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I'm a quantum physicist turned VC, and leading Atomico early-stage deep tech
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisHad a great time at HumanX in Amsterdam this week, on stage with Jai Das of Sapphire Ventures and Roseanne Wincek of Renegade Partners (thanks Romain Dillet for moderating). Three main notes I jotted: 1. Capital can speed things up, but it can't fix the fundamentals. Nobody doubts that a lot of money accelerates development, and in parts of AI where scale matters it makes a real difference. The harder question is whether it helps you build a company that becomes money-making and stays that way. 2. Europe has a real opportunity across the whole AI supply chain. At Atomico we've been laser focused on building resilience into what is likely the most important technology of the coming decades. That runs from deep tech and infrastructure, such as Lace Lithography in lithography, tem in energy (great to see you in the room Ross Mackay and Bartlomiej Szostek!), simulations of the real world with PhysicsX through AI-native companies like Framer. These are the capabilities that will shape European tech sovereignty. 3. The environment for European founders is shifting. There's growing political recognition of founders as agents of change, and AI is making building companies more accessible, so more people in more places can have a go. That gives real scope for significant tech companies to come out of Europe, including from outside the usual hubs.
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisThe energy infrastructure for the 21st century has just become one step more efficient and now enables many more energy businesses to be built on top of it 🔌⚡🚀 Congrats tem and Versa Energy!Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisWe've taken a minority stake in Versa Energy, the UK's leading white-label energy supplier. tem's long-term vision has always been the same: build the infrastructure the next generation of energy businesses will run on. That means two things: every transaction priced closer to the true cost of energy, and a licensed route to supply it through. We do the first. Versa does the second. We've worked together since we began. Versa holds the Ofgem licence and handles the regulated supply behind it: meter registrations, compliance, the rest. Our technology, Rosso, prices every transaction and runs the operations underneath. Both of us keep operating independently. The result: bills and prices closer to the true cost of energy, backed by the full protection of a regulated UK supplier. This stake is the next move in that same plan, backing Versa to accelerate the next generation of energy businesses, whoever builds on Rosso next. Read the full release: https://lnkd.in/ekJp8jQ7
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisLet's go to Space! 🚀Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisToday, we’re proud to announce that Atomico has co-led The Exploration Company’s $450 million Series C, the largest ever round raised by a European space company and by an EU-headquartered company led by a female founder and CEO. Space infrastructure underpins everything from communications and scientific research to security and critical services. Yet the ability to reach, supply and return from orbit remains concentrated and fragile. TEC is changing that. This funding will advance Nyx, its reusable, launcher-agnostic spacecraft, towards docking with the International Space Station and returning safely to Earth. It will also accelerate Storm, the reusable high-thrust rocket engine designed to lay the propulsion foundations for a future European heavy-lift launcher. Together, these technologies will strengthen Europe’s resilience in space transportation while serving customers and institutions worldwide. Hélène Huby and her exceptional team are proving that Europe can turn world-class engineering into industrial strength at global scale. We’re delighted to co-lead alongside Bessemer Venture Partners, the Scale Up Europe Fund managed by EQT Group, and partner with TEC’s existing investors Cherry Ventures, Plural, Balderton and Red River West. Congratulations to Hélène and the entire TEC team. 🚀 https://lnkd.in/eJqivH8p
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared this"Money back to people" is probably one of the most compelling north stars one can have. $50m and and tem is just getting!Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisFeels like only yesterday we were speaking to our first customers, and today, we’re celebrating £50m is back in the hands of tem customers. £50m that hasn’t been squeezed by the market or sucked out by layers of intermediaries. Our technology is changing the very economics of how energy is priced, and we’re only getting started. Proud of all of us for pushing relentlessly toward our north star ⭐ Joe McDonald Jason Stocks Ross Mackay Bartlomiej Szostek
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisExcited to finally announce Atomico’s newest partnership with Callosum! 🎊 There is no silver bullet for inference efficiency and cost. No single chip, model, or workflow can deliver across every use case. 🧩 Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg are building for exactly that reality: a world in which an entirely new inference stack is emerging - and enterprises need a seamless, autonomous way to navigate and harness it. 🚀 That's Callosum 🧠💻Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisToday, we’re delighted to announce that Atomico is leading Callosum’s $100M seed round, one of the largest ever raised in Europe, alongside Plural, DCVC, Sovereign AI. As AI moves from training to inference, a new constraint is emerging: compute. Callosum is solving that problem. Its platform breaks AI workloads into their component tasks and routes each one to the model and chip best suited to the job. The result: more useful intelligence from every unit of compute, without developers having to manage the complexity underneath. And it’s already delivering. Today they also announced a partnership with US chip maker Cerebras. Working with them, on complex agentic workloads in financial services, Callosum ran workloads 4x faster, reduced compute costs by 70%, and improved task success rates by 10% compared with a single frontier model running on conventional infrastructure. Faster. Cheaper. More accurate. But this isn’t just about efficiency. A heterogeneous approach also makes AI infrastructure more resilient, reducing dependence on any single model, chip or architecture. Atomico we believe the future of compute is heterogeneous. Callosum is building the infrastructure layer for that future. We’re incredibly excited to partner with Danyal Akarca, Jascha Achterberg and the entire Callosum team as they build for the agentic era. Read more on why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/ey967463 Bloomberg article linked in the comments.
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisLace Lithography on yesterday's China DUV news and big shake up to the stock market. Spot on: "The moat was never the machine. The moat is the will, the intensity, and the problem-solving it takes to build the next one." A big shift is underway in semiconductors. An industry used to moving in decades now has to move in quarters. Are untouchable markets still untouchable today? Not for long.Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisIt was always going to happen. Yesterday, reports confirmed that China has started producing homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, with the first units shipping to SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT this year. The volumes are small for now: five machines in 2026, roughly twenty next year. The capability is not. These tools target the 28nm node, and with multi-patterning they can potentially reach the 7nm node. Take the capabilities seriously. China has the resources and the patience to outwork the rest of the world. But take the urgency more seriously still. Beijing treats lithography as a matter of strategic national priority, and it moves accordingly. Low-resolution EUV out of China (likely 100% for the domestic market) within the next few years is not a remote scenario. It is the likely one. Advanced lithography is the deepest bottleneck in the semiconductor supply chain, and for decades it has also been the West's deepest moat. A company, technology and supply chain that nobody else could replicate. In a race where control of intelligence is critical, this part of the world has been asleep at the wheel, betting that the existing answer would remain the answer forever. We started Lace three years ago because we fundamentally disagree. EUV was the answer then, and it still is today. But it will not be the answer forever. In two years, we printed patterns with a resolution that took the industry fifteen years and billions of dollars to reach. And we are just getting started: three years from now, our first EUV-capable platform will be printing chips at industrial scale, and within five, we will extend resolution to levels previously considered impossible, with larger field sizes and at a fraction of the cost. The moat was never the machine. The moat is the will, the intensity, and the problem-solving it takes to build the next one. The future is bright when you print it with atoms. p.s. We’re hiring across many roles (link in comments). If you have the ambition to build the future of chipmaking, come join us
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisLisa Sorg is one of a kind - she’ll build smth amazing, so we are all excited to follow the next chapter! Godspeed!Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisYou can't connect the dots looking forward - only backwards. Nine years ago, I interned at Lazada in Singapore, working for Maximilian Bittner. Then I spent my career in VC at Visionaries and Atomico, backing Europe's most ambitious founders. Now it's my turn to build, and I couldn't be more excited to start a company with Max, backed by the firms that shaped me as an investor. A full circle moment. We've raised €12M from Headline, Atomico, Rerail, Global Founders Capital and a group of angels I'm genuinely proud of: Alexandre Berriche, Arthur Waller, Christian Lindner, Ilkka Paananen, Miki Kuusi, Robert Gentz to name just a few - founders and leaders behind many of Europe's defining success stories. We'll share more soon. Until then: if you're an exceptional engineer or builder who's excited about the wealth space - and wants to join our team literally from day one - we'd love to hear from you. We’ll be building from London, but focus is on Europe from the start. As this also marks the end of my 2.5 years at Atomico, I wanted to say a huge thank you to the entire Atomico team, but especially Niklas Zennström, Andreas Helbig, Ben Blume, and Sasha Vidiborskiy for the trust and support I’ve received. I can't wait to continue working together - just from the other side of the table. cc: Christian Miele, Jonathan Userovici, Niklas Zennström, Andreas Helbig, Anthony Danon, Oliver Samwer, David Sainteff
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisEurope needs to be more resilient. Semiconductors are critical part of it. Lace Lithography is a critical part of it 🤏⚛️Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisVery pleased to present Lace Lithography and share our perspectives at the consultation workshop with the European semiconductor industry on the resilience and security of Europe´s supply chain, which took place in Brussels yesterday. Thank you very much to Pierre Chastanet and the EC Microelectronics Team for organizing this very interesting and important event.
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Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisHaving grown up in Moldova 🇲🇩 , where preventative healthcare is standard, I assumed that it’s the same everywhere 🏥 . But it's not. And I get it: it's expensive, it uncovers a bunch of things that might not even be worth attention, insurers hate to pay for it, it takes time, etc etc. But it saves lives. It improves quality of life. It prolongs lives. Neko Health make it affordable, accessible and efficient for everyone 🫶 And it will change the world 🌏 Huge congrats on the milestone, team, and Atomico is honoured to be a part of the story!Sasha Vidiborskiy shared thisWe've raised a $700M Series C, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners. More than 350,000 people have joined the waitlist for a Neko Health Scan, and ~100,000 people have been able to experience one in Sweden or the UK. Now, we're coming to the US. Neko's approach to redefining how people understand and act on their health is already working: for returning members, our data shows that 5 out of 7 of their key health markers showed statistically significant improvement between scans. This funding will scale our research into the hidden causes of disease and the development of proprietary technology to detect it before it has time to develop. It will also fund our continued expansion, and our first US clinic is set to open in New York this year. You can join the waitlist on our website. This round comes weeks after our biggest update yet to the Neko Health Scan, with body composition measures and clinician review of wearable data now included in all scans across our clinics. We're grateful for the continued support of Atomico, General Catalyst, and Lakestar, and welcome new investors including Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD Partners.
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1d
Bodil Holst and Adrià Salvador Palau ;)
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisI’m delighted to welcome Alex Kayyal to Model ML as our Chief Financial Officer. Alex has spent more than two decades building, investing in and advising some of the world’s leading technology companies. Most recently, he was CFO of The Trade Desk (NASDAQ: TTD), a public technology company with nearly $3 billion in revenue. His history with the company actually goes back more than a decade: he was one of its early investors, later joined the board as an independent director, and ultimately became CFO. Before that, Alex spent nearly a decade at Salesforce, where, as SVP and Managing Partner of Salesforce Ventures, he helped build the investment business globally and oversaw more than $5 billion invested across 300+ companies. He later became a General Partner at Lightspeed, and across his investing career has backed and worked closely with companies including Algolia, Atlan, monday.com, Gong, Snyk, Tennr and Wiz. He started his career at Merrill Lynch, first in the Office of the CFO and then advising companies on IPOs and M&A, much of the same work our customers now run on Model ML. Across his career, Alex has sat on 11 boards and worked closely with more than 30 technology companies. As a banker, operator, investor and board member, he’s seen how great technology companies are built and scaled from almost every side of the table. Hiring a CFO at this stage can sometimes feel like hiring another founder. Being exceptional at the job is only one piece of the puzzle. Finding someone who thinks about the world the way you do, shares the ambition for what you’re building, and is willing to do whatever it takes to win is a whole different ball game. I didn’t tell Alex this at the time, but I knew within about five minutes of meeting him that he was that person. Welcome to Model ML, Alex. Let’s get to work. Thank you Pietro for making the introduction. Feels like a decade ago!
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisSuper fun chatting with Bob Mumgaard today at Reuters Fusion Energy 2026 about the exciting progress in fusion energy and the responsibility that comes along with commercialization.Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisIn this afternoon's fireside on "The Responsibility of the Opportunity: A Call to Action for Fusion" at Reuters Fusion Energy 2026, Bob Mumgaard, CEO, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, reflected on the progress, challenges, and responsibility that come with commercializing fusion energy. A great conversation, filled with humour, and in a packed room, wonderfully moderated by Alice Brooks, Partner at Khosla Ventures. Highlights from the discussion: ⚡ Fusion has moved from a fringe concept to a credible energy solution, with milestones such as NIFs ignition breakthrough helping validate decades of scientific progress. 📈 Clear, measurable milestones matter. From achieving plasma to generating net electricity and commercial viability, the industry needs transparent benchmarks that investors, policymakers, and the public can trust. ❄️ The industry must avoid another fusion winter. The discussion explored fusion winters, periods of stagnation caused by overpromises and scientific missteps, such as the Pons and Fleischmann controversy and the Zeta experiment in 1958. These winters have historically damaged public perception, underscoring the need for transparency and accountability. Mumgaard drew parallels with other industries, including AI and crypto, which experienced similar cycles of hype, failure, and resurgence. He referenced milestones like the quantum equivalence milestone in quantum computing and the Turing Test in AI as examples of how clear benchmarks can attract investment and drive progress.🏗️ SPARC represents the next major step to demonstrate net fusion energy and pave the way toward commercial deployment. He expressed optimism about the modular design of fusion plants, which could lead to cost reductions and scalability. He noted that while building first-of-a-kind systems is expensive and complex, cost curves for components like magnets and capacitors show promising trends. The modularity of fusion plants offers potential for repeated parts and streamlined manufacturing, making them economically viable in the long term. 💰 While first-of-a-kind systems will be costly, modular plant designs and improving cost curves for key technologies could support long-term scalability and affordability. 🤝 Public-private collaboration remains critical, with industry milestone programs helping establish clear pathways toward commercialization. 🌎 Beyond energy, fusion has the potential to reshape economies, industries, and global infrastructure in the same way other transformative technologies have throughout history. The message was clear: fusions opportunity is enormous, but realizing it will require transparency, accountability, and a relentless focus on achieving meaningful milestones. #FusionEnergy #CommercialFusion #EnergyInnovation #FusionPower #REFusionEnergy
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisThank you so much to those who have shared such wonderful messages. It really is the honour of my career to have been appointed Managing Partner of the peerless Founders Keepers team. I'm honoured and so excited for what we're building. Everything to come will be built on the foundations Richard Segal and Lizzie Segal have brilliantly constructed, and I'm so grateful to them and our fellow Partner Hannah French for the trust and opportunity to step up. Thank you also to our amazing colleagues (#What.A.Team), as well as our clients and candidates. I'm also indebted beyond measure to Brent Hoberman, Carolyn Dawson and the entire Founders Forum Group family for the ecosystem you've enabled us to collectively create. Finally, thank you to Rochelle Rosenthal and my wonderful (actual) family for enabling me to do this. Can't tell you how excited I am for what's to come from this exceptional team. Richard Segal Lizzie Segal Hannah French Erinn Leahey Lucy Broer Dominique Askew Jessamy Vero Alice Garber Sumaira Baig Jasmine Navazesh Caroline Handford Chmaj Janine Bouwer Shauna WenzelSasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisSome big news from Founders Keepers today... We are delighted to announce Stephen Rosenthal’s promotion to Managing Partner. Stephen’s loyalty and hard work have been central to our growth over the last 7 years, and this is an exciting step for our firm. In Stephen’s new role, he will lead our search operations across delivery and team, continue to win and deliver searches for clients, and develop our Tech & Product community. Richard Segal remains CEO, with an increasing focus on strategy, key relationships, new opportunities for growth, and further development of our advisory proposition. Please join us in congratulating Stephen 👏 Stephen Rosenthal Richard Segal Hannah French Lizzie Segal Brent Hoberman
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisSasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisMeet Berian James. Before tem, Berian spent his career building infrastructure other businesses depend on: payments fraud systems at Square, AI and data science at Maersk, machine learning at Copenhagen Energy Trading. Berian now leads Rosso, our energy transaction infrastructure. That's not a small brief. Every price we quote and every transaction made through tem runs through what his team builds. Get it right and businesses pay less, generators get more, and the energy market starts looking like it should. He's been doing this for months already. Long overdue we made it official.
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisSasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisLast week I spoke at the Gartner Summit in London about why we need frontier AI to protect against frontier AI attacks... Frontier AI has enabled agents that plan, call tools, and act across systems. The attack surface is no longer a single conversation. It's every action and decision an agent can take. That makes security much harder. I'd argue cybersecurity is facing some of its hardest challenges right now. As model capabilities keep accelerating, our controls have to move with them. Now we have to put frontier AI on the defenders' side. The challenges are real. The urgency is real. And because of that, it's never been a better, or more important, time to work in cyber. Also, was great catching up with customers, hearing where analysts see the market heading, and meeting founders building what comes next. Exciting times!!
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisSasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisWe are very proud to announce Kembara VC's second investment: Reverion, a Munich company building world-leading energy technology. Electricity demand is rising fast, with data centres’ power needs expected to nearly double by 2030. Reverion could become a critical part of the answer: born from years of research at TUM, its fully dispatchable power plants generate clean electricity at world-record efficiency (74.2%), turn surplus renewable power into gas for long-term storage, and capture CO₂. Robert Trezona's blog explains why we believe Reverion can become a global clean energy champion built in Europe: https://lnkd.in/eY_AGZ7H Congratulations to the Reverion team on the $175M Series B—and to Rob for leading our investment!
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Sasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisSasha Vidiborskiy reacted on thisWhat a pleasure to speak at the inaugural HumanX Europe in Amsterdam last week! My takes on stage, and I stand by them: ⚡ For AI, the roadblock today is energy, and the roadblock in the future will be energy. From training to inference to chips, every bottleneck eventually lands on the same constraint. Each new model release pushes the frontier further out, from robotics to biology, and pulls harder on the same grid. (Proud that Runware is attacking this head-on with modular inference pods that bring compute near low-cost energy) 🔐 Security is the sleeper category, especially agents talking to agents in ways humans cannot follow. (Watch Blackwall in this space) ❤️ At the application layer, harnesses and workflows are now table stakes. Customer love is the moat. Models improve every 3 to 6 months; the companies that survive help their customers defend their AI journey to their own boards. (Orbio AI from our portfolio is a great example.) 🧬 Vertically, biology is the biggest near-term frontier. The genome is still poorly understood, transformers could unlock personalised medicine, and big pharma is buying in for the first time in years. 🤖 Physical AI is real, but the data infrastructure for it barely exists. Robotics data is scarce, hard to collect and needs perpetual collection. On-device inference in this vertical will look nothing like what we know today. Thank you to Alex Hern for moderating, to Philip Chopin and Larry Li for a brilliant discussion, and to Shauna Kiely, Zach Butler, Brian Curran and the whole HumanX team for having me. See you at the next one! #HumanX #AIInfrastructure #Energy #Biology #PhysicalAI #VentureCapital
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Sasha Vidiborskiy liked thisSasha Vidiborskiy liked thisAt the UN General Assembly, the red thread of my speech was simple: Small countries do not choose their geography or their size. But small does not mean powerless. Moldova is not a huge domestic market. We cannot outspend the largest economies. So we have to compete differently - with permits in days rather than months, clear regulation, digital public services and rules that change when they no longer make sense. Technology is moving faster than regulation almost everywhere, and artificial intelligence is widening that gap. Small countries can have a natural edge here. We want Moldova to become a place where emerging tech can be tested responsibly through regulatory sandboxes - where regulators learn alongside companies, rules adjust with evidence, and good ideas do not wait years to reach the real economy. When an entrepreneur arrives with a technology for which the law has not caught up, the answer should not simply be: “There is no rule for this.” It should be: “Let us find a safe way to test it.” We may never have the deepest pools of capital or the largest GPU clusters. But we can build better rules and be more agile. Smallness does not have to mean weakness. Sometimes it means turning faster and delivering when larger countries cannot. Moldova may never be a great power. But we have everything it takes to be a great country.
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