Scaling Europe

Granola has just raised a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, becoming one of Europe’s newest AI unicorns, after spreading from VCs and founders into companies almost entirely through word of mouth. Sam Stephenson, Co-founder of Granola, says that growth has been driven by word of mouth more than any other channel, with early adoption coming from people who spend their days in meeti...

Spore. Bio has unveiled a new microbiology technology that can detect, quantify and identify bacteria in under 10 minutes, replacing a process that typically takes 5 to 20 days and has not meaningfully changed for decades  Amine Raji, Co-founder and CEO of Spore. Bio, says the company spent three years building and validating the technology to work directly in industrial environments, with machine...

Europe used to build strong local companies. Now founders are building global winners from day one, with a much higher ceiling than before. Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures, says ambition across Europe has shifted, early stage funds are staying focused even as rounds get bigger, and more companies are being built in deep tech as Europe moves into harder problems. The Scaling Europe...

Credo Ventures has raised an $88m Fund V to continue backing pre-seed founders from Central and Eastern Europe, keeping the fund size unchanged even with strong performance and LP demand. Maciek Gnutek and Jakub Krikava, Partners at Credo Ventures, say staying disciplined on fund size is key to returning top outcomes, with the focus on backing the best founders early across the region and its dias...

Dash0 has raised a $100m Series B at a $1bn valuation after hitting over $10m ARR and growing faster than expected, becoming a unicorn just months after its Series A. Mirko Novakovic, CEO of Dash0, says the shift to agent-generated code is driving this change, as software is deployed faster than it can be reviewed and observability becomes essential to keep systems running in production. The Scali...

0TO9 is aiming to build 1,000 profitable fintech companies, based on the idea that founders should not have to rebuild licensing and compliance from scratch. Jessica Holzbach, Partner at 0TO9 and former Co-founder of Penta, says fintech has become harder to start at the earliest stage, even as build times have dropped from years to weeks with AI. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - chec...

UK startups raised around $23.6B last year, bringing venture funding back close to previous highs and signalling renewed momentum in the ecosystem. At the same time, investment is concentrating around larger rounds and AI companies, while the long-standing challenge of helping UK startups scale into global companies remains. Jenny Edwards is Head of Venture Banking at NatWest, working with founder...

Build Weeks take scientists from idea to investment readiness in seven days, allowing Wilbe to work with hundreds of researchers each year instead of a handful of cohorts. Devika Thapar and Ale Maiano, Co-founders at Wilbe, say the shift is driven by a new generation of researchers who want to move faster and build companies earlier, as scientists increasingly think and operate more like engineers...

Fuse Energy has already crossed $500m in annualised revenue and grown 10x. Alan Chang, Co-founder and CEO of Fuse Energy, says the company’s real constraint is not capital but hiring enough great engineers. The business continues scaling in the UK energy market and is preparing to expand into new products and markets. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here: https://get....

AI adoption inside companies still looks far messier than the hype suggests, with teams using different tools, uneven security standards and little visibility into how AI is actually used day to day. Justas Morkūnas, COO at nexos.ai, is building around that problem with a no-code agent platform designed to help companies move from prompt to outcome while keeping security and control in place, espe...

The $23B Wiz acquisition has become the largest venture-backed M&A in history, a milestone moment for the tech industry and the cybersecurity ecosystem. In this conversation, Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures and an early backer of Wiz, reflects on the long relationship with the founders that began years before the company existed and why conviction in people, more than markets or produc...

Alan has grown from a small French startup into one of Europe’s most ambitious digital health companies, reaching €785M ARR and a €5B valuation after Index first backed the company in 2017. Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures, reflects on that journey from the early investment to today and what it takes to build a company capable of scaling across markets and transforming healthcare systems. The...

Large companies already run on thousands of APIs and internal systems, which makes connecting AI to the systems that actually run a business far more complex than it first appears. Sean Blanchfield, Founder of Jentic, discusses why this integration challenge is becoming one of the biggest obstacles for enterprise AI and why he believes a new infrastructure layer will be needed to manage how AI int...

Entrepreneurs First has raised $200m in fresh capital to continue backing founders before they even have a team or an idea. The firm has built its model around identifying ambitious individuals early in their careers and helping them turn that potential into companies. Jonny Clifford, Partner at Entrepreneurs First, explains why many of the world’s best potential founders never start companies in...

Cloudsmith is building a new generation platform for managing the software supply chain, challenging long-established players like JFrog and Sonatype while scaling from its roots in Belfast to large enterprise customers around the world. Before becoming CEO of the company, Glenn Weinstein spent eight years as a U.S. Navy pilot before moving into software, later holding leadership roles at companie...

Wordsmith AI builds legal AI specifically for in-house legal teams, helping companies bring legal work back inside the business instead of relying on external counsel. The company already works with hundreds of organisations including BT, Deliveroo, Remote and Skyscanner and has been growing rapidly as demand for tools that automate internal legal work accelerates. Ross McNairn, CEO of Wordsmith A...

Harmonic is building what it calls a startup discovery engine, used by investors to find founders earlier than traditional deal flow ever allowed. At Slush in Helsinki, I spoke to Darri Atlason, Head of Growth at Harmonic. He talks about how funds now track talent inside companies like DeepMind or Palo Alto Networks to spot potential founders before they even start a company. In some cases the sig...

European tech is now a $3.8tn ecosystem, and Niklas Zennström has seen the entire journey from quitting his job around the dotcom crash to building Skype and later founding Atomico to back the next generation. He explains why technology now sits at the core of Europe’s future GDP growth and why unlocking Europe’s own institutional capital could determine whether the next wave of global tech leader...

QuantumLight uses proprietary AI models to scan and rank thousands of companies using public data, helping the firm identify the strongest investment opportunities and move quickly with high conviction. At Slush in Helsinki, I sat down with Dora Zikouli, Investor at QuantumLight VC, and she explained how the firm combines that data-driven approach with lessons from scaling Revolut under Nik Storon...

Three years ago ElevenLabs had just 10 people. Today the company has around 400 employees, is valued at $11bn and is still scaling rapidly as it works toward a team of more than 900. Victoria Weller joined early as Chief of Staff and now oversees operations, playing a central role in building the systems that support the company’s hypergrowth, from scaling hiring to maintaining a culture built aro...

Workplace disputes often go unchallenged because most people do not know their rights or cannot afford legal help. Danae Shell, Founder and CEO at Valla, is building a consumer legal AI company designed to change that. Valla’s smart legal platform helps people identify workplace legal issues and understand their options, combining AI with legal expertise to make support faster and more accessible...

The moment Crijn Bouman first saw autonomous vehicles in action, one problem became obvious: remove the driver and much of today’s infrastructure stops working. Charging stations, parking garages and service hubs all assume a human behind the wheel. After building EV charging company Epyon and selling it to ABB, he started Rocsys to fix that interface with hands-free robotic charging for autonomou...

Lawhive has grown to $35m in revenue after 7x growth in a single year and recently raised a $60m Series B to accelerate its US expansion. Co-founder and CEO Pierre Proner built the company by combining a regulated law firm with an AI platform instead of simply selling software to lawyers, using automation to reduce the cost of legal services and open access to help for people who would otherwise s...

AVP began as an €80m venture initiative inside AXA and is now an independent firm managing $2.5B across venture and growth. François Robinet, Founder and Managing Partner at AVP, built the firm with a deliberate transatlantic strategy, operating across Europe and the US and learning early that the biggest constraint for European tech is not talent or ideas but access to very large pools of risk ca...

When ElevenLabs was still fourth in the market, its instant voice cloning was already 10x cheaper and 10x faster than competitors. That was enough for Bryan Kim, Partner at a16z, to book a same day flight from San Francisco to London and close the Series A over lunch in Notting Hill. What followed was a rare transition from creator led self serve revenue to serious enterprise scale, as the company...