How AI Is Disrupting Industrial Tech | Visionaries Club VC Insights
AI is disrupting traditional SaaS — and Europe's industrial tech giants are finally listening. In this episode of Startuprad.io, we explore how applied AI in B2B is transforming procurement, logistics, and manufacturing, and why industrial tech innovation may crown the next wave of unicorns in the DACH region.
🎙️ Guest: Marton Sarkadi Nagy, Partner at Visionaries Club, a Berlin-based VC with €600M+ AUM and a unique LP base of unicorn founders and legacy industrialists.
💡 What You’ll Learn:
Why traditional SaaS is dying and how agentic AI is redefining B2B software
How Visionaries Club blends legacy and innovation to spot top founders
What makes a “genre-defining founder” (hint: urgency, obsession, execution)
Europe's edge in the application layer of AI
Radical accountability and how top founders handle crisis
Learn more here: https://www.startuprad.io/post/how-europe-s-visionaries-are-using-ai-to-disrupt-industrial-tech
🔗 Listen to the Podcast Anywhere: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1O2dpN9cUU6F9tS5Ocvc8P Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/startuprad-io-startup-podcast-from-germany/id690941914 Castbox: https://castbox.fm/channel/id1140079 Goodpods: https://goodpods.com/podcasts/startupradio-startup-podcast-from-germany-24813
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00:00Hey guys, welcome back to our interview Q&A session for premium subscribers of Startup
00:26Right.io together with Martin, an ultra marathon runner and now partner at VisionariesVC.
00:33I was wondering for this section, we talk a little bit more in that.
00:39I was wondering about a good behind the scenes founder story from your portfolio that challenged your thinking.
00:47Yes, I think this is a really interesting one.
00:49And I would love to take the example of Tactile, which is a pre-seed company that we bagged from three guys.
00:59And they were coming out of Technical University of Munich, CDTA, and they were ideating a lot about procurement
01:11because they had some experiences working at Palantir and some of these companies.
01:15And they correctly identified that procurement as a function at these massive industrial companies
01:22is one of the most outdated yet undigitized or undistrupted verticals.
01:26So the way that they went into solving that problem is that, okay, this is a really interesting vertical.
01:34It's completely outdated.
01:36Workflows are not also automated.
01:38So what should we do with it?
01:40Let's try to automate it, right?
01:41So the initial idea was let's build an RPA for procurement, right?
01:46It's very clear, right?
01:48Something is inefficient.
01:49Let's try to automate it.
01:51And this was really the vision.
01:52This was the very deep mission and vision that they had in their mind.
01:58And as they were talking to more and more customers and they started building the product,
02:03they realized that none of the heads of procurement want to automate anything because they don't have time for this at all, right?
02:11So what ended up happening is that the three founders pretty much walked up to these industrial companies
02:17and sat in the room of procurement leaders trying to observe what they are doing on a daily basis
02:23and really, really try to understand what are the most important features that would instantly drive value on the spot for them.
02:31And this is how they started building the product,
02:34which is something that has very little to do with the concept of RPA, the procurement.
02:40And this really challenged my thinking because as a VC investor, you always ask the question,
02:45what is more important, vision versus execution?
02:47Should the product be more vision-driven or should it be solving really the needs of the customer?
02:53And I would say this really needs to meet in the middle because if you are completely caught up in what the customer says,
03:01you may be overly built and sold for the very specific needs of one customer
03:07and you won't have a very solid product vision that can help you build a big company.
03:12If you're focusing too much on vision, you won't really be in the reality of what you actually need to build.
03:17And this is something that I think really came out in that story.
03:22I always hear from VCs to talk about red flags, what they don't like.
03:29But I was wondering, maybe you can share an unconventional red flag or a green flag you use in your founder evaluation.
03:40Yes, I would say I would go for the unconventional green flag, to be honest.
03:47And that is the why now.
03:52That's really the why now that is very, very interesting.
03:56And we always have this exercise where with the founder, we just close ourselves into a room for one hour
04:02and have a very honest conversation about a life journey, two-sided.
04:07So it's completely open because you have to put out your cards if you want to be on the cap table of someone for the next 10 years.
04:16And it has to work the other way around.
04:18But ultimately, we have this exercise where you plot your life in a chart where on the horizontal axis you have time
04:30and on the vertical axis you are indicating kind of the moments that were really pivotal in your life.
04:38Maybe meeting an entrepreneur that inspired you to pull the trigger and start a new company.
04:41Maybe meeting your co-founder at the university.
04:45And when you are describing that chart and what the pivotal moments in your life are,
04:51and you're sitting there and you're trying to articulate why you are starting a company now,
04:57you should have a very clear articulation of why that is happening right now.
05:03Why are you willing to take an 80% pay cut to start this new company?
05:07Why are you not taking a job at McKinsey or BCG, but actually venture on to raise money from BCs
05:15with complete high level of uncertainty?
05:17And usually the answers to that questions are very short and very clear.
05:23And I would say that's one very clear indication in really exceptional founders.
05:29What's one bold prediction you have for European venture capital in the next three years?
05:35One bold prediction is that European venture capital will have an absolutely amazing time in the next three years.
05:50Not an advertisement.
05:54Exactly.
05:54But I think this is something that we started discussing a little bit,
06:01but I think it goes very much back to what Europe has and what Europe doesn't have in many cases.
06:08And what Europe has is absolutely amazing talent from a technical perspective,
06:13but also execution perspective if you get the right triggers at the right time.
06:19And if you look at some of these ecosystems, what they don't have is maturity.
06:25Not from the perspective of talent, but the perspective of how much network effects you have across entrepreneurs, operators, investors, and everything.
06:34But if you look at some of these ecosystems that are in their own way so complementary to each other,
06:41not just from a talent perspective, but culturally, and what you can work with from Stockholm, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Paris, London.
06:49And if you look at how much it has changed over the course of the last four years or five years,
06:56and how much we as investors see really, really exceptional young entrepreneurs wanting to start new companies,
07:03it's galaxies away.
07:06It's just incredible what has changed.
07:08And this change is just only accelerating.
07:10And this is something that I think a lot of us underestimate because we are always looking left and right to U.S. and Asia,
07:17obviously, for some interesting reasons.
07:20But if you look at really what we can work with from a talent perspective and how much these ecosystems,
07:26how little this ecosystem needs to ignite, I do think that, yeah, it's going to be very interesting in next years.
07:35Yeah, I hope so.
07:37Of course, that gives me a lot of interesting stories to tell.
07:40How do you vet AI startups promising platform-level disruption versus narrow features?
07:50Well, in the past, you had this saying, I think, in technology and venture that you either live long enough to be a platform
08:00or die as a point solution or as a feature.
08:03And I think that is something that is very strongly and radically changing.
08:13Because if you look at how some of the existing software companies, especially, for example, in the case of agentic AI,
08:23are monetizing and how they are selling to companies, they are not selling features.
08:30Often they are selling work, which is something that has never existed before.
08:33So, if you are able to sell a product that can do exactly what a human being would do,
08:39then the amount of lock-in that you can potentially achieve versus a product feature that you can migrate away from,
08:48in my view, is just very different.
08:49So, the whole concept of a feature, to some extent, in the most exceptional case of products and startups,
08:57will become somewhat irrelevant.
09:00How much value you can ultimately unlock, in the cases of these companies,
09:05is what's going to drive what, I would say, we can call a platform.
09:09And finally, the last question.
09:13What's a lesson from your time at Tear that you wish every founder knew?
09:20That lesson is that great hires will show excellence regardless of the environment that they work in.
09:29When we were doing references on people that we wanted to hire,
09:36and ultimately, we see them perform,
09:39it was very clear that if you look at some of these incredibly unpredictable environments
09:44where you have to juggle various different responsibilities
09:50and own various different outcomes,
09:52no matter how unconventional or unfamiliar the environment you might be in,
10:01an exceptional talent will find a way to really show excellence
10:07and find a way to pretty much be their own entrepreneur in that environment.
10:11And this is something that, especially in the very early stages of startups,
10:14so in this stage of zero to one,
10:16is probably, I would say,
10:18I wish many founders knew
10:20and could make more informed people decisions on.
10:25Hiring decisions, yeah, it always comes down.
10:29I've heard this quite frequently also from HR professionals.
10:33A lot of the success you'll have with your startup
10:38is tied to your first hires you do.
10:42Yeah.
10:43Yeah.
10:44Exactly.
10:45We can totally agree.
10:47Martin, thank you very much.
10:48It was a pleasure having you as a guest.
10:50Thank you so much for having me.
10:56That's all, folks.
10:57Find more news, streams, events, and interviews at www.startuprad.io.
