General Catalyst

At the Invest in Germany summit, Germany showed itself at its best: open to progress, curious about the future, sure of its style, at home in both tradition and modernity. The summit convened the right people at the right time: political leaders, global investors and entrepreneurs from around the globe recognising Germany's and Europe's potential. Credit to Friedrich Merz, Lars Klingbeil, and Martin Blessing for bringing this conversation to the forefront. It was encouraging to see international investors, including Larry Fink, share that confidence in our potential. Perhaps it is time we started believing in and activating it ourselves. So, in the words of Jensen Huang, let's just do it. Investors: lean in, together, to build the future of this country and this continent. Industrial base: embrace AI. Your domain expertise and supply chains are your edge. Policymakers: don't just regulate. Co-create a new age of prosperity, growth and innovation. In my eyes, Germany's future growth and strategic autonomy will come from three things: the lowest-cost intelligence, a country bet on physical AI, and modern defence capabilities. Why lowest-cost intelligence? Because in a world where cognition becomes abundant, the cost of intelligence decides who can compete. It is what turns a labour economy into an intelligence economy. Yet Europe today has less than 5% of global AI compute. We should use our balance sheet as a nation to change that. The commitment to scale Germany’s AI infrastructure, alongside partnerships with companies like NVIDIA, is an important step. Now we need to turn that ambition into infrastructure at scale.. Why physical AI? Because no country has the ingredients as complete as Germany does: precision engineering, automation know-how, an enormous pool of machine and process data. The only thing we lack is scale. Why defence? Because security is the basis of everything. There is no prosperity, no investment and no open society without it. Companies like Airbus, Hensoldt and OHB have spent decades building the backbone. A new generation of defence companies can now thrive on it if public demand follows with reliable orders, budget shares for new technologies, and Germany buying as Europe's anchor. Growth creates a future. A future creates hope. Above all, for young people. Keeping it together is on all of us: policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors alike. I am convinced that we can still set the direction for the years ahead ourselves. Words must now be followed by action.

Last week, we announced our investment leading Factorial's $150M Series D at a $2.5B valuation. I want to take a minute to talk about our journey that led up to this moment. The difference between a good and a great founder in my view is excellence in capital allocation. For most companies that have found product-market fit and move to the scaling phase, the primary use of capital is funding the burn caused by sales and marketing investments. That investment gets funded using the company’s own cash (often equity), which turns these businesses into dilution machines that are very cash consumptive. Founders, employees, and shareholders own less and less of what they built and backed. My partners Pranav and Karanveer Mohan designed CVF to fix this. Investing in sales and marketing gives you scale and can make your company significantly more capital efficient. To build category leaders, you need scale but also require you to be at the forefront of product innovation. The top founders, in our view, are incredible capital allocators, allocating as much of their own cash for the things that drive uncapped returns like product and engineering, while not trading off scale in their GTM. This mindset can significantly increase the company’s equity value, as we see with Factorial. On Jordi Beyond being one of Europe's finest product builders, Jordi is an exceptional capital allocator. From early in his journey, he used CVF to supercharge sales and marketing, starting with $80M, then $120M more in 2024 and 2025, totalling $200M, while preserving his equity for new products and new country expansions. The result: 16,000 customers across 90 countries, and a company that has rebuilt its entire platform around AI. Alongside the new equity investment, GC is committing a further $540M through CVF, bringing total committed capital to over $700M. For founders reading this: this means you can scale your capital base significantly with minimal incremental dilution for you and your team. And if this does not make you pause and get curious, how will you excel in capital allocation? Factorial is one of many More than 80 companies have raised more than $7B through CVF in five years (again, pausing on this). We are in a world where terminal value is questioned, unit economics and free cash flow matter. We want to back founders who treat capital structure as seriously as product. Jordi is the clearest example of that I have seen. My partner Harry Elliott and I are hosting an invite-only dinner in London on July 6 to talk more about CVF. Comment or DM if you want to join.

I’ve spent a decade betting on the "hard path" for Europe. Not to follow trends, but because of the world I want my children to inherit, in a future defined by the strength of our own making. Strategic autonomy will not be won in policy papers or bombshell speeches. It will be won by our ability to align technology, procurement, and production into deployed capability at speed and scale. At General Catalyst, we don't view resilience as a "theme." We view it as an Operating System, a tightly connected architecture of sovereignty: - Sensing: Owning the means of observation (ICEYE). - Decisions: AI-native systems where software-defined hardware allows advantage to compound (Helsing). - Industrial Depth: Rebuilding the "missing middle", the energetics and subsystems that determine replenishment speed. - Energy: The enabler of sovereign throughput. Energy flexibility is now a defense capability. Last week, we saw two tangible proof points of this "OS" in motion: Hypersonica building Europe's sovereign hypersonic strike system, delivering its missile prototype for flight testing at unprecedented speed. Onodrim Industries restoring our industrial depth in mission-critical components. But let’s be clear: To safeguard our democracies, resilience is the baseline, not the finish line. Europe needs strategic autonomy, not as an act of detachment, but as a means to act independently in the domains that matter most. It is about building the strength to be a more reliable partner without compromising the values that define us. Sovereignty is an industrial outcome shaped by procurement signal quality. When we solve the "cost of coordination" across 27 systems, capital markets transform from observers into force multipliers. From orbit to the factory floor: Sovereignty is manufactured.

Jacomo helped a Formula 1 team win back-to-back world championships using machine learning (ML) to optimize race strategy. He then spent years building ML systems for complex engineering problems from aerodynamics to materials design, seeing firsthand the limits of traditional physics simulation. He co-founded PhysicsX to push the limits of physics simulation by training AI models that are faster and more accurate on experimental data. They're accelerating the path from digital design to real-world performance across aerospace, automotive, semiconductors, and beyond. For aerospace clients, this means improving everything from engine performance to aerodynamics. Robin caught up with Jacomo at Slush to discuss how Europe’s legacy in industrial manufacturing positions PhysicsX to lead the next wave of industrial AI.

Between a product manager's vision and an engineer's keyboard, weeks disappear. Ideas get rewritten, context dissolves, and everyone waits. Emma Burrows saw this bottleneck hindering shipping velocity and built Rezonant on top of Portia AI to eliminate it. Rezonant transforms messy product specs, scattered call notes, and rough sketches into precise engineering tasks ready for coding agents or humans to execute. Engineers become true product owners who shape what gets built, while PMs focus on strategy and customers instead of translation work. Alex Mackenzie chatted with Emma at Slush to hear how Rezonant is reshaping product and engineering collaboration.

Manufacturers quietly bleed money—about 20 cents of every dollar spent simply evaporates. Bernhard saw this waste firsthand on the factory floor and decided to do something bold about it. That spark became EthonAI. It started small: one Swiss factory with one set of problems to solve. Bernhard scaled these successful results from plant to plant until EthonAI was powering operations for semiconductor makers, Siemens, Lindt & Sprüngli, and more. If you’ve unwrapped a Lindor truffle recently, there’s a good chance it passed through their software. Workers were losing hours each week to avoidable inefficiencies. Now, AI agents watch processes in real time—spotting temperature drift, material inconsistencies, and other early signals of trouble before they become defects. Robin sat down with Bernhard at Slush to hear how EthonAI is powering better products, smoother shifts, and the future of factories.