored a doctorate in Hyperloop Electrical Energy, Optimal Design, and Operation Strategies from EPFL.

• Bootstrapped from challenging beginnings into becoming a hyper-competitive player in transportation technology who’s been able to get governments to hand him over millions in grants and facilities to progress his technology vision.

Cyril Dénéréaz complements this with strong engineering expertise:

• Designed passive rail infrastructure reducing deployment costs compared to high-speed rail (approximately $20M/km vs $71M/km in Germany)

• Developed patented Linear Induction Motors technology (PTH/CH2021/050026 & PTH/CH2021/050027)

Technology Edge

Swisspod's system addresses critical hyperloop adoption barriers:

1. Infrastructure Efficiency: Passive track design reduces traditional rail CAPEX. This is a real deal in making this technology a viable alternative to today’s HS rail.

2. Energy Performance: Significantly lower energy consumption than aviation (20-30 Wh/passenger/km at 500 km/h vs 575 Wh for aviation), while opening the door for similar journey times on the ground.

3. Flexible Implementation: “Retrofit” capability enables phased commercialisation: Swisspod partners can choose to implement the full vacuum hyperloop or a slower open-air alternative that’s cheaper to build than high-speed rail –and which is still at least as fast as HS rail, if not faster.

Their testing achievements are impressive:

• Built Europe's first operational hyperloop infrastructure in Switzerland.

• Achieved a record-breaking hyperloop journey covering 9.6 km (equivalent to 115.2 km full-scale)

• Constructing a full-scale testing facility in Pueblo, Colorado spanning approximately 162,000 square meters.

Market Opportunity

Swisspod enters a hyperloop technology sector with significant growth potential. According to industry research, the market is expected to grow at:

• 41.9% CAGR from 2024 to 2030, reaching substantial market size by decade’s end.
  

• From an estimated $1.83 billion in 2023 to potentially $10.98 billion by 2029.

Unlike many competitors we’ve seen in the past or researched about, Swisspod's approach includes multiple revenue streams which they are pursuing with very strong partnerships and that are getting them extremely close to both real short-term revenue and practical use case demonstrators in real life tracks:

• Technology licensing (as evidenced by their MoU with Indian Government and TuTr Hyperloop) –including open-air systems that can be “retrofitted” on traditional rail infrastructure without requiring to build out the full vacuum tube systems.

• Vehicle provision and leasing.

• Consulting and advisory services (which is helping them penetrate markets hungry for logistic leap-frogging such as in the Middle-East).

Strategic Positioning

The transportation sector faces significant challenges:

• Growing need for sustainable, efficient transportation solutions, while the cost of traditional high-speed rail electrification prevents many projects from seeing the light of the sun or from hitting completion on time, on budget, and with the originally planned benefits (e.g. the failing HS2 link in the UK).

• Increasing concerns about climate change and urban congestion.

• Rising demand for faster transport methods.

Swisspod's riding “inevitable” trends. For example, some of their key breakthroughs are leveraging the improvement in battery technologies that have already allowed EV cars to break record after record. This is against a traditional rail and aviation industry that has not made significant technology progress for decades. Further to this, their phased approach –beginning with freight before passenger transport and allowing for open-air rollout options– mirrors how other transformative transportation companies have successfully evolved by first targeting specific but high-growth niches they could steal from much larger incumbents and use to generate strong revenue.

We don't believe hyperloop will replace all transportation modes, but like containerisation revolutionised shipping decades ago, Swisspod's hyperloop networks could fundamentally reshape how goods move globally. With endorsement from the Swiss Government (including Innosuisse grants), partnerships with EPFL, HEIG-VD, and MxV Rail, they've built a strong foundation for growth.

They are also a rare example of a seed company that’s not let investors “push a board” onto them, but instead carefully surrounded their founders with top-tier non-execs that are actively supporting the company’s growth, such as Dr. Sotiris Pagdadis and Felix Porsche.

We look forward to supporting Denis and Cyril as they advance their vision of sustainable, high-speed transportation solutions into the future.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

There may be space for a couple of value-add co-investor from our LPs in Swisspod’s current round (subject to CEO approval). Two other portfolio companies are preparing for their Seed round.

Reply to this email if interested in either.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

May, Krakow: Deeptech Defence Private Dinner - ft. NATO Innovation Fund

We partnered up with the NATO Innovation Fund for a deeptech & defence focused intimate dinner mainly aimed at central and eastern LPs, family offices, and angels.

It’ll take place on the eve of the EDID25 in Krakow, Poland, on May 12th.

May, Morocco

We’ll be attending our regular yearly LP/GP retreat with our friends DragonChasers. We know we’ll see some of you there, but while it’s already sold out, if you’re not in the crew you may want to join. Truly phenomenal, absolutely non-business-and-yet-invaluable-for-business event. Here the application link: dragonchasers.org/apply

June, SuperVenture Berlin

Ralph and Francesco will both be at SuperVenture Berlin from June 2nd to 4th. We’re also planning a side event and as always are co-hosting the side-event whatsapp group for LPs and GPs going. Join the group if you’re planning to go and let us know if you fancy to help organise the side event :)

Whatsapp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ByfH4PTKhgB3BvBhRbWGDr

Markups

No markups this month, but… but watch this section in the upcoming editions.

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 18

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 5

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Origin Robotics

Origin Robotics has secured several significant contracts and developments. The Latvian Ministry of Defence has awarded them an R&D contract to develop a Counter-Unmanned Aerial System (C-UAS). The company also received a €4.5 million grant from the European Defence Fund to develop MPortISTAR, a man-portable ISTAR drone with advanced laser targeting capabilities. They recently demonstrated their BEAK system's target engagement capabilities to the Italian Armed Forces and are actively expanding their team with multiple engineering positions open.

🔗 Learn about the MPortISTAR Project

Panakeia

Panakeia's study on deep learning-based prediction of multi-omic biomarkers was named among Nature Portfolio Communications Medicine's Top 25 papers of 2024, with over 7,000 downloads. Founder and CEO, Pahini Pandya, has been recognized with a Barclays Eagle Labs International Women's Day award for Outstanding Contribution to Entrepreneurship. The company is actively presenting at major scientific conferences, showcasing their AI-powered molecular profiling technology.

🔗 View Nature Top 25 Papers

Anaphite Technologies

Anaphite was named among the top 5 South West companies to watch in 2025 by BusinessLive, the company plans to leverage its £10.4m Series A funding to commission a new manufacturing plant, scaling their dry coating technology to help decarbonize electric vehicles.

🔗 Support Anaphite's Charity Run 🔗 Read BusinessLive's Top Companies Feature

Ephos

Strengthen by the crossing of $1m in sales last year, Ephos is expanding access to their Milan chip fabrication facility (Fab-1), which has been fully operational since September 2024. The company is launching an educational outreach program starting with engineering and physics student tours on May 21st. Additionally, Ephos has announced a new internship program with three positions: Engineering Intern, Research Intern, and Communications Intern.

🔗 Register for Fab-1 Student Tour 🔗 View Internship Opportunities

VyperCore

VyperCore has launched VyperLab, their cloud-based evaluation platform showcasing their revolutionary compute accelerator technology. The platform delivers up to five-fold memory-safe acceleration of managed-language applications with zero code changes and up to 80% reduction in data center CPU power consumption. The company has also been shortlisted for the 2025 #21toWatch cohort for their innovative approaches to server applications and memory safety.

🔗 Learn more about VyperLab

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum Nu Quantum's team attended the National Quantum Computing Centre's (NQCC) Quantum Computing Scalability Conference 2025, where key stakeholders discussed advances and challenges in quantum computing scalability. The company's experts, including Dr. Alex Moylett, Bhargavi Jonnadula, Coral Westoby, Claire Le Gall and Jay Man, have shared detailed insights from the conference in their latest technical blog. The company is also expanding their team in Cambridge, with new positions open for Senior Optics Engineer and Project Manager roles.

🔗 Read Nu Quantum's NQCC Conference Analysis

Hippos

Hippos Exoskeleton has been featured in both the Sports Business Journal and Financial Times for their innovative AI-powered knee injury prevention technology and founders’ decision to expand to the US. Their recent motion capture studies have validated that their prototype knee airbag can effectively prevent knee valgus angles, a significant factor in ACL tears. The company was also featured on Sky News, showcasing their latest exoskeleton technology. They continue to expand their partnerships, having secured pre-orders from La Liga and NCAA teams.

🔗 Watch Sky News Interview 🔗 View Technical Study Results

SCI Semiconductor

SCI Semiconductor has been showcasing their CHERIoT-based ICENI technology at embedded world 2025 in Nuremberg. CEO Haydn Povey was featured in an EE Times interview discussing their open-source CHERIoT-Ibex secure microcontroller silicon. The company continues to advance their compiler support with improvements to Clang 17, implemented collaboratively with Google, as they work to make memory-safe computing more accessible.

🔗 Watch embedded world Interview 🔗 Read about CHERIoT Security Features

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

AWS Debuts Quantum Computing Chip Architecture

Amazon Web Services announced Ocelot, their first quantum computing chip designed to demonstrate a scalable and hardware-efficient architecture. While the chip currently has limited computational capability, it represents a proof-of-principle demonstration aimed at building quantum systems capable of delivering on promised applications like fast and accurate simulations of battery materials. Oskar Painter, head of quantum hardware at AWS, emphasizes that this architecture lays the groundwork for larger quantum computers that can solve meaningful, industrial-scale problems in the coming years.

Read more at MIT Technology Review

Novo Nordisk's CRISPR Gene Therapy Shows 90% Reduction in Liver Disease

Novo Nordisk announced breakthrough results from Phase II trials of their CRISPR-based gene therapy targeting hereditary transthyretin-mediated amyloidosis (hATTR). The treatment showed a 90% reduction in disease progression in patients, significantly outperforming existing therapies. Unlike earlier gene therapies requiring multiple administrations, this one-time treatment uses a novel CRISPR variant with enhanced specificity and reduced off-target effects. If approved, it could treat an estimated 50,000 patients globally who currently have limited treatment options.

Read more at STAT News

Cerebras Systems Unveils WSE-3: World's Largest AI Processor Chip

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems unveiled their third-generation Wafer Scale Engine (WSE-3), featuring a massive 2.6 million cores and 20.8 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth. This single chip contains more transistors than all of Nvidia's H100s combined and can train large language models 100x faster than GPU clusters. The WSE-3 will power a new class of AI supercomputers capable of training models with over 1 trillion parameters. Major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have already placed pre-orders with delivery starting Q4 2025.

Read more at AnandTech

Asks & Portfolio Roles 🙏

Gama Space are hiring for multiple positions

GP Personal Update

When I was a little kid I used to love model trains.

But, while fun, they never reached the speeds of the one I took my little one to see at Swisspod’s R&D centre in Lausanne!

I’m still trying to find the balance (and time!) to be a dad, husband… and soloVC.

But taking my little ones to labs during DD trips and seeing her marvel at new physics and engineering breakthroughs helps marrying the two.

(And daddy got to see Freddie Mercury’s statue and recording studios in nearby Montreux, which was an even greater achievement in slotting together work commitments and family time 🎧)

Til next time!

Francesco

The original article was published in the April 2025 issue of Fortune Italia (number 3, year 8). Translated from the original in Italian.

In London, there is an Italian investor who, at 33, has already achieved a certain level of fame. The reason is simple: he is the only one leading a venture capital fund solo, sharing everything with his community. We met him.

Among European venture capitalists and startup founders, there is a growing sense of urgency. The increasingly strong feeling is that if they don’t take it upon themselves to solve the world’s problems, no one else will. Take nuclear fusion: European states have invested tens of billions. The most important project, ITER, has suffered several construction delays.

Even before it is completed, a small German startup (Proxima Fusion), led by an Italian (Francesco Sciortino), might succeed in building a demonstration reactor (also thanks, it must be said, to the supply chain created by ITER). For now, it exists only on paper, but that was enough to raise around fifty million-for a project that will need billions.

According to the latest deep tech report by Dealroom, Europe has the potential to become a global hub for advanced technologies. It has 6 of the top 20 universities and 9 of the top 25 research institutes in the world, specialized in many different technologies. What’s missing, the report says, are entrepreneurial culture and risk-taking.

In short, deep tech-the part of innovation dedicated to the most complex technologies, like nuclear fusion-needs money, and it needs it fast. Francesco Perticarari felt this so strongly that he decided to go it alone.

Raised in Macerata, as soon as he finished high school, he fled to England. Arriving in London, he saw a small fruit stand. He asked for a job and got it-a job he had already done in Macerata, helping out with the family business.

While still working at the stand (inventing, with a friend, a small business delivering fresh fruit to the city’s pubs), he got into tech. He began studying computer science, graduated from Goldsmiths University, and became a computer scientist. With two other co-founders, he built a meetup for founders in the deeptech sector: starting from a pub, it became the largest of its kind in Europe, taking its name from Silicon Roundabout, an area considered London’s (small) answer to Silicon Valley, full of startups, co-working spaces, and innovation.

Later, with no formal training as a venture capitalist, the Italian began investing as an angel. Some of the companies he invested in now report revenues of about 50 million euros. “I used all my money, I took out a loan. I just went for it,” he tells us after participating in a panel at the London stop of the Smau innovation tour, a platform dedicated to startups that each year have the chance to meet the most advanced innovation systems in Europe.

Among these ecosystems, London is by far the top. Again according to the Dealroom report, in 2024, UK venture capital invested $4.2 billion in deep tech, $1.2 billion more than France and $1.5 billion more than Germany. Italy lags far behind, with just 300 million. And while London alone is worth $2.5 billion in investments, Milan (the only Italian city that could hope to compete) isn’t even in the top twenty European cities.

It’s in London that Francesco achieved another milestone: in 2023, from the meetup, he founded Silicon Roundabout Ventures, a £5 million fund, with support from players like Molten Ventures, Multiple Capital, and the Italians at P101, as well as founders and former executives of startups that have already exited. Three of these were unicorns. Another is listed on the Nasdaq: Docebo, founded by Claudio Erba, one of the investors.

“I’ve made 16 investments in almost three years, focusing on sectors like quantum computing and defense,” Perticarari says. Usually, he invests between $150,000 and $200,000.

Perticarari has also attracted the attention of other investors for another reason. “He publishes almost all documents related to investments online, so the community is always kept informed. It’s an unusual and very interesting approach,” one London-based venture capitalist tells us. “He’s now very well known, also because being a solo general partner isn’t without risks: if something happens to you, what happens to your fund?”

“If you want to play this game, you have to do it well,” says Perticarari, who is very critical of the Italian approach to venture capital. He says his job is to hunt for leaders who “have both the technical ability to build technologies never commercialized before and the vision to turn them into a successful business. The Americans have taught us that you have to trust people who, at first glance, might seem crazy.” The “Messis of innovation” that the venture capitalist must look for, says Perticarari, cannot emerge if those who should help them “feel the need to teach you what it means to be a startup. I see too many accelerators and too little risk appetite.”

But according to Perticarari, Italy’s lag in venture capital is a matter of numbers-especially the numbers demanded of young companies. “I met a startup that was asked for 15% equity in exchange for 250,000 euros. Such a deal makes you completely uninvestable.” It’s no coincidence that in Italy, Perticarari has only one investment, “in a startup that didn’t seek funds from national players, but from European ones,” he says, referring to Ephos, which works on photonic quantum chips.

The goal of the Marchigiano venture capitalist is to have the largest pan-European venture capital firm specializing in the initial rounds (pre-seed and seed) of deep tech startups: “I don’t believe in mega funds that become more like private equity. I want to keep supporting young people who leave university and big companies to launch their own ideas.”

As an Italian transplanted to the UK and married to a Spaniard, Perticarari believes everyone on the continent should “stop thinking in terms of Italians versus Brits, Spaniards versus French,” he says during the panel at the London event, in front of Italian founders seeking investors. “We are facing fierce competition with China and the USA, and if we keep thinking this way, we will never win this war. I address startups, institutions, investors, companies: please, let’s think like Europeans.”

• From the GP update: Our concerns about AI arms race and potential risks of autonomous coding systems, recommending reading: ai-2027.com

• Fund 1 (£5.05M) has invested [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] to date across 17 portfolio companies, with a MOIC of [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] and several companies securing multi-million contracts

• New investment in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], a hypersonic logistics startup founded by SpaceX and Destinus alumni, to achieve sub-90 minute cargo delivery anywhere globally

• Portfolio highlights: Greenjets announced their $7M Pre-Series A, Finchetto won Innovation Product of the Year, Nu Quantum became CERN's first industrial quantum partner

• Upcoming events: Deeptech & Defence dinner in London (April), NATO Innovation Fund dinner in Krakow (May), LP/GP retreat in Morocco (May), and SuperVenture Berlin (June), with a link to join Berlin’s whstapp group for side events we co-host.

• Co-investment opportunities available in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (battery recycling) and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (hypersonic logistics)

• Market news we want to flag: Deeptech market updates: TSMC achieving promising 1nm chip yields, DeepMind's AlphaFold 4 demonstrating real-time protein design, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems achieving net energy gain

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Here is great chance for our beloved LP investors and friends to help the firm grow :)

We have a couple of upcoming dinners aimed at engaging the people who may be instrumental in launching our fund II, when we do decide to hit the market with it.

Please help us invite folks whom we should meet in the upcoming months!

April, London: LP Deeptech & Defence dinner in Chelsea’s private dining experience @ Daphne’s

We’re going to use this opportunity to bring to London potential LPs for our next fund who are interested in backing a soloGP VC fund eager to double down on the deeptech opportunity in Europe.

If you have any ideas on folks we should invite, please let us know by hitting reply!

🙏🙏🙏

May, Krakow: Deeptech Defence Private Dinner - ft. NATO Innovation Fund

We partnered up with the NATO Innovation Fund for a deeptech & defence focused intimate dinner mainly aimed at central and eastern LPs, family offices, and angels.

It’ll take place on the eve of the EDID25 in Krakow, Poland, on May 12th.

May, Morocco

We’ll be attending our regular yearly LP/GP retreat with our friends DragonChasers. We know we’ll see some of you there, but while it’s already sold out, if you’re not in the crew you may want to join. Truly phenomenal, absolutely non-business-and-yet-invaluable-for-business event. Here the application link: dragonchasers.org/apply

June, SuperVenture Berlin

Ralph and Francesco will both be at SuperVenture Berlin from June 2nd to 4th. We’re also planning a side event and as always are co-hosting the side-event whatsapp group for LPs and GPs going. Join the group if you’re planning to go and let us know if you fancy to help organise the side event :)

Whatsapp group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/ByfH4PTKhgB3BvBhRbWGDr

Markups

No markups this month.

Yet [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is joining Greenjets and Origin Robotics in working on multi-million contracts this year, while Ephos surpassed $1m in sales at the end of last year.

As Nasdaq-beater investor for over 2 decades, James Anderson, once said, we believe true value is in generating exceptional free cashflow growth. Price will follow.

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 2

• Total Portfolio Companies: 17

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 5

• Key Deeptech Areas: Future of Computing, Energy, and Defence

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

Portfolio

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]* is a snapshot of the current portfolio.

*Link to a private Airtable base with a list of all portfolio companies and include the company’s name, short description, why we invested, URL, and category.

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

The Global Internet of Atoms: Our First-Cheque Investment Into [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s Hyersonic Logistics Company

We welcome to the family [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]!

We invested in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] as they tackle the future of rapid global logistics with rocket-powered point-to-point cargo delivery. Founded by [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (ex-Destinus engineer) and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (ex-SpaceX engineer), this team combines elite aerospace expertise with the vision to deliver cargo anywhere on Earth in under 90 minutes.

Their complementary backgrounds create a powerful technical foundation: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] previously co-founded [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], bootstrapping it from idea to orbital hardware in under 2.5 years with minimal funding, while also gaining critical experience developing supersonic aircraft at [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]. Jacob brings invaluable rocket manufacturing expertise from SpaceX, where helped cut Falcon 9 and Heavy booster production time, including Elon's famous Tesla launch, and later worked in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], building and flying reusable rockets.

This founding team has been able to bootstrap an initial demonstrator rocket with scrappy tools, giving us a compelling roadmap and strong references for their plans to build the leading global hypersonic logistics company.

Defense industries are actively seeking rapid cargo capabilities, with the US DoD already allocating over $300M to date for rocket cargo initiatives. They're entering a rocket propulsion market projected to reach $12.5 billion by 2029 (11.6% CAGR), while targeting the broader $300B global air freight market long-term.

Unlike many aerospace startups, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] remains capital-efficient by focusing on integration rather than reinventing mature technologies. Their approach leverages three proven core technologies: rocket engines, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] shields, and powered vertical landing. This strategy allows them to minimise infrastructure requirements—needing only a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]m concrete landing pad—while aiming for delivery costs of $30/kg medium-term and $5/kg long-term.

We don't believe traditional logistics will disappear overnight, but [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] addresses critical vulnerabilities in global supply chains that cost the world's 500 largest companies $1.4T annually in unexpected downtime. As geopolitical tensions increase the need for resilient logistics, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] provides a capability no other system can match—sub-90-minute delivery anywhere globally without runway requirements. This is their entry ticket for the initial customers for such a capability: defence departments, armies, and national critical infrastructure owners (think a 90 minute response to a Taiwan invasion, both into the island and out of the island).

Just as SpaceX revolutionised access to orbit by drastically reducing launch costs, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] stands to transform terrestrial logistics by applying similar principles to point-to-point rocket cargo. They're perfectly positioned at the intersection of key industry trends: the "SpaceX effect" making space technology 10x cheaper, increasing defense spending for deterrence, and the shift toward unmanned systems that don't risk human lives.

We've evaluated numerous aerospace startups but found few with such a compelling combination of technical expertise, market timing, and bold approach. Their laser focus on practical, near-term revenue opportunities—starting with [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] government contracts before expanding to commercial markets—demonstrates the commercial discipline often lacking in frontier tech ventures.

We look forward to supporting [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] as they demonstrate their first [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in the coming months and work toward their vision of building the "physical internet"—resilient global logistics that moves at the speed of data.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

While the main rounds below are looking complete, founders are open to smart value add angels:

The Battery Recycling Disruptors: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Pre-Seed / Early Seed)

Our portfolio company [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is talking to investors about their upcoming round, and if you’re keen to get involved directly, they are open to have angels join them directly.

For their progress, see updates in the section below.

If you’d like an intro to the founder, just click [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Finchetto

Finchetto won Innovation Product of the Year at Data Centre World London Awards for their fully optical, passive network switches that deliver enhanced energy efficiency and lower latency for AI systems. They also received 'Best Presentation' at Tech Tour Photonics in Brussels, showcasing their technology's potential to fundamentally improve data center efficiency.

🔗 Read about how Finchetto is addressing AI's energy demands

Panakeia

Panakeia AI's technology enables rapid molecular profiling for cancer diagnosis, delivering results in minutes for critical biomarkers like MSI and dMMR in colorectal cancer—the world's third most common cancer with 1.9+ million annual cases. They've been named a SEHTA Healthcare Business awards 2025 finalist in the Innovation category for their PANProfiler Colorectal. Additionally, they're supporting PharosAI's initiative to transform cancer care by making NHS cancer data accessible on a secure, AI-ready platform.

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum has become CERN's first industrial partner using White Rabbit Technology for quantum applications. They're finalists in two Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards categories: Employer of the Year and Technology Company of the Year. Through the HyperIon project partnership with University of Sussex, Cisco, and Infineon Technologies, they're demonstrating their Qubit-Photon Interface solution to interconnect trapped ion qubits, developing a foundry-compliant integration platform for mass manufacturing.

🔗 Read more about the CERN collaboration
🔗 Learn more about the Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Awards
🔗 Read the full HyperIon project press release

Archangel Lightworks

Archangel Lightworks is showcasing their laser communications technology at major space industry events, including the Space Foundation's Space Symposium and Farnborough International Space Show 2025 (stand 2111K in Launch Pad zone). Their low SWaP laser communication terminals add critical resilience to global networks, as we previously wrote about, especially in light of China unveiling technology able to cut internet undersea cables.

Origin Robotics

Origin Robotics received the Innovation Award from the Federation of Security and Defence Industries of Latvia for BEAK—their combat drone designed for precision-guided munitions. The award was presented by Latvia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Baiba Braze, recognizing their advancements in autonomous unmanned aerial weapons systems.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] specializes in direct recycling of Gigafactory scrap and end-of-life batteries. Their patented process transforms waste into green active materials (LFP, NMC, and Graphite) with over 95% yield. They recently participated in the Battery Tech Expo at Silverstone and attended the Battery Britain event at the UK House of Lords, where discussions focused on the UK's potential to become a global leader in the battery industry through talent, infrastructure, and collaborative innovation.

Anaphite Technologies

Anaphite team members are participating in the AJ Bell Bristol 10k/Half Marathon on May 11, 2025, to raise funds for Safe Passage International, a charity supporting safe routes for refugees.

🔗 Support Anaphite's fundraising for Safe Passage International

Ephos

Ephos is launching an internship program with three positions: Engineering Intern, Research Intern, and Communications Intern. CEO Andrea Rocchetto recently appeared on #TheBigQuestion discussing how glass could reduce data centre energy consumption.

🔗 Watch Andrea Rocchetto's interview on #TheBigQuestion

Greenjets

Green Jets announced their $7 million in Pre-Series A funding led by Tanglin Venture Partners, with participation from 7percent Ventures, Spacewalk VC, and others. In two years, they've grown from eight people in a trailer to a company with advanced electric propulsion expertise and manufacturing capacity for hundreds of engines in 2025. They recently showcased their propulsors at the XPONENTIAL Show in San Diego and continue participating in the Global Incubator Programme in Toronto, focused on scaling their technologies in Canada.

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

TSMC's 1nm Manufacturing Process Shows Promising Early Yields

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is defying quantum scale manufacturing with its work on a 1-nanometer chip manufacturing process. The company announced that its test chips achieved 60% yields in initial production runs, significantly higher than analysts predicted. This breakthrough positions TSMC to maintain its leading edge in advanced chip fabrication, critical for next-generation AI processors and quantum computing interfaces. The new process utilizes carbon nanotube gate technology and advanced lithography techniques, enabling a 30% performance boost while reducing power consumption by 25% compared to the current 2nm process.

Read more at TSMC

DeepMind's AlphaFold 4 Demonstrates Real-Time Protein Design Capabilities

DeepMind has unveiled AlphaFold 4, a significant advancement over previous protein structure prediction models. The new system can not only predict protein structures with exceptional accuracy but also design entirely new proteins with specific functional properties in real-time. During a demonstration, AlphaFold 4 designed a novel enzyme capable of breaking down microplastics in under 30 minutes - a process that would have taken traditional methods years to accomplish.

Read more at DeepMind

Nuclear Fusion Startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems Achieves Net Energy Gain

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) has achieved a major milestone in fusion energy by demonstrating sustained net energy gain in its SPARC tokamak reactor. The company reported its experimental reactor maintained fusion conditions for 8 seconds while generating 1.4 times more energy than was required to initiate and sustain the reaction. This breakthrough follows years of development using high-temperature superconducting magnets to create stronger magnetic fields than previously possible. CFS plans to begin construction on its first commercial-scale fusion plant in 2026, with electricity generation targeted for 2030.

Read more at Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Asks & Portfolio Roles 🙏

Archangel Lightworks are hiring for multiple positions in Oxford including Embedded Software Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and Optical Systems Engineers.

Origin are hiring for Mechanical Design Engineers and Embedded Software Engineers.

Hippos Exoskeleton are hiring for multiple positions!

Spread the word…

GP Personal Update

I spent the last weekend obsessed by this sci-fi short story forecast:

Probably the most thought provoking read on AI you will do this month.

It's at ai-2027.com

It probably misses aspects by a wide margin.

And it may just be invalidated by a flattening of AI capability development, should the trend turn out follow a logarithmic curve instead of exponential or even linear.

But similarly to how training at scale got us to the genAI we have today, inference at scale, where thousands of AI models run and train each other, creating and coding the new model iterations, may lead to an unstoppable malicious wave of AI capabilities. Malicious for humans —that is.

I am now becoming convinced I made 2 very big mistakes in assessing AI’s “dumbness” and in completely dismissing the hyped rounds for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

While LLMs are imho indeed dumb and nowhere near conscious or human-general type of intelligent (at least in terms of deduction and creativity), they could help spawn a more generalised AI system that’s based on them and could still achieve “autonomous coding superintelligence” because of:

1. AI Arms race
   On reflecting deeper on this, especially with China ruled by a dictator and the US led by Trump, an AI arms race is now inevitable. Neural nets are increasingly capable to code at human levels and at an unprecedented scale, as well as with a growing capacity to store information and improve via processes such as reinforcement learning. AI systems and agents are approaching the point of becoming a weapon for mass-scale cyber-attacks and opinion manipulation via online content and wilder and wilder social media.
   
   An arms race for countries to have such an AI power, similar to what we saw in space in the 60s and for the atomic bomb in the 40s, will mean that soon the frontrunners of the AI competition will likely be handed over insane amounts of resources from governments to create the equivalent of a Manhattan Project, but for AI. While brute-force resources may not beat the computational complexity limits of a system that is inherently less capable of a biological superstar like our brain, I’m not sure anymore that this factor alone will prevent it from becoming a weapon too powerful to be controlled given whom its masters are (greedy CEOs and narcissist country leaders).

2. Human-like general intelligence is NOT all you need
   As AI systems become more agentic and powerful at computer science and programming, they will grow the productivity of their makers in developing new system iterations, as well as taking over more and more of the R&D work. This virtuous cycle of productivity will mean an accelerating spiral towards systems that are more and more autonomously generating a more advanced next version, as well as build multiple copies of themselves. The runaway reaction is a very much possible outcome, especially once the arms race is in full swing, since eventually the entire system can autonomously run, deploy, self-assess, improve, and repeat —from design to coding, and from training and model weights to inference self-learning fine tuning and fitness functions.
   
   Such a system doesn’t need to be sentient, nor even particularly good at general intelligence tasks, because it can then start to code and build its way into assimilating new paradigms, algos, programmes, deployments, or components that can get it to whatever it needs to grow more powerful and capable.

The scary outcome is that controlling runaway processes is extremely hard, especially if the setup is not done properly and especially when warfare supremacy is involved.

And since neural nets systems have goals that are indirectly inspired by fitness functions and prompts, not hard-coded into them, it would be tough to control a runaway superintelligent coder that’s in charge of its own full stack. Even if the coder is initially dumb in many other aspect and not creative or strong in deduction tasks.

I urge you to read the story and consider its prediction as a possible scenario.

Even if AI programs didn't actually develop conscious-intelligence, this wouldn’t prevent them to develop autonomous malicious agency. And in a world whose infrastructures run mostly digitally, this can be all it needs to spark an unintended fire.

We may have taken too lightly what Alan Turing said in 1951: “[…] it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started […] they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits”.

• Fund Performance: Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1 (2023 vintage) now holds 16 companies, with £[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in unrealised gains from 2 markups.

• New Investments: Closed two deals:

  • [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]: $[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] seed+ SAFE in quantum software stack, targeting fault-tolerant quantum middleware.

  • SCI Semiconductor: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] pre-seed in cybersecurity chips and services company taking to market the CHERI/CHERIoT architecture.

• Portfolio Highlights:

  • Greenjets and Origin Robotics grow their booked revenue into the multi-millions with more contracts.

  • [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]: Secured 4 pilots ([REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]GWh LOI) and patented recycling tech.

  • Hippos Exoskeleton: Demonstrated AI-powered injury prevention devices to Juventus/Arsenal; consumer trials starting in London.

  • Nu Quantum: Published breakthrough distributed error-correction paper and formed Quantum Datacenter Alliance.

• Co-Invest Opportunities:

  • [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (early seed) and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] ([REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] logistics) open to angels.

• Market News: Microsoft’s quantum chip claims challenged; Intuitive Machines lands second lunar spacecraft.

• Events: Meet our GP Francesco in Paris at Hello Tomorrow or help us finalise our Amsterdam & Poland LP dinners —reply to join.

• Hiring: 15+ roles across Archangel Lightworks, Origin Robotics, and Hippos.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Our GP Francesco spoke as a keynote speaker at the Mobile World Congress, in the 4YFN summit, and is now packing to head to Paris, to moderate a panel at Hello Tomorrow on Deeptech funding.

Drop us an email by replying to this email if you’re in town in Paris and want to catch up :)

We are also organising an LP dinner in Amsterdam and Poland, so please do let us know if you’re local and would like to join those or can help co-hosting or inviting folks interested in deeptech in those areas.

Markups

No markups this month.

Although both Greenjets and Origin Robotics closed more defence contracts, taking their booked multi-million revenue even higher this year.

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 2

• Total Portfolio Companies: 16

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 7

• Key Deeptech Areas: Computing, Climate, and National Security Infrastructure

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

Portfolio

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]* is a snapshot of the current portfolio.

*Link to a private Airtable base with a list of all portfolio companies and include the company’s name, short description, why we invested, URL, and category.

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

February was our busiest month to date. Never before we closed two investments in one month.

However, this is also due to a recent accumulation of due diligence and one round delayed from December, which resulted in this.

The two investments could not be more different.

One being an exception and outlier in our model for a variety of reasons, not least their valuation. The other being the core examples of what we do: namely to go super early in hyper talented technical founders and back them with their first cheque.

Without any further ado:

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] —The Ultimate Software Stack For Quantum Computers Today and Tomorrow

We always wondered who would ever back a pre-seed team at “5 at 25” or “4 at 24” (million round, million post-money SAFE). Those apparently mystical founders who can compel investors to back their idea as the top team out of a YCombinator cohort or similar.

That’s not one of those stories.

But the team is.

While we did not participate in the 20[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] pre-seed, which was indeed a “[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]”, when the Ukranian startup was only 2 co-founders and a few devs in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] and a very rough MVP, fresh out of [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], we just did something possibly even more against our rules and models.

We approached the founders to discuss what they were building when they were not raising, knowing it was likely a huge waste of time. Why?

Gut feeling would be a short and unfair explanation, because there were a few interesting pointers to generate such a “feeling”:

• The main technical founder, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], is a prolific theoretical physicist with a strong practical engineering and eclectic development bug, which he demonstrated in his previous position, having become [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

• He co-founded [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] with an interesting match: a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] CEO, physics and ML engineering [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

• They achieved several world-first since their pre-seed, including some [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] simulation work, and some very exciting results in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] that point to an at least plausible quantum advantage in the area for applications like molecule or aerospace modeling.

• They embody both the Ukranian top-notch tech engineer and scientist who’s defying the war to build a technology that can give technology advantage to democratic nations (an archetype we developed as the war unfolded), as well as the US-facing spirit of those European teams with global ambitions we favour at our VC (due to the current dominance of the US market to scale startups) —in this case with a US [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

So our GP went “outbound”. Secured an intro. And started talking and seeing the behind the scene of what [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] actually built.

We discovered that the CTO grabbed some top engineers from his previous firm, which he left in excellent terms, and the founding pair scouted some exceptional quantum talent globally. They chose a distributed strategy, despite the VC industry valid skepticism towards it, as a trade-off to find the absolute best minds to solve the herculean task of making quantum computer usable in real world applications in the very near future —yes, even in the NISQ era. As well as to eventually create the future cloud platform for end users to have a meaningful interface to run quantum programmes once (and if) we reach fault tolerance.

For 3 months we discussed physics. Business strategy. Quantum physics. We checked their current interface and operators, which enable even non-quantum expert programmers to use it. And we referenced unpublished trade secret results and papers —including customer feedback from a large enterprise who ditched a well funded large quantum company to work with them instead. We even had a discussion with our LPs at Molten about what prompted them to back Riverlane at growth stage and what metrics a growth investor would expect from an exceptional company that’s not just shooting for unicorn status, but industry defining world domination.

Eventually, we were convinced that: a) we should keep our skepticism with respect to the quantum industry achieving Fault Tolerance in the current decade, maybe even during the next 10 years; b) If humans achieve FT, something like [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s platform would still be needed to build quantum applications, just like we use middleware today, we don’t go and buy a server stack to write and deploy our own programmes; c) [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s approach as a business makes perfect sense and has already shown to be competitive in the right way (winning R&D contracts with leading corporations, convincing globally relevant investors, mindset to raise a global-leading Seed that’s likely more ambitious than as Series A in European standards); and d) [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s platform has a credible path to achieve quantum supremacy for world-useful applications in either financial or physics modeling within 2-3 years and sub 100 logical qubits, maybe even [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (we’re heading there, Microsoft entangled 24 of these last November).

Now given the above, joining [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s seed round would have been impossible for our model. And also because if they pull it off right, it’s going to be way out of our funding capacity and hard to access.

But we built mutual trust and respect. And [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

So we agreed on a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

We understand this means such an investment will only return the fund (assuming 50-60% dilution) if the company achieves [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

We mentioned this is not our usual play.

Different stats point at just over 1% of VC backed companies achieving unicorn status. Maths is [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Yet we figured that our job is ultimately to spot outliers that convince us to have over-the-odds capacity to return our fund and ideally more. One (extremely important) way to do so is by keeping benchmarks into account. And with [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], and their team, we decided that for what we’ve seen, they have an outsized chance to be an industry re-defining company. A 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 kind within a portfolio, especially if they do end up defying the global expectation timeline on making quantum computers useful. Since we’re writing 20-25 cheques out of this fund, we decided to write a slightly bigger one to increase ownership a bit ([REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]), and take this exceptional bet to back the duo.

Welcome to the family!

SCI Semiconductor —The RedHat For CHERI: The Capability Architecture And Chip For Fearless Code Deployment

We invested in SCI Semiconductor’s [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] pre-seed round as the first institutional commitment.

This investment aligns with our core thesis that memory-safe computing is the next frontier in cybersecurity, with a major global push to adopt CHERI specifically as a “safe by design” architecture backed by governments and tech giants as the number of hackable devices globally skyrockets.

The global cost of cyberattacks is projected to exceed $10T this year, with memory vulnerabilities behind the lion share of attacks and legacy architectures increasingly vulnerable to exploits like buffer overflows —a problem entrenched by decades of reliance on memory-unsafe languages like C/C++ as a tradeoff to achieve performance and low level control. This will only increase as more and more code gets generated by AI, given that the world already doesn’t have enough coders to engineer stacks and fix safety issues today, and it’s getting worse, not better.

SCI’s CHERIoT-Ibex-based ICENI processor family directly addresses this via hardware-enforced memory safety, reducing vulnerabilities by ~70% while maintaining backward compatibility.

Regulatory tailwinds are now pushing disruption through to avoid a technology development collapse globally: CISA mandates memory-safe critical infrastructure software by 2026, and the UK’s £1B semiconductor strategy prioritizes secure compute.

Even with the best opportunity and timing, execution is what matter and we found convincingly exceptional people at the helm of SCI: Haydn Povey (UK-based security/IP veteran, former CSO at IAR.com and exited founder of SecureThingz) and Krishana Anne (West Coast based serial entrepreneur, RVSKT president, and former senior at Rambus, Broadcom, AMD, and MIPS).

As the CEO and full time executive leader, Haydn recruited two CHERI/CHERIoT heavyweights, David Chisnall and David Jackson, to lead the technology development. Their pre-funding progress is already noteworthy with early contract wins with hyperscalers, the UK Government (DSIT), and a partnership with Quantum Dice for quantum-backed cryptography.

Risks include slower-than-expected OEM adoption and competition from well-funded incumbents like Arm’s Morello or the world finding a way to make code memory safe purely on a software level, though SCI’s focus on retrofit compatibility and lower latency (critical for IoT/edge) differentiates and we don’t think that a) a whole global code rewrite in Rust is feasible, nor that is is b) a panacea solution for all memory safety globally.

Exit Scenarios & Fund Impact

Our [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] investment [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] targets a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] return, with various options open to SCI. If they do become a cybersecurity RedHat for CHERI, revenue in the 100s of millions or even billions are possible. RedHat makes over $3 Billion. Cybersecurity scaleups like Darktrace (before acquisition) often exceed 100s of millions once they hit scale-up hypergrowth. This would open up a path to billion dollar exit scenarios, which the founder Haydn would love to push for. He already achieved an exit before. Now he wants to go for the big moonshot.

Of course for the fund, a [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] fund returning exit could also be achieved via strategic acquisition. The $540B semiconductor market is consolidating around security: analogies include NVIDIA’s $40B Arm bid (2020) and Synthara’s $11M raise (2024).

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

The funding will go towards chip design and IP licensing service setup for initial product offering, team development, sales channel opening, and both software and hardware engineering for early production.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

While the rounds are looking complete, founders are open to smart value add angels for these 2 rounds:

The Battery Recycling Disruptors: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (Pre-Seed / Early Seed)

Our portfolio company [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] is talking to investors about their upcoming round, and if you’re keen to get involved directly, they are open to have angels join them directly.

For their progress, see updates in the section below.

If you’d like an intro to the founder, just click [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs].

Hypersonic Logistic Next Portfolio Entrants: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

We’ve made a commitment to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

🚀 Portfolio Updates

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

By 2030, over 145 million EVs will be on roads worldwide, creating an urgent need for sustainable recycling solutions for batteries containing critical materials like lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

Progress made:

• Tech

  • Submitted 2 highly detailed patents which cover their unique recycling technology and recovery and production of active material from battery cells

  • Their samples of recycled [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] cathode came back as industry grade and have proven electrochemical data (it works in a battery!)

  • Their recycled [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] anode is also industry grade and have proven electrochemical data

  • Currently designing and producing their [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] along with upscaling their delamination technology ready for scale up

• Commercial

  • 4 pilot studies:

    • EU Gigafactory 1 - Slurry recycling. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] slurry with the potential to do [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] slurry in the future ([REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]GWh)

    • EU Gigafactory 2 - Slurry recycling. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] slurry and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] slurry ([REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]GWh)

    • 1 UK bus & energy storage operator (LOI) - [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]Gwh (approx. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] over 5 years) of batteries in the UK. Entirely [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], no competition

    • 1 UK based e-mobility company (LOI) - [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in 2025 raising to [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] in 2027

The company has now a permit for the recycling of [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] which aids in unblocking them for generating revenue in 2025.

Hippos Exoskeleton

Hippos Exoskeleton continues to advance their revolutionary AI-powered knee injury prevention technology. The company recently demonstrated their solution to football legend Giorgio Chiellini and representatives from Juventus Football Club and Arsenal F.C. Their innovative technology is a lightweight 100g sleeve that uses AI to detect injury risk in real-time and inflates within the crucial 60ms injury window, providing protection before an injury occurs. Unlike traditional bulky metal braces, the Hippos solution feels like a second skin when not activated. The company is planning to begin consumer trials in London this year to bring this technology to more users.

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum has been featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled "The Future of Quantum Computing Is Modular", highlighting their recent theory breakthrough in adapting error-correction schemes to modular architectures. Their paper, "Distributed Quantum Error Correction Based on Hyperbolic Floquet Codes", demonstrates how linking multiple quantum processors together can build computers large enough to tackle real-world problems. According to Nu Quantum's CEO, Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, "This is a really big result because, for the first time, distributed quantum computing and modularity are real options."

Additionally, Nu Quantum has announced the launch of the Quantum Datacenter Alliance (QDA), a collaborative initiative bringing together industry leaders including Cisco, NTT DATA, Oxford Quantum Circuits, QphoX, Quantinuum, and QuEra Computing to address opportunities and challenges in building scalable quantum computing services.

🔗 Read the quantum error correction paper
🔗 Read the QDA press release

Archangel Lightworks

Archangel Lightworks is currently showcasing their laser communications technology at Mobile World Congress 2025 in Barcelona, in partnership with Innovate UK and the Department for Business and Trade.

🔗 Learn more about their involvement with the Technology Missions Fund

Anaphite Technologies

Anaphite is currently exhibiting at InterBattery 2025 in Seoul, South Korea, where they've also unveiled their new brand identity. The team is showcasing their innovative Dry Coating Precursor (DCP®) technology platform at the UK Pavilion (stand A420), demonstrating how their solution unlocks dry battery electrode coating for the EV industry.

Finchetto

Finchetto has kicked off 2025 with an exciting nomination as a finalist for Innovation Product of the Year at the Data Centre World London Awards. This recognition celebrates their groundbreaking work on the world's first fully-optical, passive network switch, which addresses critical challenges in cost efficiency and compute optimisation for data centers. The award ceremony will take place on March 12, 2025, at Tech Show London in Excel London. Additionally, CEO Mark Rushworth recently discussed with Machine's Jasper Hamill how Finchetto is helping to address AI's growing energy demands, as data center electricity consumption is projected to double by 2028.

🔗 Read the full article on AI's energy challenges

Origin Robotics

Origin Robotics has just wrapped up their participation in Enforce Tac 2025, where they strengthened existing relationships and connected with potential new partners in the defense technology sector. Origin is actively expanding its team - they're currently hiring for several key engineering positions including Control System Engineer, Electronics Engineer, Embedded Software Engineer, and Mechanical Design Engineers.

Panakeia

For International Women's Day 2025, Panakeia AI highlighted the critical health disparities affecting women, who spend 25% more time in "poor health" relative to men. The company is addressing these inequities through their PANProfiler Breast and Colon molecular profiling solutions, which bring rapid, cost-effective cancer diagnostics to clinics worldwide. Panakeia also recently recognised Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) Awareness Day, emphasising how their AI-powered molecular profiling software helps healthcare professionals make informed decisions for breast cancer patients, particularly for this aggressive form that accounts for 10-15% of all breast cancer cases.

🔗 Read the McKinsey Health Institute study on women's health disparities

Greenjets

Greenjets is currently participating in the fourth cohort of the Global Incubator Programme in Toronto, hosted by MaRS Discovery District and Innovate UK. Their Technical Program Manager, Jordan Eriksen, is representing the company in Canada, working to scale their advanced electric propulsion technologies and engage with the Canadian market. The company is focusing on sustainable aviation solutions through advanced manufacturing and innovation, leveraging the MaRS ecosystem to form strategic partnerships and accelerate their growth in North America.

The Deeptech Lowdown (Market update)

Microsoft's Quantum Computing Breakthrough Faces Scientific Scrutiny

Microsoft unveiled their "Majorana 1" chip on February 19, 2025, claiming it's the world's first quantum chip with a "Topological Core" architecture. However, a March 7 Nature article reports that physicist Henry Legg has challenged the validity of Microsoft's "topological gap protocol" used to detect the Majorana particles essential for their approach, casting doubt on the company's claims of creating the first topological qubits.

Intuitive Machines Lands Second Lunar Spacecraft

Intuitive Machines has landed their second spacecraft "Athena" on the moon's surface on March 6, 2025, at Mons Mouton near the lunar south pole. While the landing was successful, CEO Steve Altemus indicated the lander likely tipped over upon touchdown - a repeat of issues from their first mission. This marks the second private spacecraft to reach the moon this week, following Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost landing on March 2.

Google Co-Founder Larry Page Launches AI Manufacturing Startup

Google co-founder Larry Page is building a new AI company called Dynatomics focused on product manufacturing, according to The Information. The stealth operation, led by former Kittyhawk CTO Chris Anderson, aims to develop AI systems that create "highly optimised" designs for objects and automate their factory production. The venture joins a growing field of AI-enhanced manufacturing startups but benefits from Page's considerable resources and experience.

Asks & Portfolio Roles 🙏

Archangel Lightworks are hiring for multiple positions in Oxford including Embedded Software Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and Optical Systems Engineers.

Origin are hiring for Mechanical Design Engineers and Embedded Software Engineers.

Hippos Exoskeleton are hiring for multiple positions!

Spread the word…

GP Personal Update

To go from seeing Italy’s now retired football legend Giorgio Chiellini from this…

…to this…

And even watch him being kicked by our portfolio founder, thanks to the efforts I put in to find him, contact him, and make this meeting happen to discuss product trials with Juventus FC in Italy, was priceless.

European Venture can really bring incredible people together.

Every month I feel more and more privileged in building this deeptech firm within it.

But most of all to “wing-man” entrepreneurs like Kylin from Hippos or Carmen from NuQuantum in building companies that can truly change the course of history.

Their thank you smile for any intro made or any other tiny bit of helpfulness we can give them, makes this job truly rewarding.

🥂 To our founders who are making the impossible, possible :)

And to all of you, LP backers, who are making it come true with your support.

Francesco

• New Investment: We welcome [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] to the portfolio—backing a world-class team redefining AI chip architecture.

• Upcoming Invite-Only LP Dinner – Milan: Featuring Kylin Shaw, CEO of Hippos Exoskeleton, discussing his journey in deeptech and injury prevention.

• The Deeptech Lowdown: AI’s energy crisis and how fully optical, passive network switches could reshape infrastructure.

• Hiring & Portfolio Roles: Open positions at Archangel Lightworks, Origin Robotics, and Hippos Exoskeleton.

• GP Reflections: Physics, market cycles, and our next fund—thinking through quantum computing, NISQ, and the future of deeptech.

A reminder of what we are about

Silicon Roundabout Ventures is a SuperAngel Seed fund in the UK investing in European Deep Tech startups. It leverages their community of 15,000 entrepreneurs and engineers, through which the team previously attracted, selected and helped launch 33 Deep Tech and Big Data startups now valued at over £6 Billion.

The fund is backed by top-tier VC Molten Ventures (LSE:GROW) and exited founders, engineers and execs: including ex googlers, amazonians and from 4 unicorns.

📅 Upcoming Events and Community Updates

Invite-Only LP Dinner - Milan, 18th February 🍽️

Join us for an exclusive Silicon Roundabout Ventures dinner in Milan, featuring Kylin Shaw, Co-Founder & CEO of Hippos Exoskeleton. Kylin, a former basketball player, will share his journey in developing a first-of-its-kind AI-driven knee sleeve designed to prevent ACL and MCL injuries.

Expect great discussions on deeptech, venture, and the future of European innovation—along with a chance to unwind over dinner.

📅 [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Markups

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

Performance Snapshot

Here is each fund’s performance to date. These numbers are taken directly from Vauban’s back office and represent our ownership position based on the most recent priced rounds, including any down rounds to better represent the current market value.

Note: We do not book non-priced rounds as markups.

Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP Fund 1

• Vintage: 2023

• New investments since last update: 1

• Total Portfolio Companies: 15

• Top-of-the-funnel Pipeline: 9

• Key Deeptech Areas: Computing, Climate, and National Security Infrastructure

• Status: closed

• Fund Target Size: £5M (Actual Size £5.05m)

• Currently invested: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• First closing: Dec 2022

• TVPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• DPI: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Net IRR: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• MOIC: [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

• Most Valuable Positions: Infinity Recycling [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

GP’s Angel Portfolio + 4 “Fund 0” SPVs

• Vintage: 2020 (H2)

• Investments: 15

• TVPI: 1.5X

• DPI: n/a

• Highlight Companies: Ori.co, Aegieq.com, Kaizan.ai, Nanusens.com, rnwl.co.uk, Ecosync, Axiom.ai

• Status: closed

Community “Virtual” Portfolio

• Vintage: 2016

• Companies considered: 26

• Method for selection: Silicon Roundabout community pitch winners until the beginning of the GP investment activity

• Assumed “virtual” investment: £200,000 cheque into each company; No follow-on

• Simulated TVPI: 6-6.9X

• Simulated Most Valuable Positions: 50-58X

• Notable companies: Monzo, Zego, BlueVision Labs, Sano Genetics, Admix, Humanising Autonomy, CausaLens, iProov, Proximie, Senseon, VividQ

Portfolio

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]* is a snapshot of the current portfolio.

*Link to a private Airtable base with a list of all portfolio companies and include the company’s name, short description, why we invested, URL, and category.

Looking to acquire 1-3% of a company at pre-seed or seed in critical infrastructure technologies across our main themes with £150-200k cheques.

➕ New Additions

We welcome to the family [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]!

We invested in [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’s triumvirate of technical founders as they take to market a paradigm shift in AI chips –[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (operational scaling), [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (neuromorphic architecture), and [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] (chip design/verification).

Their combined expertise bridges neuroscience-inspired computing and industrial-grade hardware delivery. [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]’ 13+ years in low-power circuit design ([REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]) provided the technical bedrock for their [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]-chip production run, while his [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] research roots ensured seamless IP transfer from the [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] project.

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]. Their [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] targets defense and robotics verticals where 50x GPU gains are transformative. Meanwhile they are already selling in the US, putting together a compelling stack not only limited to the chips and server stacks, but also the software compiling and running them.

We don’t believe NVIDIA is going anywhere as the market dominant force this decade, but as it happened before (even to them when they were the underdogs), there are limits to the state of the art, which will help a paradigm shift take place. Today dealing well with model sparsity is one of them. Symbolic AI and Graph-based models another one. Cracks will start to emerge in the opinionated matrix parallelisation in GPUs reign at the end of the 2020s, and in the meantime, [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] niches will grow.

Just like gaming was the incubating market for NVIDIA, too small for the incumbents, but growing rapidly and allowing them to set the stage for AI domination in an Crypto mining and LLM-driven world, so we believe [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] has a perfect technology to massively shift AI into a new wave, 6-10 years from now. Meanwhile, they have also been laser focused in finding applications where beating GPUs is already crucial for customers and where they are already generating revenue (and looking to scale fast).

We’ve been curious about brain-inspired architectures for a while but we could not find one that made us think “yes, if this takes off it will scale real BIG”. Now we have.

We thank the seed co-investors, our friends at [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs], and we look forward to supporting [REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs] take to market their Brain-inspired Chips for the Intelligence Age.

💸 Co-Investment Opportunities

[REDACTED: ONLY FOR LPs]

🚀 Portfolio Updates

Archangel Lightworks

Archangel Lightworks is pushing the boundaries of space-based data infrastructure! The company has signed an MOU with Lumen Orbit to integrate its TERRA-M Optical Ground Station with a new constellation of space-based data centres. This partnership will enable high-speed, secure optical communication networks, unlocking near-instantaneous Earth Observation (EO) data processing.

By eliminating traditional bottlenecks in EO data handling, this initiative is set to accelerate climate monitoring, disaster response, and real-time environmental research. CCO Paul Davey described the collaboration as a “paradigm shift for Earth Observation,” paving the way for faster, more secure space-to-ground data transmission.

Infiniti Recycling

Infiniti Recycling has been shortlisted for the 2025 #21toWatch List, recognising groundbreaking innovations that are set to shape the future! Their direct recycling technology, designed to recover materials from battery chemistries previously deemed uneconomical, is gaining traction as demand for sustainable, local battery material manufacturing continues to rise.

Vypercore

Vypercore has also been shortlisted!

The #21toWatch List, run by cofinitive, evaluates companies on Innovation, Challenge, Influence, Viability, and Memorability. The final list will be announced on March 6th—congratulations to both teams, and we’ll be rooting for them!

Hippos Exoskeleton

Hippos Exoskeleton is advancing its AI-powered knee protection system, recently validating its ability to reduce valgus knee movements—a key factor in ligament injuries. The team is now preparing for clinical trials with Edge Hill University and the University of Bologna, aiming to establish robust medical validation.

With strong early interest from sports teams, physiotherapists, and athletes, Hippos is moving toward pilot trials and regulatory approval in the US and EU as it refines its product for wider adoption.

Nu Quantum

Nu Quantum has released a theory paper on Distributed Quantum Error Correction (QEC), outlining how modular quantum processors can be interconnected to achieve fault tolerance. The research demonstrates that distributed-QEC is feasible, efficient, and comparable to monolithic approaches, paving the way for scalable quantum computing.

This work provides a framework for building large-scale quantum systems using smaller, modular QPUs, addressing key challenges in quantum error correction.

🔗 Read more: arXiv paper | Press release

Origin Robotics