Scaling Europe

More than 80% of corporate legal work is repetitive, and it is still being billed by the hour. LEGALFLY is building the legal operating system for in-house teams, automating contracts, compliance checks and due diligence at scale. I spoke with Co-founder and CEO Ruben about why legal budgets are shifting from law firms to AI tools, how junior-heavy legal models are starting to break, and how Legal...

Building a consumer hardware company in Europe is brutally hard. Capital-intensive, unforgiving, and dominated by giants, it’s a category most founders avoid entirely. At Slush in Helsinki, I spoke with Carl Pei about why Nothing chose to take that risk anyway, what most people underestimate about hardware, and how design, pragmatism, and long time horizons shaped the company’s path. The Scaling E...

Multiverse is built around a simple idea that AI only matters if people can actually use it at work. Euan Blair has spent the last decade building a company focused on reskilling people inside organisations, helping them apply new skills directly in their jobs rather than learning in isolation. As AI accelerates, that challenge has become more urgent, and more human, than ever. The Scaling Europe...

Velocity is building infrastructure that connects traditional banking and stablecoins, giving global CFOs and treasury teams a way to move money across borders with more speed and control. I spoke with Eric Queathem about why stablecoins are moving into mainstream finance and how Velocity raised $18m in its first five months to build payments and treasury tools for global companies. The Scaling Eu...

SynthFlow started as a no-code layer on top of GPT. Today it is one of Europe’s fastest-growing voice AI companies, processing millions of enterprise calls every month. I sat down with Hakob Astabatsyan, Co-Founder and CEO of SynthFlow, to talk about why simple “AI receptionist” use cases are already becoming commoditised, why real value only shows up when entire business workflows are automated,...

Gui Gomes and Joao Alves are building Bleap with a simple but ambitious bet that changing the backend of finance can change what users get out of it. They explain how Bleap reached 20,000 users and $30m in transactions, why higher cashback and better savings rates depend on new infrastructure rather than better design, and what it takes to scale a blockchain-based fintech beyond early adopters aft...

Matt raised $400m for his new firm - Evantic. It's investing in B2B AI companies across EMEA and the US. It's already invested in Synthesia, ElevenLabs, Harvey, Lovable and n8n. In this exclusive interview we discussed his new VC model, how he's able to get into the hottest deals, the future of Evantic and all things European Tech.

Building quantum computers is hard. Making them useful is even harder. Phasecraft is focused on the part most people overlook: the software that lets today’s quantum machines solve real problems in materials, chemistry, energy, and optimisation. In this conversation, we talk about why algorithms matter more than hype, how close quantum advantage really is, and what it takes to turn frontier scienc...

Tandem Health was built to reduce the amount of time doctors spend on administrative work instead of patient care. At Slush in Helsinki, I sat down with Lukas Saari, Co-founder and CEO of Tandem Health. We talked about why clinical documentation became the starting point for AI in healthcare and how Tandem Health is scaling across Europe while working within existing clinical workflows. The Scalin...

Tyler Edwards spent eight years building AI systems for British intelligence agencies including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. He's now building Overmind - a startup building the supervision layer for AI agents, which just announced a £2M seed round led by specialist cybersecurity investors. We discuss the round, working in MI5 and the future of cybersecurity in a world of AI. The Scaling Europe show is p...

I spoke with Max Buchan, CEO of Valarian, about building systems that are meant to keep working even when trust, borders, and assumptions break down. Valarian focuses on the digital backbone behind sensitive operations, where losing control of data or access is not an option. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel – check them out here: https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Hanna Payette Peterson is trying to close the gap between world-class science and company creation in Europe. She shares why Berlin has the research, talent, and ambition to produce breakthrough bio and AI companies, but still struggles to turn academic work into startups. We talk about mixing scientists with builders early, why hackathons can spark real ventures, what Europe can learn from more m...

Carmen Alfonso Rico is the founder of Cocoa, a pre-seed fund backing founders at the moment before a company really exists. We talked about what she means by backing “killers with a heart”, why building a venture-scale company makes no rational sense, and how she looks for founders who feel it’s inevitable for them to build. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel – check them out here: https...

The company, founded by Duco van Lanschot and David Schreiber, has built an AI-native compliance platform that accelerates business onboarding and automates manual work. It announced a €10.7m seed round last May led by Index Ventures and is today announcing a $30m Series A led by CapitalG . The company has been accelerating like CRAZY. We sat down to discuss the round and much more. The Scaling Eu...

Barney is one of the UK's top founders. He started Cleo way before AI was hot and has now built one of the UK's strongest AI companies. It expanded to the US where it has seen it's huge success, but now after 4 years it has come back. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here:https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk

Raising money as a Series B / C Deep Tech company in Europe has been notoriously hard. A new €1bn fund, Kembara, is looking to change that. It will make 20 investments of €40m each as it looks to plug this gap. It's founding partners have between them invested in OpenAI, SpaceX, Anduril, the Exploration Company, RobCo and many other amazing deep tech companies. The Scaling Europe show is prese...

Attio has tripled its customer base to over 7,000 in the last year. It raised a $52m Series B led by GV (Google Ventures) last year and has gone from strength to strength. Today it's announced Ask Attio, its new conversational AI layer that can reason over and act on everything in your CRM. It ingests all your data (emails, notes, calendars, product data, billing, interactions etc.) and enable...

Mick Hodgins recently joined Notion as GM of EMEA after more than a decade at Google and a year-long career break. I spoke with him about why he made the move, how Notion was building with AI before ChatGPT took off, and what it means to scale a product-led company across regions while moving upmarket into enterprise. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel - check them out here: https://get....

Energy is one of the biggest markets in the world, yet it still runs on outdated transaction systems. I spoke with Joe McDonald, Co-founder and CEO of tem, about why electricity is really a data and infrastructure problem, what he learned from building and selling his first energy company to Shell, and how tem is rebuilding the way electricity is traded to reduce costs and remove unnecessary inter...

Harvey has become one of the leading AI companies in legal tech in just a few years. At Slush in Helsinki, I sat down with Gabe Pereyra, Co-founder of Harvey, and Ilya Fushman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, an early investor in the company. We talked about how law firms moved from testing AI to rolling it out firm-wide, and why legal turned out to be a strong place for real AI adoption. The Scaling...

Fleet, a French scale-up specialising in IT fleet management, has just announced a partial exit at a €100m valuation. The business has been entirely bootstrapped and this is the first time it has opened its capital to external investors for the first time. This primary LBO transaction provides ten of millions of liquidity to the two founders, Sevan Marian and Alexandre Berriche, as well as to empl...

Synthesia has announced a $200m Series E at a $4bn valuation led by Google Ventures. Vidu Shanmugarajah has backed the company since before ChatGPT and the AI boom. I spoke with him about the team’s early foresight, how they navigated both opportunity and challenge as AI took off, and what built long-term conviction at Google Ventures as Synthesia continues to scale. The Scaling Europe show is pre...

Kanishka is the AI Minister in the UK responsible for AI Opportunities, Semiconductors and Tech for Growth among other bits. He's a big AI advocate and overall tech enthusiast. Yesterday the government announced it was up-skilling 10m UK citizens in AI skills so we sat down to talk all about it.

Wiz is one of the greatest success stories in VC history. It went from 0 to a $32bn cash in exit in 5 years. I spoke to their VP of EMEA to hear about how they grew so fast, difference between european and US buyers and the acquisiton.

Today Synthesia has announced a $200m Series E at a $4bn valuation led by GV. I sat down with the CEO to hear all about the round. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro and raise 01:30 - what gave GV the conviction to double down. 03:55 - What value ex-sequoia partner Matt Miller is bringing to the table as one of the only new investors 06:12 - The secondary sale, how much, why and whether there were any cash...