If you think about how many companies in Europe or in the U.S. have the capacity to become Uber,

the vast majority of those do not have the capacity to raise billions of dollars and deploy

that in a way that's going to return a factor of that money.

The idea of investing in, quote, AI, it's a bit fractured in that, you know, if you are investing in a company that is specifically an LLM business

or specifically, you know, building out hardware for compute power, those are

clearly AI businesses. For us, every business at this point is effectively an AI business.

Yes, of course we look for female founders. We also just look for the best founders and a lot of them

are female. And if you aren't seeing, you know, a proportionate number of female founders, then you're missing some of the very

best deal flow in the industry.

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Hello and welcome to the UKTM podcast, a weekly chat with the movers and shakers of the UK

tech industry and the destination for all things UK tech related. I'm your host, Jane Wakefield, and today I'm

joined by Karen McCormick, Chief Investment Officer at Venture Capital and Early Growth

Firm, Berengia. Welcome, Karen. Thank you, Jane. It's great to be here. Now, what the

listeners won't hear is that I had to do several takes of your name, not your surname, but the name of your company.

So tell me the story as to how you came by the name, first of all.

Yes, sure. So I have to say it was before my time. Our two founders are the ones who had

developed the original branding. And it's representative of the fact that Berengia is both

US and Europe. We've been transatlantic for nearly 40 years now. And the name is an amalgamation of, if you think about the Bering Strait, which is there used to be a landmass there, which connected basically the European continent to the North American continent. And so it's kind of an amalgamation of that landmass that is now the Bering Strait.

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