From the Editor’s desk:
The important bits first:
• Please apply for our upcoming Mixer featuring a VC panel — including breakout roundtables and networking drinks — Thursday, Feb 26, London “AI, Power & the Road to 2026”
• Please take our SHORT, two-question, reader survey here.
• Any other thoughts, comments, criticism: [email protected]
Pathfounders will run a programme of curated events this year, alongside a membership network for founders and investors. Sign up to be the first to hear about it here. Make sure you’re a subscriber to this newsletter and follow all our channels below. To partner with the site, newsletter, and/or events, contact our head of partnerships: Ana Williams, Ana[@]pathfounders.com
Like your news and updates from us a little faster? Get our Pathfounders WhatsApp Announcements (appears in your main WA feed) OR get the Pathfounders Whatsapp Public channel.
Upcoming Events
• Catch Mike Butcher, Founder & Editor of Pathfounders, at: Mobile World Congress and subscribe to our Luma to be alerted to our upcoming events. He’s on [email protected]
The Latest on Pathfounders:
Pitch Pathfounders
In our new feature, Pitch Pathfounders, we spoke to first-time founder Aaron Devitt, a 23-year-old Dublin-based founder who dropped out of college to build an AI-native startup he’s convinced will supercharge a hard-to-crack problem in proptech.
Exclusive: Former MI5 engineer secures £2m to keep agentic AI in check
Overmind is building the supervision layer for autonomous AI agents in high-risk industries.
By Amelia Isaacs
Occam raises €3m to bring autonomous drones to Ukraine’s frontline
Backed by European defence investors, the startup is betting the next phase of the war will be decided not by the number of men but by technology, innovation, and autonomous systems.
By Amelia Isaacs
Can Multiverse’s new acquisition give it the growth it needs?
Founder and CEO Euan Blair tells the Pathfounders Podcast what his next strategic moves will be, and why the US didn’t work out as a potential market.
By Mike Butcher
Cities are the key to ClimateTech
As 2150 closes its €210m Fund II, co-founder Christian Hernandez tells the Pathfounders Podcast that cities are the answer to decarbonisation.
By Mike Butcher
Mike’s Drop
Our first event!
First of all, please apply for our first-ever curated Pathfounders Mixer featuring a panel discussion, bringing together founders, investors, policymakers, and ecosystem operators for a sharp on-stage conversation, followed by structured, high-signal networking. We’ll explore the major forces shaping tech and venture in 2026, including: Geopolitics and capital flows; AI’s next phase of growth; and what’s next for strategic technologies across the UK and Europe.
The first speakers to be announced are (more to come):
• Sitar Teli, Managing Partner, Connect Ventures
• Alex van Someren, recently exited as the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security and former Managing Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners
• More to come!
2026: The year Europe grows up?
• And can Europe create its own social media?
In attempted number 197 (it might as well be at this point), a startup called “W” launched at Davos, attempting to become a sovereign social platform for Europe. W forks the BlueSky protocol ATT, but you can only join a waitlist for now.
It's backed by an advisory board, former ministers, and businesses, most of which are based in Sweden. The two Vs in W supposedly stand for "values" and "verified."
W is designed to remain under European ownership. (Let’s also note that Mastodon is moving to a European nonprofit structure after initially operating as nonprofit in Germany.)
‘W’ CEO, Anna Zeiter, who recently left her job as chief privacy officer at eBay said there’s an “urgent need” for a new social media platform built, governed, and hosted in Europe.
We’ll see what the product is like before we comment further.
Davos Redux: Is Sovereignty the answer to would-be Kings?
The technology industry is in a state of heightened awareness at the start of 2026. The moniker for Davos was “the spirit of dialogue.” But as I pointed out in my video piece short from there, the actions and stance of the Trump administration created something much closer to a “spirit of destabilisation.” This meant that, as one founder who specialised in sovereign compute put it to me over a dinner, “Trump just made me a billionaire.”
Emerging from the frenetic Davos/WEF period, European entrepreneurs and investors were ‘cock-a-hoop’ that the ‘EU Inc’ project to create a Delaware style company structure for the whole of the EU had been mentioned on stage by Ursula von Der Leyen at the WEF. Only to then hit reality when people started asking how long it would take….
The brief Davos download:
VCs were unusually present during the Davos gang-bang. Lightspeed had an entire ‘house’ - dubbed (tres originally, ‘Lighthouse’), while First Minute Capital’s Brent Hoberman and Balderton Capital’s Bernard Liautaud were glad-handing all and sundry at various events and receptions. This rarely used to happen at Davos (and I’ve been going for a number of years). The main constituent population at Davos is bankers and financiers, NGOs, governments, Crypto kids and Nepo-babies. Rarely VCs and startup founders, whose budgets are generally leaner. What was attracting them? Well, it’s pretty simple: The world has become nightmarishly more febrile since Trump returned, so the only real way to get a sense of what is actually going the f*ck on was to get in amongst the Davos hordes and suck up contacts, and the atmosphere.
Another indication that Davos/WEF will be in everyone’s diary for next year was the sheer amount of AI companies present - its effect on jobs and economies will no doubt draw them back for years to come, Trump or no Trump.
Palantir’s Karp said humanities graduates are doomed, but BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein said it was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology,” and McKinsey’s global managing partner said the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity.”
The CEO of Google’s DeepMind Technologies was more optimistic. Hassibis said internships would likely be replaced by interns learning AI tools instead. However, the job market would be in “uncharted territory” after the arrival of AGI.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO didn’t denying the existence of an AI bubble, but said it was a misreading of the needed investment into AI infrastructure, such as compute. Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, agreed with him. Huang added that Europe was well placed for this moment.
Microsoft CEO Nadella said AI had to grow beyond tech otherwise the bubble would burst.
Kristalina Georgieva, head of the International Monetary Fund, said AI would be a “tsunami hitting the labour market”, with young people worst affected.
Elon Musk was, as usual, full of… superlative comments: "We might have AI smarter than any human by the end of this year,” he claimed, not unexpectedly. We’d also all have robots and “abundance for all" later on. Of course, none of his robots are actually working in his own factories yet.
Yann LeCun just dumped on LLMs as usual.
In a spooky prediction of the Moltbot craze, which took off with vengeance in the last couple of weeks, Canadian computer scientist and one of the so-called 'God-fathers of AI', Yoshua Bengio, warned at Davos that today's systems are trained too closely to be like humans. Well, guess what, that’s almost exactly how these Moltbots were behaving on Moltbook.
Also at Davos, Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, said humans could lose control of AI and “not selling chips to China is one of the biggest things we can do to make sure we have time to handle this.” Guess what happened the week after? China gave the green light for Chinese AI companies to buy Nvidia H200 AI chips. So that prediction lasted a matter of days.
And pretty much everyone was excited about Agentic AI.Pitch Pathfounders
Pitch your startup to Pathfounders. Fill out this form, and you may get featured.
Op-Eds and Contributed Columns
We’re ready to start receiving pitches for Op-Ed columns. These can be on tech, startups, investing, AI, the future, frankly, you name it. So long as it tech starup or VC-related and bloody interesting.
The rules are: A short paragraph outlining the piece. Followed by three or four bullet points about the main issues you’d cover. The argument must be backed up by third-party references. We’ll only take pieces we green-light. Nothing submitted ‘on-spec’. We will build a form for these submissions, but in the meantime, you can pitch us at [email protected]. Pitching us more generally? Here’s all you ned to know about that subject.
Hot Tips and News
Please send all tip-offs, suggestions, and news to [email protected]
That’s all, folks
As always, you can interact with Pathfounders via the email [email protected] and, even, via an anonymous form if you want to tell us something you think is important, but would prefer to keep some distance. You can even subscribe to Pathfounders WhatsApp Announcements (appears in your main WA feed) or the Pathfounders Whatsapp Public channel.
Follow Pathfounders:
Pathfounders WhatsApp Announcements (appears in your main WA feed)
We are not on Substack (sorry), but we will publish headlines from here.