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Fintech Deals

Slush, the annual tech conference in Helsinki, was abuzz with continental pride amid calls for tech sovereignty.

Here are Lucinda's top takeaways after a week in the cold:

European regulators and companies both for years have called for the creation of homegrown tech giants, but those dreams face capital and scaling bottlenecks.

About the same number of startups are created annually across Europe as in the U.S., "but only 8% of the scale-ups are in the EU; 60% are in the U.S.," the EU's Henna Virkkunen said on stage.

AI bubble talk simmered throughout Slush — but no one is ready to pull back from writing checks. Expect to see a bunch of later-stage rounds get announced before year-end as FOMO tops saturation fears.

"With AI models, we don't know how much better they're going to get ... It might only be as big as the internet or PCs, or smartphones ... Or it might be much bigger than that," tech analyst Benedict Evans said on stage.

Investors do seem concerned about the legaltech and vibe-coding space, with many betting on consolidation. But not in their portfolios, if you were wondering.

Venture investors are applying AI to their work, seeing new promise after an era in which such applications fell short of expectations.

Virtually every speaker is using it for operations like drafting investment memos or unifying financial documents.

But there's still considerable skepticism around using AI for investment decisions.

EQT has long used a homegrown platform it calls "Motherbrain" for sourcing and says that employee AI literacy is correlating to performance, but AI doesn't have an investment committee vote, EQT's Victor Englesson tells Axios Pro.

Slush tackles European tech scaling, AI usage in VC funds

Two people seated on a stage under pink and red lighting with a large geometric structure above, speaking at the SLUSH event with flames on both sides and an audience in front.

Slush, the annual tech conference in Helsinki, was abuzz with continental pride amid calls for tech sovereignty.Here are Lucinda&#x27;s top takeaways after a week in the cold:

Slush tackles European tech scaling, AI usage in VC funds

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