Sifted

🚨 BREAKING: Balderton just launched Built in Europe: a continent-wide campaign championing Europe’s startup ecosystem 🚀 Here’s what we know so far: 👉 The initiative is backed by 100+ founders and CEOs from Europe’s leading tech companies, including Revolut, Mistral AI and Wayve. 👉 The campaign will roll out across London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Munich through billboards, digital advertising and community projects. 👉 The group has launched a new jobs site, which aims to become Europe’s largest startup talent hub, aggregating open roles from 1,000 startups. 🔗 Read the full story on Sifted here: https://lnkd.in/e6T38WwS

🤳 Will Europe’s VCs catch up to the influencer craze? While VCs have long been trying to become LinkedIn “influencers” — posting hot takes and raking up views and comments — some investors have taken it more seriously. Visionaries recently said it was hiring a content and social creator in London, with the aim of becoming “Europe’s first social-first VC”. Meanwhile, Matthieu Stefani, cofounder of French VC firm OVNI Capital, has seen his “Génération Do It Yourself” podcast rake in upwards of 700k views on YouTube. 📍 Read more in Sifted below: https://lnkd.in/e-KMAvtj

Who owns headcount? Traditionally, that has sat somewhere between HR and finance. But as AI changes how companies hire, scale and measure performance, the answer is becoming less clear. When growth, cost and productivity are all moving in real time, can HR and finance still plan separately? What becomes possible when both teams work from the same data and direction? And as AI brings new visibility to workforce decisions, is this the moment HR and finance finally start operating as one? Join Sifted and Rippling for a conversation on the headcount paradox and how startups can think differently about workforce planning, cost and execution. On the panel: Katharina Bremer, Finance and HR at sewts Alessandro Bonatti, Chief People Officer at WeRoad Rhiannon B., Senior Manager, HR (EMEA) at Rippling Achraf ARIFI, VP of Financial Planning and Analysis at Vestiaire Collective Moderated by Éanna Kelly, contributing editor at Sifted 📅 June 24 🕛 12pm BST / 1pm CEST 💻 Virtual Register via the link in the comments 👇 #EuropeanStartups

🇬🇧 "There's lots of good reasons to be based in Britain." We recently hosted James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital and chair of the UK's Sovereign AI Unit on the Sifted Podcast. Since joining Balderton in 2012, James has led investments in second-hand shopping platform Depop, AI agent maker Convergence and bank payment fintech GoCardless — as well as AI frontier lab Prior Labs, which was acquired by German software giant SAP earlier this month. James discusses how the acquisition came about, why UK companies should register at home rather than abroad and what needs to be done to take the country's ecosystem to the next level. He also talks through Sovereign AI's investments to date — which include Isomorphic Labs, Ineffable Intelligence and Callosum — and responds to the backlash it has received. Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/eU6S_Cm9

For fintech leaders, infrastructure is no longer just a backend issue, it’s a growth issue. As more companies look to launch embedded finance products and scale across markets, many are running into the same challenge: legacy BaaS infrastructure that can’t keep up with speed, flexibility and compliance demands. This piece explores what’s causing the bottleneck and what modern fintech infrastructure needs to look like instead. Featuring insights from Olegs Cernisevs, PhD, chief technology officer at fintech company Blackcat and a chief architect of the infrastructure behind Papaya. Particularly relevant for fintech founders, CTOs, product and infrastructure leaders thinking about scaling embedded finance products without being held back by legacy banking infrastructure. https://lnkd.in/e5EHiA6B

🔍 This ex-Spotify boss is using AI to help VCs tell which startups are "90% bollocks". Henrik Landgren worked at the music streaming giant for half a decade before serving another five years at EQT Ventures & Growth. Now he's launched Gilion, an AI tool that analyses the revenue potential of companies. Now he's selling his predictive platform to VCs. "They're really bad at using data," Henrik tells Sifted contributing editor Éanna Kelly. Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/e4_EtEzK

JUST IN: London-based Inherent has come out of stealth with a $50m raise 🚀 Here’s the quick breakdown: 💰 The round: Founded by DeepMind and Microsoft alumni Louis Kirsch, Kaloyan Aleksiev, Tantum Collins and Edward Hughes, the team has raised $50m co-led by Index Ventures by Radical Ventures. 🧠 The proposition: Inherent's AI platform "Faraday" aims to combine human scientific research with AI in order to produce novel inventions and innovations. Why it matters: 💡 Index investor Danny Rimer says that while most AI systems are built to answer questions, they can't yet figure out the questions worth asking: "That's the gap Inherent is building into." The company has recruited Entrepreneurs First cofounder and former UK government AI tsar Matt Clifford as an advisor. 📍Get the full story in Sifted here: https://lnkd.in/esTWUui2

One year ago French AI darling Mistral announced it was expanding into AI infrastructure with Mistral Compute, a new offering backed by 18k Nvidia GPUs to support its own compute needs as well as those of its customers. Since then the French scaleup has secured an $830m loan to fund its infrastructure build-out, with multiple projects underway in France and Sweden, representing €4bn in investments. The company says it plans to build 1GW of compute for AI across Europe by 2030, which would make it a sizeable cloud player in the region. As Mistral ramps up efforts to establish itself as a leading European "neocloud", becoming an "end-to-end" provider of AI, from infrastructure and compute to model operation, I looked into the why and the how of the strategy. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/en34dbRW

Last night in Madrid, we brought together founders, investors and technology leaders building AI companies across Europe for a Sifted Connects Dinner with Nebius. The conversation focused on what it actually takes to build and scale AI businesses right now, beyond the hype. A few themes stood out: → The opportunity ahead is huge, but turning ambition into sustainable business growth remains the challenge → As AI companies move from experimentation to production, infrastructure choices are becoming harder to reverse later → Regulation, talent pressures and enterprise adoption are all shaping how quickly European AI companies can scale There were plenty of honest insights and shared experiences around what’s working, what’s proving harder than expected and how founders are thinking about the next phase of AI growth in Europe. Thank you to everyone who joined us for such an open and thoughtful discussion, and to Nebius for sponsoring the evening.