Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we connect and champion the people building European venture.
In this episode, Andreas Munk Holm sits down with two pillars of Italy’s modern tech ecosystem:

• Giovanni Daprà, CEO & co-founder of Moneyfarm, one of Europe’s leading digital wealth management platforms

• Paolo Gesess, co-founder & GP at United Ventures, one of Italy’s premier early-stage VC firms

Together, they unpack how Moneyfarm went from a Milan-founded startup to a pan-European fintech player; how Italy’s ecosystem has evolved; how United Ventures backed Giovanni through multiple strategic inflection points; why the shift from Blitzscaling to Default Alive made Moneyfarm stronger; and how European fintech is entering an era of consolidation and acquisition-led expansion.

This is an episode full of concrete frameworks, real founder–VC dynamics, and hard-earned lessons from building across Italy, the UK, and Europe.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 04:00 | Moneyfarm as a digital wealth manager built to make investing simple, guided + discretionary, now managing £6.5B across Italy & the UK

• 04:54 | Why United Ventures backed them: early conviction in a massive savings problem, founder clarity from day one, and a mission that remained unchanged for 13 years

• 06:31 | Building from Italy first: leveraging local regulatory fluency + talent cost advantages while keeping a pan-European vision from day zero

• 08:59 | Italy today vs. 2012 — more capital, more repeat founders, more international operators returning, and a dramatically deeper talent pool

• 13:21 | The “tipping point” moments — moments where the board must choose: buy back shares, bring in global investors, widen the model (e.g., B2B2C)

• 17:45 | Where Moneyfarm is now — strong in Italy + UK, product expansion complete (brokerage + pensions), and preparing for the next geographic phase

• 18:37 | Surviving the capital cycle: seeing interest rates spike in real-time, shifting from burn to profitability in 24 months, and reshaping the framework for Europe

• 19:50 | The Europe playbook: “default alive” — why blitzscaling never fit most of Europe, and how disciplined scaling becomes a competitive advantage

• 22:25 | Founders vs. VCs on growth vs. profit — debunking the myth: alignment, capital structure, and long-term value trump forcing hypergrowth

• 23:09 | Managing founder stress & incentives — secondaries, refreshed equity plans, changing founder roles, and adapting governance over a 10-year journey

• 25:41 | The cap table reality — Moneyfarm with VCs, PEs, and industrials: why no one could force a “burn it all” strategy even if they wanted to

• 27:41 | Building European-style VC — United Ventures’ thesis: European standards, European ambition, and preparing founders for international Series B/C investors

• 30:09 | The next frontier: pan-European expansion, from product expansion → to commercial optimization → to cross-border consolidation

• 34:13 | Growing into M&A as a founder — Moneyfarm’s three acquisitions, building the muscle, and using M&A as a growth lever when organic slows

• 36:11 | The M&A playbook — when to build vs. buy, why scale matters, and the founder’s job in orchestrating product-led acquisitions

• 37:40 | What founders often underestimate — M&A is expensive, cognitively draining, and requires dedicated people so you don’t destroy core execution

• 39:47 | The board’s role — independent perspectives, long-term value thinking, and helping the CEO avoid deal fever or tunnel vision

• 41:00 | The hard question: exits & fund cycles — how VCs manage tail-end holdings, DPI realities, continuation funds, and why selling is not betrayal

• 43:48 | DPI explained simply — why some funds need liquidity earlier, and why United didn’t (strong DPI → more patience → no forced exit)

In this episode, Andreas sits down with Michael Sackler, founder of Supernode Global, to unpack the thesis behind Supernode’s Fund II: backing application-layer software with great UI/UX — the tools people actually use every day at home and at work — at a time when most European funds avoid consumer and default to “AI-infra everything.”

Michael shares how his background in film shaped his view on tech leverage, why Supernode focuses on consumer-grade experiences applied to B2B, what their six theme areas are (wellbeing, productivity, community, creative and professional augmentation), and why they’re putting unusually strong skin in the game with a 34% GP commit.

Welcome back to the EUVC Podcast where we dive deep into the craft of building and backing venture-scale companies in Europe.

Modern software doesn’t fail quietly.

It fails on Black Friday.
It fails while the CFO is in a board meeting.
It fails when your biggest customer is mid-way through a critical workflow.

And when it does, there’s one brutal reality:
The data is there but nobody has time to interpret it.

Today we’re exploring one of the most under-discussed yet mission-critical parts of building modern software: reliability in production.

Joining Andreas are:

👩🏻‍💻 Poone Mokari: CEO & Co-Founder, ewake
Paris-based startup building AI agents for software production reliability, fresh off a $2M pre-seed led by Connect Ventures.

💥 Pietro Bezza — Managing Partner, Connect Ventures
Europe’s most product-obsessed early-stage investors (Aikido, Typeform, TrueLayer), backing ewake as their next agentic AI investment in observability.

We unpack why observability is overdue for a rewrite, how AI agents finally provide the “reasoning layer” that logs & metrics never could, and how ewake is building a global devtools company out of Paris.

Here’s what’s covered:

• 01:12 | What ewake does — AI agents for software production reliability that reason across logs, metrics & code to cut through observability overload

• 02:32 | Why Connect backed them — trusted intros, a massive category (post-cloud, multi-$B), and founders with rare insider insight into reliability engineering

• 05:18 | The shift AI enables — from reactive data dashboards to an intelligence layer that correlates structured + unstructured data and finds root causes

• 07:48 | The hidden layers of tech — why deep, unglamorous infrastructure (observability, reliability, SRE workflows) is a massive opportunity for new entrants

• 08:52 | The wedge — LLMs as reasoning engines over infrastructure data: not more dashboards, but an operator that collaborates with engineers in critical moments

• 11:48 | Production ≠ code on your laptop — the real-world complexity: business context, urgency, multi-team coordination, and why semantic reasoning matters

• 14:38 | “Can we trust AI?” — why agentic workflows differ from ChatGPT, how ewake constrains context, guards against hallucinations & enforces “don’t know” responses

• 16:38 | Founder–market fit — living the pain at Criteo, deep SRE experience, and product instincts that made ewake’s pitch compelling pre-product

• 17:16 | Connect’s thesis — product-first founders, problem insight over pedigree, and why product is the highest leverage driver of venture-scale outcomes

• 22:31 | Product-led ≠ PLG — clarifying the difference between product-first strategy and the specific go-to-market motion of product-led growth

• 26:02 | How Awake raised $2M pre-product — insight clarity, storytelling from lived experience, fast-moving investors, and a clear “teammate, not dashboard” vision

• 30:40 | What Connect looks for — opinionated founders with singular insight, UX instincts, and a tinkerer’s mindset for frontier-tech categories

• 38:20 | Why build in Paris — deep AI talent pools, strong engineering culture, global problem space, and a shift toward France as a magnet for AI founders

• 42:15 | Geography myths — why great companies emerge anywhere, Europe’s deep industry advantage, and dual-hub (EU + US GTM) playbooks

• 47:23 | Where ewake is now — out of stealth, hiring, in design partnerships, building alongside early users, and stress-testing agents in real incidents

• 51:52 | Final reflections — design-led vs. tinker-led founders, why ewake fits the frontier-tech profile, and what the next wave of AI infra looks like