Andreas Klinger 🦾
@andreasklinger • 71,011 subscribers
Mad-scientist investor main-questing Europe 🇪🇺 @prototype_cap 🦾 @euinc_petition 🇪🇺 🔧-prev: @producthunt @angellist @coinlist @beondeck ❤️ @susanneknoll
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If you care about manufacturing or industry in the West you need to understand how China can produce so cheaply. In the 90s people would have said cheap labor. Now they would say supply chain. The real answer is insane hypercompetition in a race to the bottom. The Chinese call this involution. Everyone competes until there is no margin left. The West believes it’s China vs the world. For Chinese companies it’s China vs China and a permanent Hunger Games just to survive. We break down how it works in our deep-dive. Full video in our channel: We cover the coffee wars , the EV race to the bottom that currently bankrupts Germany, cities that act like VCs, a wedding photographer that build a global top 10 car brands,cement plants getting sold by the state to buy car factories from Wales. How top-down policies and bottom-up hustle works, and how we in the middle will get squeezed by China Shocks every year from now on.
Andreas Klinger 🦾30,325 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
It only needs a few crazy ones to fix a continent… Let's be crazy… I got something to announce: We're launching PROTOTYPE: a new fund, fully focused on Europe. A small fund that punches way above it's size. With it we back what Europe is world-class at: robotics, automation, manufacturing, and anything that requires hard engineering. First check. First round. As early as it gets. Europe invented industry. We're the birthplace of precision manufacturing. The second largest manufacturing hub on the planet. Leaders in automation and robotics. And yet… We sell out our best tech to China. We export our best founders & most of our investment money to the US. That's insanity. What should we do instead? Build the next trillion euro companies in robotics, manufacturing, automation right here: in Europe. Showcase to young founders what is possible and change the system around them where needed. What we will do: → Publish all our fund updates and build in public: → Showcase Europe’s Most Ambitious Startups on Youtube: → Launch & support more projects like EU–INC. Enough talking about Europe. Time to build it: Startups, makerspaces, student clubs, and much more. → And most importantly, invest into the best founders in Europe. Same model as our previous funds that are in their top 1-5% cohorts worldwide. We won’t do a VC fund in the classic sense. This will be a community of hyper-ambitious people who want to actively change Europe for the better. It only needs a few crazy ones to fix a continent… Let's be crazy. Check out
Andreas Klinger 🦾406,972 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
Yea… I am done. lol 🤯 I just drew a game and it works… 💀
Andreas Klinger 🦾1,284,286 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
I just visited a company in Finland that can turn any transparent surface — windows, glasses, plastic, anything — into a 3D display that perfectly augments what you see behind it. Welcome to Distance . One of the most exciting companies in Europe right now. And they're only two years old. We're not talking about a tiny rectangle in the corner of your windshield. The entire glass becomes your screen. They showed this to Kia's design team. It led to a concept car with a full edge-to-edge 3D windshield that paints navigation onto the actual road, shows you what the car sees, highlights threats, and yes, could theoretically replace every Pepsi billboard with a Coke one. But the defense side is where it gets serious. As a neighbor to Russia, Finland feels the pain of Ukraine very directly. The Distance team wanted to be part of the solution. Their field operator headset gives soldiers jet fighter-grade situational awareness. Any sensor (thermal, infrared, multispectral) overlaid onto what you actually see. Tested in over a dozen field trials with the Finnish army. Driving armored vehicles in arctic conditions in the middle of the night with full 3D perception. The field operator headset effectively allows soldiers to see through smoke, and with extra cameras even behind walls. Some of what they showed us had never been shown publicly before. And there's more cooking under the hood they couldn't share yet. Two years in. Moving at the speed of light. Welcome to Europe!
Andreas Klinger 🦾124,153 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
We think Europe needs more pro-European, pro-tech, pro-abundance, pro-optimism propaganda. So we made it. Posters, t-shirts, hoodies. Full-on propaganda. We've been handing them out at robotics meetups and clubs all over Europe for weeks, and people love them. Why we are doing this: Europeans know more about the companies in the States than the ones right here at home. We need to change that. Time for propaganda. Every poster features a real European company: 🦾 Allonic is braiding humanoids. A completely new approach to building robotic parts. If it works, a number one company worldwide, right here in Europe. 🚜 Voltrac, the electric autonomous tractor (we made a whole video about them). 🏗️ Automated Architecture (AUAR), doing micro-factories for wooden houses. 🪨 Gondor Industries, a stone mason company using robotics. And many, many more to come. This is the first of many drops. More launching in the next few weeks, including flags, EU posters and more. 👉 Get yours at For Europe 🇪🇺🔥 PS: If you're organizing a robotics event or meetup, have a student club or hacker space, comment or message us and we'll send you a swag box.
Andreas Klinger 🦾72,727 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
“AC this, wash dryer that, US woohoo, EU boohoo” - Why are we eating this brand-warfare from the outside about us up? Europe has the strongest precision manufacturing in the world, we have leading teams in AI, CV, robotics. Europe is a leader in Automation and Frontier Tech! Not a single NVIDIA chip could be produced without European machines. Not a single American cloud, robotics, or deep-tech firm would operate without European manufacturing or suppliers. But we are too humble. Brainwashed to never celebrate Europe. By outsiders and our local politicians. Time for a change. Europe is the birthplace of industrialization. The home of frontier tech. Time, we act like it. Welcome to the real Europe! 🔥🇪🇺
Andreas Klinger 🦾311,076 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Last Christmas at brunch, my friend Peter showed me the latest version of his little bot he built. A crazy side project. Just for fun. This Monday he announced he's joining OpenAI. Sam Altman called him a genius. In between? OpenClaw went from a hobby project to the most talked-about AI agent in the world. Three months. No team. No funding. Just one retired guy from Vienna who rediscovered the joy of building things. ❤️ Last week I flew down to Vienna to sit down with him right in the middle of this madness to talk about everything: how he thinks about agents, why he let OpenClaw write its own soul file, why your mom will understand AI agents before most engineers do, and why open source as we know it might be completely broken. We are super proud of you, Peter. 🙌 Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:02 The mom test moment & Managing 3,000 PRs 04:47 The Soul Markdown file & why OpenClaw feels different 06:58 The agent's personality, humor & OpenClaw's wild week 10:31 Think like the model 12:37 Privacy & security 15:28 Open source burnout & the future of engineering teams 17:32 The end of apps & closing thoughts
Andreas Klinger 🦾160,274 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
A student in Zurich sleeps in a camper van outside a hangar every night. Just to have more hours to build a humanoid robot. He’s obsessive. He's not alone. 2,500 students across Europe are getting into robotics right now. And now they united and just launched: ESRA, the European Student Robotics Association. 🇪🇺🦾 They are bringing together highly talented young people, give them space, give them resources and let them build. By now already 13 robotics clubs. 8 countries. 2,500+ students. I visited several of them over the last weeks to get to know them and let them tell their stories. We've also been helping behind the scenes where we can, because this is exactly what Europe needs. Several multiple billion dollar companies will come out of the ESRA network. Right here in Europe. If the Bay Area had a student robotics network like this, they would never shut up about it. Time we do the same. 😤🔥🇪🇺 It only needs a few crazy ones to fix a continent. Turns out they're already building. 🇪🇺
Andreas Klinger 🦾116,761 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
FR8 is a 12,000 m² palace, filled with geniuses researching or building startups, it charges 0% equity and even pays for your food, living, and flights. One of their founders drank actual poison on stage to demo their tech. Welcome to FR8. Nothing about FR8 makes sense because it’s so over the top in their ambition, but they might eventually become the biggest thing for young founders globally. And it’s happening right here in Europe. They are neither a hackerhouse, nor a startup accelerator, nor a classic research lab. Instead they think of themselves as a university-like institution for the post AGI world that pushes you towards building companies, ambition, obsession, and bias-to-action. Think YCombinator, Stanford and Bell Labs all wrapped into one thing for the most ambitious 20-somethings in the world to work, run by 20-somethings. They just came out of stealth. Until recently people didn’t even know where their latest cohort is based. Because additionally on top FR8 is absurdly secretive. Their target group knows them and that’s about all they care for. We visited last week to join them behind-the-scenes as they prepare for their first demo day in their new building - a 5 floor university building in the middle of Helsinki. We knew them for quite some time so we were allowed to film them as the first team worldwide. But even we couldn’t film multiple floors and rooms of their building. This video gives you an insight into the ambitious craziness that FR8 is – but trust me there’s more to come in the near future. The biggest new thing in startups – isn’t in SF – it’s in the north of Europe and attracts young geniuses worldwide. Welcome to FR8!
Andreas Klinger 🦾85,136 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Fundraising sucks for founders, especially if you are a first-time founder. I've raised for my own companies, invested in over 100 startups and helped 1000+ founders raising money. We had a bit of time so we decided to do a 40-minutes fundraising crash course. It’s a mix of strategic stuff, mental models, understanding investor game dynamics and tactical advice. Hopefully useful to anyone raising money right now. A few takeaways – but I explain it all in the video better: 1. You can evaluate every deal on three vectors: “credentials, innovation, execution”. You want to be strong on two of them. And being able to understand where you stand here allows you to be pro-active in driving your raise. 2. "We're not fundraising yet, but..." is the most underrated hack. Use it to test the waters. If an investor is genuinely bullish, they'll make you an offer anyway. 3. If it's not a hell yes, it's a no. VCs that want in will do anything to get in. The rest keep you in weird limbo with fake homework. 4. "Come back with more traction" is a lie. It means: we don't believe in you yet, but if the market proves us wrong, sure. But there is an easy way around this. Get the right people involved. 5. Don't pitch. Send the deck before. Have a real conversation. Your only goal: can this investor repeat what you do in a way that's exciting at drinks afterwards? 6. Don't raise for long. Three months on the market and everyone knows? You're discounted sushi. 7. Velocity beats optimisation. Almost always. The best fundraising strategy is getting investor commitments so fast that other investors have to chase you. 8. The real elevator pitch isn’t between founder and investor but between two investors. Eg. an associate trying to show off to a partner or angels trying to get new opinions on the deal. => and tons more Full video in
Andreas Klinger 🦾79,280 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
The US banned Unitree. They will do the most important robotics IPO this year anyway. In my opinion it will redefine Chinese startups, for sure robotics. This week Unitree started going public in Shanghai. First humanoid maker ever listed on the Chinese mainland. 8,000x oversubscribed by retail investors. But the story is bigger: It’s about (what i think is) China’s Moment. If the US had software in the 2000’s, China might own robotics in the 2020’s Want to be in the room when we record? Join our Discord, watch live, ask questions, argue with us in real time →
Andreas Klinger 🦾15,928 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
A fully electric autonomous tractor that lifts 4 tons, pulls 8 tons, runs 24 hours, and you can repair it in the middle of a field. This is Voltrac. 🦾 Made in Europe 🇪🇺 How would you design a futuristic autonomous tractor? Voltrac threw out everything and started from scratch. 70% fewer parts. One motor per wheel. Hot-swap batteries. Backwards compatible with any attachment a farmer already owns. Voltrac is more than a tractor, it’s the brain of the farm. One operator supervises multiple tractors across multiple farms. Every drive analyzes the crops, catches disease early, cuts fertilizer costs. And the same hitch that connects to farm tools connects to demining gear and resupply payloads for the front line. Disclaimer: I'm an early investor, because this is exactly what Europe needs. Europe had 70 million farmers in 2020. Projected 7 million by 2030. Our population keeps growing. Everyone still wants to eat. Somebody has to solve this. They build in Valencia, not China. Because the talent, the precision manufacturing, and the know-how are all here. We just forget how good we are. If we don't build this, someone in China will and sell it to European farmers. 🇪🇺🔥 Full Video on YT!
Andreas Klinger 🦾41,826 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Europe 2031 just dropped. A five-year scenario of our continent's slide into AI irrelevance, by Judith Dada & the people who advised European leaders. It’s pretty dystopian. But it doesn't have to end where it ends. A few weeks ago I sat down with Judith in front of the Acropolis, birthplace of Western civilization, to find out what it takes to make Europe into a global AI powerhouse. Judith Dada is one of the sharpest voices on Europe, AI, and what needs to happen next. She is a GP at Visionaries Club, runs Relativity Collective, writes one of the best blogs on AI and Europe. The numbers she lays out are brutal. Europe has 5% of global compute. The US has 80%. Europe is 25% of global GDP. That math ain’t mathing. So we talked about the hard trade-offs: - Why Europe shouldn't try to rebuild every layer of the stack from day one, but instead own a few choke points where the world can't circumvent us, and use that leverage to build the rest over time. - Why we need the second-best AI labs here even if they never become number one, because those teams spawn the next generation of companies that do AI for medicine, energy, research. - And why the real problem isn't regulation or paper trails. It's that not enough people in Europe have had their wake-up moment yet. Her bet on fixing it: get the best young people across Europe to know each other from the youngest age. Exposure to ambition breeds ambition. It's the single most powerful force anyone can experience. Full conversation in the video. Filmed where it all started. 🦾🇪🇺
Andreas Klinger 🦾36,877 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
🚨 Hey folks I got something to announce: I am launching a new investment fund brand: Prototype Capital 🦾 A globally-active first-check investment fund. We focus on cool stuff that's technical hard to achieve, but also still new enough to be a bit weird – globally. Think Robotics in Eastern Europe, AI in SF, Software remotely, OpenSource SaaS, Space-tech in India, Reindustrialization of Europe, AI Agents in Brazil, among many others… - $100k-$200k - we say we invest early and we actually mean it - with every 5th investment we are the first to commit - only 6% of all ivnestments were after seed - the brand will be a larger umbrella for all kinds of stuff from our own prototypes 😬, to streams, to communities, to investinpublic transparency efforts - this is legally speaking a rebrand of my previous solo GP fund so we got track record to proof - we do about 15-20 investments per year Link in thread! 🔥 Please RT if you got a sec – Appreciate your launch support 🙏❤️
Andreas Klinger 🦾212,691 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
This week we celebrated OpenClaw🦞 Conf in Vienna. 🔥 One thought stuck with me. We're entering a world where custom software is normal. Everyone has their own insta-coder, their own personal appstore. Soon software will exist on the fly, only when you need it. Just for one moment. Then it's gone. Personalized, disposable, one-shot. 🤯 Code can now be autogenerated. So if code is "no longer worth anything" (hyperbole speaking) and you can auto-build any idea into existence (slop gods be kind): What is the future of software development – especially for founders? I made a video on this. Spoilers: we had the working title: "Software Development is f**d" This video is maybe more questions than answers – especially for SaaS founders. But I also cover POVs of mine: Eg why GitHub is obsolete, why open source might actually be dead soon, the Mexican standoff between designers/engineers/PMs, why prompt injection could be bigger than SQL injection, and what I'd actually do as a SaaS founder right now. But there is also a paradox in all of this: Now might be the most exciting time to build software. Ever. 🦾 Thanks as always for watching. Likes, shares, subscribes, goat slaugthering, and any other algo magic you can throw at this: deeply appreciated. Trying to build this YouTube channel up and your support genuinely helps. Link to the channel in the reply ❤️
Andreas Klinger 🦾67,630 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
If you've raised €10M in equity, there's another €1-3M sitting there in additional finance that costs you 0 percent of your company. Let’s talk about debt. Global debt markets are 75 times larger than VC. But we barely talk about it and few people understand it. I invited William Godfrey from Tangible, who is currently arranging hundreds of millions in debt facilities for hardware companies, to teach us how to raise debt. 👉 Full video on YT, link in comments The core mistake: using equity to pay for CapEx. You raise VC, then spend it on CNC machines, a small factory, or robots you'll rent out to customers. Every euro of it dilutes you, and you're back raising again sooner. Some of my favorite takeaways from Will: - If you've raised €10M in equity, expect roughly 10-30% of that available in equipment finance. So another €1-3M, without giving up more of the company - Advance rates run around 80%, meaning you put in €20k of every €100k borrowed. Same logic as a mortgage deposit. - Asset-backed facilities put the collateral and the contract into a separate SPV. If that vehicle fails, the risk sits there rather than killing the company - Time your debt raise with your equity raise. You negotiate best with a full bank account, and debt is a terrible tool for extending runway in a pinch - Build a "seed portfolio" first. Finance ten as-a-service deployments off your balance sheet, prove the recurring cash flow, then take that record to a credit fund and refinance the lot - Lenders don't reject small startups because they're risky. They reject them because they're effort. Will's advice is to be easy to lend to. Use components from reputable manufacturers with warranties and insurance. Skip the clever per-inspection pricing. Sell the boring, provable cash flow and keep the ambitious stuff on the equity side. Disclaimer: Big fan, small investor in Tangible since early days.
Andreas Klinger 🦾13,706 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Berlin just hosted the best robotics meetup in Europe. 🦾 We wanted to get 50 friends together. 500 people applied once we put a private page up. The demos were all made in Europe: a fully autonomous electric tractor that lifts 4 tons (Voltrac). A multi-ton autonomous excavator (sensmore). Drones built fully in Europe (HIGHCAT). Anti-drone lasers (Stealth). Strike systems delivered by balloon (Planetfall). A payload that sees landmines through soil (Sapper Intelligence). Multiple robot arms working perfectly in sync (EVASIVE ROBOTICS). Satellite defense lasers (also Stealth). Actual Star Wars stuff. The reason we do this is simple. If these tractors, robots, lasers aren't developed and produced in Europe, they'll be built elsewhere. We need these jobs here. These manufacturing sites here. And the best way to get more founders building them is to show what's already possible and inspire the next ones. Next stops: Today in Athens (join us here, link 👇), soon in Munich and London. If you want to host one, hit us up. This is CLANKERS by PROTOTYPE. For Europe. 🇪🇺🔥
Andreas Klinger 🦾33,976 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten