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Christopher Eichler spent over a decade in academic physics, a PhD at ETH Zurich, a fellowship at Princeton, a senior scientist role back at ETH, and now a professorship at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Then he decided a university lab wasn't the right vehicle anymore, and founded Quint Computing to build the next generation of superconducting quantum processors. In this episode, Michael Machold, Operational Director of the Quantum & Semiconductor Lab, talks with Christopher about the exact moment academic research hits its limits, why he chose a startup over staying in the lab, and what building a company has taught him that a physics PhD never could. They also get into the physics itself , why quantum computing matters now as AI pushes conventional chips toward a physical limit, what early quantum computers will realistically be used for, and how the Bavarian ecosystem (including the Max Planck Institute and Munich Quantum Valley) shaped his decision to build in Europe instead of the US. If you're a researcher wondering whether your work belongs in a company, or a founder curious about the deep-tech path from lab to startup, this one's for you. Entrepreneurial Realities is the podcast of TUM Venture Labs. Subscribe for more conversations with the founders and researchers building Europe's deep-tech future.

Martin Giese has spent 25 years at the centre of Munich's deep tech ecosystem — and he thinks most European founders have a blind spot that no incubator programme will fix: they can't sell. As Managing Director of XPRENEURS (now UTUM Accelerator) and guest lecturer at Stanford GSB, Martin has seen founders across three continents make the same mistake. In this episode, we dig into what Stanford founders understand about customers that TUM founders typically don't, why the Europe-US gap is more cultural than financial, and what it actually takes to build a B2B company that scales past the first few customers. Join me as I speak with Martin Giese — investor, incubator director, and one of Europe's most clear-eyed voices on what it really takes to sell deep tech.

This is our 100th episode — and we are not celebrating with a retrospective. We are celebrating with three founders who came back to tell us what actually happened. Flora Geske co-founded SUMM-AI, a GovTech company using AI to make public administration more accessible and efficient, and winner of the TUM Presidential Award. Pablo Palafox co-founded HappyRobot, a Y Combinator-backed agentic AI platform for logistics that has raised $44 million and counts the world's biggest freight brokers among its customers. Kevin Berghoff co-founded Quantum Diamonds, a TUM spin-out that has just raised €152 million and deployed its quantum sensing systems in the US, with nine of the world's top ten chipmakers already engaged. Three very different sectors. One starting point: Munich, TUM, five years ago. Join us as we look back at five years of building — and forward at what comes next.

Adrian Locher co-founded Merantix Capital in Berlin in 2016 with machine-learning researcher Rasmus Rothe. What started as an AI studio has become one of Europe's most distinctive AI organisations: a venture studio that incubates companies from scratch, a campus hosting an entire ecosystem, and — as of June 2026 — a €100 million plus fund backing AI ventures across the continent. In this conversation, Adrian traces his path from founding his first company at fourteen and selling the Swiss flash-sale platform DeinDeal to Ringier in 2012, to building Merantix's combined studio-fund-campus model. We discuss what it actually means to build AI-native companies in Europe, where the structural obstacles remain, how to evaluate teams when technology moves faster than any due diligence, and what a thriving European AI ecosystem could look like by 2031.

Defense tech is being rewritten in real time — not in labs or conference rooms, but on the frontlines of Ukraine. Join me in my conversation with with Dimko Zhluktenko — soldier, drone pilot , founder of Dzyga's Paw ($6M raised, 70+ countries), analyst at Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, and now founder of Hasta, a DefTech VC fund. Dimko has lived every dimension of defense tech at once: as a soldier who uses the technology, as a founder who sources and funds it, and as an analyst who extracts lessons from it. What he shares about drone warfare, and what actually matters on the battlefield, his analysis of Ukraine, Europe, ... is something no conference panel can replicate and a must for all defenders of liberty and democracy.

Meet Eden Chabanet and Johannes Moran, Co-Founder of Arctory. Arctory is a platform for shopfloor vibe coding which, since its inception, has been used in hundreds of applications. Join me as we discuss topics such as the role of vibe coding in demanding professional environments, positioning focused platforms versus generalist ones, the role of IT in a changing world, ... and how a German startups focusing on the mid market is experience significant growth.

Join me in my conversation with Simon Wilhelm, CEO & Co-Founder of Scaile. Simon understood that classic SEO techniques no longer works. His startup helps companies get visibility. After a mere 6 months, he has secured 40 plus customers from multiple countries and shares learnings with us.

Do join the discussion I had with Edgar Kussberg about Vibe coding. Edgar is a former entrepreneur where he focused on product development and gradually turned in applying his market focused approach to code development. He is currently in charge of Product development at SonarSource, a Swiss scale up which is the leader in code validation tool. We discuss on what is the phenomenon of vibe coding, who are the typical use cases and how to make the most of this new technology.

Do join our conversation with Christine Carville and Marc Goldberg, co-founders of Resilience labs, now Cerebral, a this podcast first married couple. Both started Resilience labs in 2019 to bridge a gap in the American healthcare market by training new clinicians while providing accessible care to patients. By integrating proprietary education with AI-powered clinical tools, they professionalised a fragmented industry and achieved a significant acquisition by the platform Cerebral.

The latest episode of Entrepreneurial Realities welcomes back Sebastian Mallaby, who joined the podcast once before to discuss The Power Law, his landmark account of the venture capital industry. This time, Sebastian returns with The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence — the result of three years of unprecedented access to Demis Hassabis and his inner circle. The Infinity Machine traces the journey of a chess prodigy from North London — Nobel Prize winner, founding CEO of Google DeepMind — whose singular goal was never money or power, but the scientific dream of artificial superintelligence. The conversation covers the story of DeepMind itself, the lessons European deep tech startups can draw from its trajectory, the very real risks of AGI, and many of the other defining questions that sit at the frontier of AI today.

In this episode, I speak with Michael Brand, CEO of TraxSurf and Jonas Dunkel, CEO of DeepGolf, two German entrepreneurs applying AI to elite sport performance. Different sports but same ambition: replace guesswork with data, and help athletes improve with precision. A conversation about technology, entrepreneurship, and building something new far from the traditional hubs of surf and golf culture.

Rabbi Mois Navon is one of the founder engineer of MobilEye. He is also an advisor to the Israeli Government on the theme of AI and Ethics and a lecturer at ben Gourion University. Join us on our discussion on why ethical considerations profoundly matter for AI entrepreneurs and how to take these into considerations for your AI startups.

Sebastian Bastek, co-founder of Valoron, takes you on a journey of transforming mixed waste into virgin-quality fuels and chemicals, scaling a bold climate tech vision from the lab to industry and literally turning trash into treasure. Dive into the breakthroughs, the entrepreneurial journey, and how Valoron is turning circular economy ideas into reality. Hosted by Lucia Lara from the Climate & Circular Lab.

This episode concludes our special series during the ⁠⁠Munich Security Conference⁠⁠⁠, where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. We speak with my colleague Florian Doetzer⁠⁠, who is the Managing Director of the TUM Venture Lab for Aerospace and Defense. The name of Florian’slab was changed from Aerospace to Aerospace and Defense and announced at the MSC (see here). Together, we discuss how Florian’s lab supports Defense related startups and the underlying ecosystem which is being build in Munich for develop and support a competitive European defense industry.

This episode is part of our special series during the ⁠Munich Security Conference⁠⁠, where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. We speak with Nicolas Tenzer⁠, a French senior policy expert who was among the first voices to warn of the dangers posed by Europe's sustained disinvestment in and neglect of its defense capabilities. Together, we explore the current state of European security and draw parallels between the challenges of building the next generation of entrepreneurs and those of developing a competitive European defense industry.