Partner @atomico — VC investments in applied AI, Seed to Series B, in Europe 🇪🇺🚀. Football fan, skier, engineer.
Europe
Joined March 2015
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A man with taste - @JensenHuang picking an absolute gem for Döner Kebab on his visit to Berlin: Rüyam. Excellent choice!
Stealing this - what a great quote and analogy.
Been saying this for a while: defensibility is overrated. It serves as a theoretical VC armchair exercise, it sounds smart and thoughtful but it holds little real value.
What’s widely considered a moat:
> Technical depth - whatever it is, it will be easier to replicate it in the future than it was to build it in the past
> Integrations - someone else can build that too?
> Creating switching cost / lock-in - yeah, kinda works for a while but it can be overcome if only your product sucks enough vs competitors
> Some regulatory piece - if one company gets approval, the next can get it too. And even if it’s a temporarily exclusive license, it’s always only temporary
> Partnerships - won’t stay exclusive forever, and actually creates an existential tail risk of the partnership getting cancelled by the other party
> Patents / IP - not irrelevant for DeepTech but often too narrow. Even here, actual academic excellence & talent gravity is more important.
> Brand - that’s a better moat than its reputation tbh, hard to destroy from the outside but so easy to destroy from within. And takes time to build.
> network effects - yes, that’s a moat but true network effects are so rare in real life.
> “data” - maybe. at a late stage but not at the early stage.
So many discussions about a company’s “defensibility” - when it’s much more important what a company’s“offensive capability” is:
Velocity, intensity, culture, hiring, commerciality, excellence, being early to a market and being relentless - founder traits and founder mentality that extends to the entire company.
Which is funnily enough exactly what creates a company’s true, real defensive ability over time.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, my dear alma mater - do better! For a university that was attended by three out of five of SAP's founders, and that is still one of the best technical universities in Germany - we should be ranking much higher than where we are.
@Pioniergarage @etnshow
Andreas Helbig retweeted
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Chancellor Merz:
I've also heard you say that you want to find that balance between innovation and regulation.
There's nothing to regulate if the industry doesn't thrive.
Sorry @elonmusk - your cars might fly and such, but Karl from Germany is not convinced yet:
Flying cars are not useful, won’t get approved by the regulator and even they would, only millionaires could afford it.
Better luck next time, Elon! Maybe innovate a bit harder, ja?
Die Elektro-Ente ist nützlich und erschwinglich. Das groteske Raketenauto von @elonmusk wird im Verkehr keine Rolle spielen. Wenn es überhaupt die Zulassung bekommt können es sich nur Millionäre leisten. Die deutsche Autoindustrie hat von Tesla nichts mehr zu befürchten.
🇪🇺🇮🇹
Such a fantastic company.
$BSP up nearly 50% as Berkshire Hathaway doubles down on Bending Spoons with another $330M on top of its original $600M IPO investment.
let's not fuck this up, europe. thanks @euinc_petition / @andreasklinger for pushing this conversation back on track
Andreas Helbig retweeted
At this point the whole EU Inc negotiations are so lost in the details that everyone forgot the main goal: Creating a standard.
Basically, allow founders to raise quickly globally and use stock options to hire competitively.
Let’s say it quite clearly:
1) If EU Inc isn’t providing a standard it’s useless. We already got 30+ legal entities in Europe. Experienced founders use Delaware Inc already because of this.
2) If EU Inc doesn’t fix stock options Delaware Inc is still the better option.
I understand the there are complex details and people are worried about loopholes. But you can’t lose the actual goal of it because of it.
An EU Inc that doesn't provide a standard is pointless. Nobody will care about intricacies of compromises reached in political committees if the market can't use the outcome.
If you are in contact with your political leaders (prime ministers, presidents, et al) please reach out to them. Or to founders/investors in your network who might have that access.
🔥🇪🇺✌️
xitter.cf/euinc_petition/status/…
The best and nuanced take on Valar Atomics vs Day One aka “Kendrick vs Drake for people who know what a post-money SAFE is” - the topic of the day in Venture in the US.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Andreas Helbig retweeted
It’s begun.
The season where Swedish developers go into their fiber-connected caves for 6 months of darkness outside.
Can’t wait to see what will ship. glhf
europe finally has a strong frontier llm with mistral - and what does germany's number one and government endorsed search engine ecosia do?
shut it off because it runs on french nuclear power
instead it'll pick chinese models
i've seen german nuclear psychosis over the last decades - but this one sets a new bar. wtf
Berlin-based search engine Ecosia, used by government services, is dropping its French AI partner, Mistral, its CEO told POLITICO.
The company will now bet on open-source models, including those from China.
vist.ly/5mh5y
I was born in the city where one of the most important patents of modern history was filed: The Benz Patent-Motorwagen - the worlds first automobile - patent DRP 37435, filed by Carl Benz, in Mannheim, 29 Jan 1886 (admittedly quite some years before my birth). As a kid, I used to roam the Landesmuseum für Technik und Arbeit there, admiring all the pieces of technology around me, and becoming fascinated by the innovation process itself. How do people come up with this - what makes gas combust? What makes steel fly? How do you get these ideas?
And I'm so proud to work with a company that makes actual, real inventions happen faster - Ankar. In Founder & CEO Tamar Gomez' own words - "Were reinventing the way inventors invent. There is absolutely no blueprint for what we do."
Tamar co-founded Ankar with Wiem Gharbi to build the operating system for innovation: an AI platform that helps enterprises to accelerate their R&D cycles and to unlock breakthrough innovation at an unprecedented rate, quality and defensibility.
I sat down with Tam to discuss where an R&D team's time really goes, why breakthroughs often happen where two fields meet, and how Ankar actually helps teams get there faster.
Atomico led Ankars $20M Series A in December 2025, and were proud to partner with Tamar and the team as they expand throughout Europe and the US. Ankar has been absolutely crushing it. The worlds most ambitious R&D teams already trust Ankar with their invention process - such as L'Oréal and Valeo (and many many more who sadly cant be named - R&D is a secretive field after all)
Watch the full conversation here: youtube.com/watch?v=aOJHQxbP…
And meet Tamar at one of their events on 20th Oct in London - if you're an engineer, PM or product builder working at the intersection of software, AI and the physical world, please join! lnkd.in/p/eSYZWRx3
Andreas Helbig retweeted
Europe is the only region stupid enough to invest all it's money into other region's economies and then complain that their own economy doesn't improve.
🇺🇸🇪🇺 Europe once had factories and no money. Now it has the money, but it sends much of it away.
Where do European savings go? Across the Atlantic, into America, where they flow into US equities, Treasuries, and other financial assets—and, increasingly, into the valuations of a handful of tech giants.
Those returns are difficult for American factories to match, which helps push capital toward finance and technology rather than manufacturing.
Meanwhile, European plants face high energy costs, weak investment, and growing Chinese competition—all problems that more capital could help address, yet European savings continue to finance American assets.
I call this “the West’s carry trade against itself”: Europe saves; America turns those savings into financial assets and inflated tech valuations; meanwhile, China builds the factories.
The chart below shows twenty years of this dynamic.
More on this soon: open.substack.com/pub/europe…
