  We use the holographic V-QCD models to analyse the physics of dense QCD and
neutron stars. Accommodating lattice results for thermodynamics of QCD enables
us to make generic predictions for the Equation of State (EoS) of the quark
matter phase in the cold and dense regime. We demonstrate that the resulting
pressure in V-QCD matches well with a family of neutron-star-matter EoSs that
interpolate between state-of-the-art theoretical results for low and high
density QCD. After implementing the astrophysical constraints, i.e., the
largest known neutron star mass and the recent LIGO/Virgo results for the tidal
deformability, we analyse the phase transition between the baryonic and quark
matter phases. We find that the baryon density $n_B$ at the transition is at
least 2.9 times the nuclear saturation density $n_s$. The transition is of
strongly first order at low and intermediate densities, i.e., for $n_B/n_s
\lesssim 7.5$.
