Scaling Europe

Leather is a $100bn global market and no alternative has managed to truly replace it. At Slush in Helsinki, I spoke with Michael Newton , CEO of Corium, about why the only real way to replace leather is with leather itself, grown from bovine skin cells instead of animals. He believes Europe has a genuine opportunity to build breakthrough companies if it can reduce the friction that still slows fou...

Using drones to stop drones is becoming a core part of modern defence. Jan-Hendrik Boelens, Founder and CEO at Alpine Eagle, is building air to air defence systems designed to detect and intercept hostile drones, securing the German Ministry of Defence as a launch customer and testing the system in Ukraine as the company expands beyond Germany into the UK. The Scaling Europe show is presented by D...

A €20m fund is now backing European founders building autonomous defence systems across air, land and sea. I spoke with Louise Boucher, Founder and Managing Partner at Sisyphus Ventures, about how startups are securing government contracts within their first 12 to 18 months and why she sees the opportunity to build multi-billion-euro defence companies in Europe over the coming years. The Scaling E...

Revolut built its own performance framework when an Excel sheet stopped scaling and culture began shifting at just over 100 employees. At Slush in Helsinki, I spoke with Georgian Andrei, GM of Revolut People, about how that internal system ties every employee to measurable KPIs that update in real time and how it has now become a standalone product aimed at helping other European companies scale w...

Intercom’s AI customer service agent FIN is already resolving more than 1 million conversations every week and is on track to hit $100m in revenue. When I spoke with Des Traynor, Co-founder of Intercom, he described what it really takes to pivot a 15-year-old SaaS company into an AI-first business while the market is still figuring out what AI actually means. FIN is no longer just a feature inside...

Gilion is building infrastructure that connects startup performance directly to capital. At Slush in Helsinki, I spoke with Henrik Landgren, Co-founder and CPTO at Gilion, about how granular company data and AI-driven analysis are used to structure funding decisions, including non-dilutive growth financing of up to €5–10m for companies with strong underlying metrics. After working with large-scale...

ivee has announced the first close of its seed round, raising $1m and going for more. The company started as a recruitment platform helping people back into work. After Dragon’s Den and a sharp shift in the market, it expanded into AI upskilling as companies began racing to retrain their workforce. Amelia Miller argues the next divide in the labour market will be AI-fluent vs non-AI-fluent, and th...

Bloom & Wild grew to £50m in its first seven years, raised over £100m from General Catalyst and Index, then had to pivot hard when the market shifted. Aron Gelbard, Co-Founder and CEO, talks about moving from growth to profitability, rebuilding momentum, and returning to 20% year-on-year growth while staying profitable. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:https:/...

A former black hole physicist now building one of the most practical bets in AI. Sasha Haco, Co-Founder and CEO of Unitary, explains why most AI agents still don’t show real impact, and why the real opportunity lies in replacing the repetitive admin work buried inside legacy systems across entire industries. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:https://get.deel.com/ru...

George Davis, CEO at Lorum, is building the clearing bank behind fintech. After TrueLayer and BVNK, he left to fix dollar clearing for financial institutions. Lorum now claims 80% month-to-month growth for six months, with USD clearing growing even faster, as it positions itself as core infrastructure in global payments. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here: https://g...

Encord has raised a $60m Series C, taking total funding to $110m, as physical AI starts to move into the real world. Eric Landau, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Encord, shares why robotics and autonomous systems are now training on data volumes far beyond what powered early AI models, and how that shift is reshaping where real value in AI is being built. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - ch...

Italian Tech Week is now Wave. Diyala D’Aveni, CEO at Vento, explains why keeping “Italy” in the name started to feel limiting as founders and investors began coming from across Europe and beyond. From starting with 100 people in 2018 to backing 160 Italian founders worldwide, she reflects on how Italy’s tech scene has evolved and what it will take for founders to believe they can build global com...

AI hardware is entering a new phase as billions flow into chips and frontier labs across Europe. Danyal Akarca, Co-founder at Callosum, and Suraj Bramhavar, Programme Director at ARIA, are working on what comes next: a £50m Scaling Inference Lab and a system layer designed to connect different models to different chips, pushing AI beyond homogenous scale and towards a more heterogeneous future. Th...

Europe just added 1 trillion in tech value. Investment is rising, unicorn creation is strong, and ambition across the ecosystem is higher than ever. At Slush in Helsinki, I spoke with Tom Wehmeier, Partner at Atomico and author of the State of European Tech report, about what this moment really means. With 44 billion invested into European tech this year compared to 500 billion in the US over thre...

ElevenLabs is not just one product. It now runs an API business, a creator platform and a fast scaling enterprise agents unit that barely existed a year ago. Luke Harries leads growth across it, and his approach is simple: if revenue stops when you step away, you have not built a system. Inside the company, intensity is deliberate. The goal is an Olympic level team, with low ego as a hiring filter...

Every company IVP backs in Europe competes directly with Silicon Valley. There is one global bar, and that is the level founders are measured against. At Slush in Helsinki I spoke with Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP, about what that actually means when you are building from Europe and how the timeline for moving to the US has shifted. A few years ago many companies would only think about the US...

Building DeepL started with a clear bet: language would be the first place where AI had to be genuinely good. At Slush in Helsinki, I sat down with Jarek Kutylowski, CEO and founder of DeepL, and we talked about why “good enough” wasn’t enough for translation, how quality became the company’s moat, and what changes when AI moves from experiments into real business use. The Scaling Europe show is p...

It took Zango eleven months to get its first major bank fully live, including six months just convincing IT to open up APIs. Ritesh Singhania, Co-founder and CEO at Zango, shares what it actually takes to sell compliance software into large financial institutions and why once a bank trusts you, the relationship tends to last. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here: http...

Karl has spent the last 6 years transforming how consumers purchase and retailers sell tech...moving from outright ownership to subscription-based access. The company has raised £150m and has just announced hitting £56.5m of ARR and £10m of EBITDA

Lars is a leading angel investor and founder based in Athens. In 2004, Lars and his brother Jens sold their mapping startup, Where 2 Tech to Google. Lars became the Head of Google Maps from Where 2’s technology, and was then the Director of Engineering at Facebook in Menlo Park and London. He's now founded Panathenea - a leading tech event in Athens.

ElevenLabs went from a $2m pre-seed to an $11bn valuation in three years, scaling to $330m in ARR as voice AI moved from curiosity to enterprise priority. Mati Staniszewski, Co-Founder and CEO at ElevenLabs, breaks down what changed inside the company once growth stopped being hypothetical and started compounding at scale. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here: https:/...

European venture has been through the SaaS boom, the 2021 bubble, the reset, and now the AI wave. I spoke with Richard Anton, General Partner at OXX, about why being AI native now defines the winners, how services are being rebuilt as software, and why Europe generates strong venture returns while pension funds still allocate just 0.12% to the asset class. The Scaling Europe show is presented by D...

Stacks, the agentic platform for enterprise finance, has raised a $23M Series A led by Lightspeed, with EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and S16VC doubling down. The round comes less than a year after Stacks’ $12 million seed financing led by General Catalyst, underscoring the company’s rapid traction and momentum. Since emerging from stealth less than a year ago, Stacks has onboarded more than 30...

Wholesale distribution is one of the largest parts of the economy, and much of it still runs on manual sales processes inside legacy ERP systems. Plato is building AI software that helps distributors spot missed sales in their own data and automatically turn emails and PDFs into quotes and orders. The company grew 10x over the past year across the DACH region and I sat down with Benedikt Nolte, Co...

Jaime and Tobie are the founders of SurrealDB - the fastest-growing and one of the best-funded - databases in the world. The company just announced raising an additional $23m in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total investment to-date (including seed) to $44m. They have also announced the launch of SurrealDB 3.0 - the only database to enable first-class agent memory and context graphs ins...