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This month we’re joined by Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, managing director at global VC firm General Catalyst and cofounder of La Famiglia VC — a Berlin-based early-stage investor which merged with General Catalyst last year.
Jeannette’s investments include companies like HR platform Deel, logistics startup Forto, HR tech unicorn Personio, defence unicorn Helsing and AI unicorn Mistral. She also sits on Helsing and Mistral’s boards, giving her a front seat at two of Europe’s most closely-watched and exciting companies.
She sat down with Sifted editor Amy Lewin to discuss how to fund ambitious deep tech ideas, how Europe can make the most out of AI to improve productivity and how that merger between two VC firms has been working out.
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Avid Larizadeh Duggan, senior managing director at Ontario-HQed growth-stage investor Teachers’ Venture Growth, is one of Europe’s first operator-turned-VCs.
Her career in tech began with stints as a product manager at places like eBay and Skype, and has switched between operational and investing roles ever since. In 2021 she joined TVG, which is part of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, one of the world’s biggest pension funds.
Its investments include German AI translation company DeepL, German battery startup Instagrid, Swedish healthtech unicorn Kry, British chip scaleup Graphcore and French health insurance unicorn Alan.
She sat down with Sifted editor Amy Lewin to discuss what’s top of tech companies’ minds at the moment, and why investors and board members without operational experience don’t always quite “get it”. -
Manglende episoder?
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This month we’re joined by Ilan Gur, CEO of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (or ARIA), a government body set up last year to fund ambitious, breakthrough innovations.
Before joining Aria, Gur was a programme director at ARPA-E, the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was established to develop new cutting-edge technologies to generate, store and use energy. He’s also been a founder — starting two companies in Silicon Valley
We discuss what technologies he’s most excited about today, covering topics from neuroscience to “programmable plants” to fight climate change. -
She’s one of the three founders of Pale Blue Dot, a Malmö-based early-stage climate tech fund which launched in 2020 and backs pre-seed and seed-stage startups reducing and reversing the effects of climate change, in Europe and the US.
Pale Blue Dot came along just ahead of the wave of climate tech funds which launched in Europe amid the tech boom. Its portfolio companies include Ember, a Scottish intercity transport startup; Monta, an app connecting charge point owners and electric car drivers; and Climate X, a platform which helps businesses analyse their exposure to and risks associated with climate change.
On this episode of the pod, we discuss what types of climate tech company Lindvall doesn’t need to see any more of, how Europe can compete with the US and how to balance VC investing with having two newborn babies. -
This week on the pod we’re joined by Jarek Kutylowski, founder and CEO of German AI startup DeepL. He’s built a profitable business in a field where he’s had to compete with the likes of Google, by developing cutting edge language translation technology.
The company says it now has “a customer network of 100k+ businesses, governments and other organisations worldwide” including Zendesk, Nikkei, Coursera and Deutsche Bahn. Kutylowski sat down with Sifted editor Amy Lewin to talk about DeepL’s technology, how it’s built an AI business with comparatively little VC funding and about how the craze around large language models is creating a new type of competition. -
Name a big European tech company, and there’s a high chance Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures, invested in it.
Martin’s portfolio includes some of the continent’s big winners, like car sharing platform BlaBlaCar, digital bank Revolut, digital health provider Kry, HR platform Personio and delivery company Deliveroo — and some of its big failures, including energy supplier Bulb which went bust in 2022.
On this month's episode of Startup Europe — the Sifted Podcast, we dig into what Martin has learnt from his time helping some of Europe's startup success stories scale, and some of the less fortunate company stories.
We hear about what he believes makes a great founder, improving stock options at European startups and why Revolut would probably IPO in the US. -
This week on the podcast we are joined by Cherry Ventures general partner Sophia Bendz — formerly global marketing director at Spotify — who talks us through what she's seeing across the European early-stage startup ecosystem in a challenging market.
She tells us about the AI effect on young companies launching today, how founders can look after their mental health in today's tough market and about how the startup ecosystem has changed since her days at Spotify. -
Andreessen Horowitz is one of the world’s best known — and biggest — VC firms, with over $35bn in assets under management, over 500 employees and a portfolio including Airbnb, GitHub, Instacart, Instagram, Lyft, Slack and Wise.
But for a long time it merely dabbled in investing in Europe.So it was big news last year when the firm announced it was opening a London office — its first non-US office — and that general partner Sriram Krishnan was moving to the UK to run it. His first job in tech was at Microsoft — and he’s since led product teams at Twitter, Snap and Facebook.
Andreesen’s new London team plans to invest primarily in crypto and Web3 — and has already done a handful of investments in Europe. Sriram joins us on the podcast to talk about Europe’s crypto prospects, what he’s learning about the continent since his move over from Silicon Valley, the attributes of great CEOs, and why he remains optimistic about tech despite wider market doom and gloom. -
This week Sifted editor Amy Lewin is joined by one of London’s best-known VCs Hussein Kanji, founding partner at Hoxton Ventures. He reflects on the kinds of big returns he won, and missed out on, by making early bets on companies like Deliveroo, Darktrace and Babylon.
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Oscar Pierre is one of, if not the, best-known entrepreneurs in Spain. His delivery company Glovo — which was bought by its bigger, listed competitor Delivery Hero in 2022 — is one of the country’s big international success stories, and now Pierre is using his experience (and financial resources) to help Spain’s next generation of entrepreneurs.
He’s also still running Glovo, largely independently of its new parent company. The business has 20m customers in 1,500 cities across 26 countries, including Spain, Italy, Ukraine, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan — and might consider further expansion soon, Pierre tells Sifted. On its app, you can order everything from a Burger King to groceries to flowers, from both independent high street businesses to big global chains.
It’s raised more than €1bn from investors and employs over 4,000 people, while working with around 65,000 riders.
On Startup Europe, The Sifted Podcast, editor Amy Lewin asked Pierre about his budding VC career, what’s going on in the southern Europe startup scene, the state of the food delivery market in 2024 — and if he’s thinking about his next move yet.
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Startup Europe is back for our new-look podcast, where we'll be focussing exclusively on longer form interviews with some of the biggest names in European tech.
Last year we brought you conversations with founders, operators and investors behind companies like Wise, Monzo, Figma, Delivery Hero and Kry and we have a whole load more for you in 2024.
This week it's Roxanne Varza, director of Parisian startup mega campus Station F.In the years since Station F opened in 2017, France has seen startup funding more than triple and the number of unicorns more than quadruple.
And now Paris is at the centre of the Gen AI boom too. Mistral, PhotoRoom and Poolside are just a handful of the buzzy AI startups based there raising huge amounts of funding.
As an angel investor (and one of Sequoia’s most active scouts in Europe) with more than 60 deals under her belt now, Varza is also getting to place some bets in the sector.
In the first episode of the Sifted podcast this year, editor Amy Lewin speaks to Varza about what’s on founders’ minds right now, Station F’s expansion plans and what she’s learnt so far as an angel investor.
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What do Lidl, Auchan, Sephora and Flink have in common? They’re all customers of RELEX Solutions, one of Finland’s four private tech companies.
RELEX makes supply-chain and retail-planning software — which might sound boring, but it's extremely important when you consider how much inventory, especially food, is wasted due to poor planning.
Sifted sat down with cofounder Johanna Småros to talk about the company’s decades-long journey from academia to commercialisation, just how many millions of kilos of waste annually the company is helping to avoid and why RELEX’s engineers are tired of hearing about AI.
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This week we discuss:
01:51 Hyme raises €8m for technology that could halve cost of storing energy
05:12 Xlinks raises $25m from TotalEnergies for 3,800km cable from the Sahara to the UK
07:46 Thought Web3 was over? This VC just raised €15m to back startups in the sector
19:27 Why Stability AI is launching a subscription fee -
This week we discuss:
01:05 Micromobility giant Tier lays off 22% of its workforce in push for profitability, Unicorn edtech Multiverse to lay off nearly a third of US employees
05:34 GenAI biotech Cradle raises $24m Series A led by Index Ventures
08:55 The top takeaways from Atomico’s State of European Tech report
20:13 Why hasn't EIF announced a single investment from its €3.75bn fund of funds yet? -
Sonya Iovieno knows European tech’s secrets. As head of venture and growth at HSBC Innovation Banking, where she works with thousands of VCs, startups and scaleups in the UK and Nordics, she has a view on who’s done an undisclosed down round, who’s been trimming headcount and who’s set up a “hunting line” for future acquisitions.
And she also knows what it’s like to go through a merger, after her organisation, formerly Silicon Valley Bank UK, was acquired by HSBC for a mere £1 after the dramatic collapse of its US parent company in March.
Iovieno joined us this week for a long-form interview on Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast to share her predictions for 2024 and her experience of the tumultuous weeks of this spring. -
This week we discuss:
Nordic merger between online grocers Oda and MathemIt ain’t Easee: How Norway’s EV rising star fell foul of regulatorsHow Sequoia-backed e-bike refurbisher Upway raised $30m in a micromobility slowdownGrocery delivery is back as Crisp raises €35m to scale next-day delivery$400k graduate salaries and gun-for-hire ‘SWAT teams’ — inside the wild AI talent market of 2023Why top AI talent is leaving Google’s DeepMind -
This week we discuss:
00:53 Aleph Alpha raises $500m Series B in one of Europe’s largest AI rounds ever
03:56 What the pitch deck from Adaptive, a new AI startup raising at a $100m valuation, tells us
07:15 French startup Quandela raises €50m to manufacture commercial quantum computers
11:03 Swedish startup wants to ‘stream energy like music’ on electric roads to charge cars as they drive
18:21 10x more money goes to VC funds owned by all-male vs all-female teams -
This week we discuss:
02:26 Web Summit announces former Wikimedia boss as new CEO
04:16 More unions sign up to Klarna strike on Nov 7
06:36 Benetton scion moves into tech investing with new €30m fund
09:40 How a “miracle” weight-loss drug created Europe’s most valuable company, and a startup investment machine
17:23 UK gears up to major AI summit under the shadow of its own lack of regulation -
This week we discuss:
02:05 French early-stage startups get a €500m funding boost in 2024 budget
04:33 Northvolt’s $20bn listing in Stockholm — a win for European stock exchanges
07:20 Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient
12:30 Quantum computing is not a threat to national security. So why can't Europe work together?
20:35 Founder to reality TV star — a shortcut to startup success?
This podcast is brought to you by Harper James, a national full-service law firm designed to support ambitious businesses. Having supported over 3,500 businesses, Harper James isn’t a run-of-the-mill law firm. It has transformed the traditional law firm model through unique price plans, smart technology and teams of almost exclusively senior lawyers — giving you affordable, commercial and high quality legal advice.If this sounds too good to be true, then head over to harperjames.co.uk and see for yourself. While you’re there, you’ll find 100s of resources to help your journey from startup to scaleup and beyond.
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This week we discuss:
00:59 Germany is about to legalise cannabis. What does it mean for startups?
03:49 Payments fintech Modulr agrees with regulator to stop onboarding new customers
05:32 German fund La Famiglia merges with General Catalyst
09:29 Northvolt founder’s heat pump startup secures €87m
17:24 The rise — and fall — of Babylon
Link to subscribe to the Sifted Fintech newsletter: https://sifted.eu/newsletters
This podcast is brought to you by Harper James, a national full-service law firm designed to support ambitious businesses. Having supported over 3,500 businesses, Harper James isn’t a run-of-the-mill law firm. It has transformed the traditional law firm model through unique price plans, smart technology and teams of almost exclusively senior lawyers — giving you affordable, commercial and high quality legal advice.If this sounds too good to be true, then head over to harperjames.co.uk and see for yourself. While you’re there, you’ll find 100s of resources to help your journey from startup to scaleup and beyond.
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