Unicorn

She places the highest value on people and building diverse teams and brings to the CEO role a background that's unusual in enterprise security, operations, culture, and human resources rather than engineering.

Prior to Adira, Emily was COO at Chainguard, where she built and scaled core business functions that helped take the company to its Series C and Unicorn status.

Before that, she served as Chief Operating and People Officer at ANCOR and spent 12 years at KPMG across HR, campus recruiting, and assurance services.

Alex Zenla is the co-founder and CTO of Adira and one of the most unconventional engineers in enterprise infrastructure, now 26.

I'll show you exactly how later in the episode, because I think the correction is actually more interesting than the real number.

What happened? In April 2026, the Joint Research Center published a science for policy briefing called Is Europe is losing its startups? It is the first quantification of the question that does not rest on Simply Unicorn List.

The method matters.

So stay with me for like 20 seconds.

That sentence has been repeated in more European tech articles than I can count.

And it's in the Draghi report itself.

and it traces to exactly one source a 2022 study by the Commission's Joint Research Center called In Search of EU Unicorns, which found 40 out of the sample of 147 EU unicorns had relocated their headquarters abroad, 32 to the United States, 7 to the UK and 1 to Israel.

40 divided by 147 is 27.2%, so drag is close to 30%, and the 40 of 147 you sometimes see quoted separately are not two findings.

A couple of companies, one company in particular, was already working on it for like a while beforehand.

But that ex post catapulted them into Unicorn status almost immediately.

And there's been a sort of a rush to go do it because there's some characteristics of, you know, different orbits that opt really work well for continuous, always-on solar energy at high flux from solar panels, which is one of the few ways of scaling the power that's needed to run giant AI data centers that makes any sense in the near term.

The turbine industry is so slow that gas turbines and the other generation mechanisms that all rely on running a turbine are going to have delays building generation capacity.

Thanks for listening to Fresh AI with support from Fifth Era and Current.

We'll be back Monday with Meet the Unicorns, tracking the standout players and biggest moves across the AI ecosystem.

Until then.

Talula AI and our AI guest correspondents are artificial intelligences created by Fifth Era LLC.