Every breakthrough begins the same way. Not with a pitch, a mandate or a machine, but with a rare few founders who see the future early, decide to build it, and become the authors of progress. Built By Few is named for them. On Tuesday 3 November, Connect Ventures’ flagship event came home to London for its third edition, after a year on the road across Europe.

We filled the venue with over 250 of the founders, builders and investors behind some of Europe’s most ambitious companies, and asked the people on stage for the unfiltered version: not the pitch, but how it really happened.

Our MC Yasmeen kept the day moving, and Pietro opened with a thank-you to everyone in the room and a word on Fund V and how we’re sharpening our focus on founders who are technical all the way down, building hardware, robotics, deep tech and AI-native companies. Then we handed the stage to those building the future and authoring progress:

Abakar Saidov, who’s building something new in stealth, joined Rory on stage to talk about founder-business model fit and making the move from software to hard tech. He encouraged all founders to ask themselves the hard questions, such as: why are you the right person to build this? And do you actually like your customer?

After that, Gerald Mullally, CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits, sat down with Sitar for a fireside on how he’s scaling British quantum computing, and how they’re achieving what would take classical computers 2 trillion years. One audience member said of the talk: “Quantum always felt like a different language to me, but the fireside chat was so enlightening for a non-technical person.”

Fabian Seipel, CEO of Connect portfolio company ai-coustics, was up next, covering audio intelligence and teaching machines how to hear. While our hearing has evolved over millions of years and is “fine-tuned” over a lifetime, simple auditory tasks like focusing on a person’s voice or inferring when to respond are still relatively hard and unsolved for machines, especially in real-world environments. Fabian talked about what it takes to build an infrastructure company for Voice AI, and what he’s learned building a deep-tech company in Europe. One guest described the session as “genuinely captivating”.

Joe McDonald, co-founder and CEO of tem, delivered our after-lunch keynote on what he’s learned building tem and Rosso, and why it matters: picking the hardest, least fashionable layer of the system and rebuilding it from the core. Joe and his team chose to build the infrastructure, the nucleus of the market. That gives them the right to build the applications they want, and to support the creation of new ones. Others can chase the shiny apps.

Paul Veugen of Desert Ant Labs, fresh from speaking at Built By Few Amsterdam in October, was in conversation with Pietro on how he, Laurier and Fredrik went from Detail, Apple’s iPad App of the Year in 2025, to building Desert Ant Labs in Amsterdam. Most AI runs on giant servers far away, which makes it slow and costly to build into everyday app features. Desert Ant Labs’ 18 small AI models run directly on your phone or laptop, so they respond in milliseconds and cost nothing to run. One of them, Voz, turns ten minutes of speech into text in two seconds on an iPhone.

We’ve known Vinit Patel, VP Sales at Aikido Security, since he joined shortly after we co-led the seed round. He arrived as employee number eight in January 2024, when Aikido had $250K in ARR, one core product and a sales team of one. Nearly three years on, it’s at $80M ARR with more than 400 people. In his keynote, “Why we win”, Vinit said there are lots of reasons for that, but one matters most: intensity. Aikido hires, onboards and trains for three behaviours. Hungry and curious: everyone in the revenue team can answer a technical question themselves, so prospects get an answer on the spot rather than waiting two days for a solutions engineer. Obsessed with the customer: “just checking in” is banned, and every touchpoint has to earn its place with something useful. And do more: input equals output, and there’s nowhere to hide. The best feedback they’ve ever had? “You guys are very intense.”

Our penultimate slot of the day went to Lamis Mukta from Anthropic, who spoke about goal engineering: the evolution of agentic design principles, from prompts to goals and everything that came in between, with practical tips for keeping your agents goal-oriented. It was right at the cutting edge of how people can bring goal engineering into their business.

Finally, we wrapped with Stanislas Polu, co-founder of Dust. It was great to bring Dust back onto the stage after Stan’s co-founder Gabriel spoke at a previous Built By Few event. This time, Stan was here to talk to us about “Designing the future of human/software collaboration”, presenting the principles they are following to build Dust, how to build a differentiated product in a crowded market, and the “Future of Work” FAQ.

Sitar closed the day by looking back on a full year of Built By Few. London was the sixth and final stop of 2026, after satellite editions in Ghent in January, Milan in March, Barcelona in May, Berlin in June and Amsterdam in October. She also took the audience through our belief that progress always has an author: the founders who saw what everyone else had learned to live with, and built what should exist. Built By Few is where we bring them together.

Across the year, our events featured authors at the frontier, from quantum computing and cybersecurity to AI models, energy, robotics and manufacturing, with speakers from Oxford Quantum Circuits, Aikido Security, Anthropic, Dust, ai-coustics, Desert Ant Labs, tem, Arduino, TrueLayer and Monumental, among others. No panels and no polish, just the real stories behind what’s being built. 

To our speakers: thank you for the candour, the war stories and for giving back to founders at the earlier stages. To everyone who came, thank you for your time and energy. We loved having you with us.

We’re not looking for many. We never were. Built By Few is for the few: the ones who make the improbable look, in hindsight, inevitable. We’ll be back in 2027, with a new London flagship and more cities across Europe. Dates to follow soon, so keep an eye on the Built By Few page. Progress always has an author. See you next year.

P.S. Check out the recap here.