Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Liz Kendall was appointed as the UK's Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology just under a year ago.  But will she keep her role under the country's new prime minister? There is one area her views diverge from those of Andy Burnham, widely tipped to be the country's new leader: autonomous vehicles. While Burnham's team is reported to have reservations about th...

The UK is home to the third-highest number of unicorn startups in the world. Does it make sense to lock it out of the EU's new Scaleup Fund? The €5bn fund, which is yet to deploy a cent of capital, has already been through a hotly contested race to find a manager (Swedish firm EQT came out on top), and now it's caught up in a political tussle over whether the UK — which famously left the...

While the UK's tech scene booms, political uncertainty looms. In this week's episode of the Sifted podcast, John Thornhill is joined by serial entrepreneur and investor Brent Hoberman. Brent, who cofounded Lastminute.com in 1998, is one of the UK’s most experienced and best-connected operators. Today, he runs the early-stage VC firm Firstminute Capital and Founders Forum, a global commun...

Late last week, the European tech ecosystem got a glimpse of a future many had worried about.  US AI giant Anthropic announced it had been ordered by the US government to suspend access to its most advanced AI models for foreign nationals. In response, Anthropic cut access to all customers, including those in the US, to ensure compliance.  The move is the first example of the US activating a so-ca...

This week on the Sifted Podcast, host John Thornhill is joined by Anu Adebajo, former Atomico partner and, as of February this year, CEO of the Newton Venture Program. Launched in 2020 by VC firm Phoenix Court and London Business School, the educational programme aims to train new generations of VC talent — whether they are experienced investors or simply exploring new career paths. Anu began her...

It’s been a curious fortnight in European tech. There was a fresh bout of anxiety after US AI giant Anthropic announced its latest funding round — which, at $65bn, is nearing the amount raised by the entire European ecosystem last year. But there’s also growing pushback against the doom and gloom. This week, VC firm Balderton launched its “Built in Europe” campaign, aimed at celebrating the contin...

In this episode of the Sifted podcast, host John Thornhill sits down with Carissa Véliz, AI ethicist, philosopher and associate professor at Oxford University to explore how algorithms and data are reshaping our lives and workplaces.  Carissa's latest book, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future , describes how ancient oracles, medieval soothsayers and modern-day AIs all te...

The competition that captivated European VC has concluded. Earlier this week, the EU chose Swedish investment firm EQT to manage its new €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund after a closely-watched race among the region’s top firms like the UK’s Atomico and France’s Eurazeo. On this week’s — somewhat emergency — episode of the Sifted podcast, host Freya Pratty chats to senior reporter Anne Sraders about the s...

This week on the Sifted Podcast, host John Thornhill is joined by James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital. Since joining the firm 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 th...

On this episode of the Sifted podcast, associate editor Freya Pratty sits down with news editor Martin Coulter, to unpack how Silicon Valley giant Anthropic is making big waves in European tech. The LLM builder and OpenAI rival has released new products that go head-to-head with some of Europe's buzziest AI companies like Loveable and Legora, raising questions about the defensibility of busin...

With over 700k women in the UK waiting for gynecological care, why is half the population still so underserved by its health system? Yes, women have historically been left out of clinical trials, but there are logistical reasons as to why, Hertility CEO Helen O’Neill tells host Amy Lewin. “ Collecting data from women on the third day of their menstrual cycle at scale is actually feasibly and techn...

On this episode of the Sifted podcast, host Amy Lewin is joined by Marianne Vikkula, CEO of delivery giant Wolt — one of Europe’s only ‘superapps’ — and chair of Slush, the iconic European startup conference.  Wolt began life delivering restaurant food to customers in Helsinki, before steadily expanding into groceries, medicine, electronics and offering services like revenue-based financing. It wa...

What do hazardous inspections, fighting and cooking crêpes have in common? All three are tasks that robots are now capable (ish) of performing. In 2025, equity investment into European robotics startups more than doubled, reaching €1.45bn — and in the first quarter of this year, European robotics startups raised €522m. But what’s triggered this uptick? On this week’s episode of the Sifted podcast,...

Last year, Kitty Mayo was catapulted into the public eye when she took the helm of Project Europe. The accelerator, launched to much fanfare by Harry Stebbings and about 200 entrepreneurs, has a bold mission: to support and invest in founders under the age of 25 to build Europe’s next €100bn companies. But, one year on, what’s it achieved? What’s been the most unexpected challenge? What will Kitty...

European seed rounds are ballooning. Last month Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs picked up $1bn at a $3bn valuation while David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence was reported to be raising $1bn at a $4bn valuation.  “Thankfully, the billion dollar seed round is not the standard across Europe — yet,” Philipp Moehring tells host Amy Lewin on this episode of the Sifted podcast. “That would be concerning.” Philipp...

Within a relatively short space of time, Laura Modiano has come to play a fairly unique and valuable role in Europe’s startup scene.  Laura, who leads OpenAI’s startup team in Europe, hops from city to city, attending hackathons, events and dinners with Europe’s leading AI companies and investors. This week she sits down with host Amy Lewin to discuss what the best startups have in common, how she...

This week at Sifted we launched our third UK and Ireland Leaderboard — a ranking of the 100 fastest-growing startups by revenue-growth across these two countries, as well as a new research report , in partnership with law firm Marriott Harrison.  The timing was fortuitous, given all the ‘ Londonmaxxing ’ going on at the moment. The capital looks set to have a very strong first quarter of 2026, at...

Hélène Huby, founder and CEO of spacetech startup The Exploration Company, is not afraid to take risks — or fail. Her company, which is only five years old, builds reusable and refillable vehicles to carry cargo to and from space stations in low-Earth orbit — and beyond.  It’s already (semi-) successfully sent cargo into space — and back — at a fraction of the cost, and time, achieved by other com...

Last month, the US AI giant Anthropic released a new Claude tool for the legal industry, triggering a sell-off in publicly listed firms like Salesforce and reigniting concerns that AI-native startups could wipe out traditional SaaS giants. So will Europe’s VC-backed SaaS giants survive the AI area? And what about the VCs who’ve heavily backed them? In this episode of the Sifted Podcast, host Amy L...

The AI debate has been dominated by large language models used to power the likes of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. But could the next wave of AI look very different? Yes, some European AI watchers say. Attention is shifting to so-called “world models” — systems designed to build internal representations of how the world works, rather than simply predicting the next word in a sentence.  A number of p...

Europe's in a state of emergency — but when will we all wake up and recognise that? That’s the question posed on this week’s episode of the Sifted Podcast by Judith Dada, general partner at European VC Visionaries Club, newsletter author, mother and setter-upper of numerous side projects.  Judith started her career in venture almost a decade ago at La Famiglia, the Germany-based early-stage i...

How do European startups like Lovable and Black Forest Labs find and hire top tier talent?  This week Amy Lewin sits down with VP of talent at European VC Creandum Michelle Coventry, who spends a lot of time advising super fast-scaling companies on how to build out their teams and what, exactly, the scaling playbook should look like in the age of AI.  The pair discuss how hiring is changing, what...

It’s been a busy start to the year for Europe’s tech ecosystem. We’ve already had five new unicorns born, €5.2bn raised, a $1bn acquisition and Sifted’s landed several scoops revealing that some of the continent’s most interesting investors — the likes of Plural and QuantumLight — are raising big new funds. To discuss the bumper start to 2026, host Amy Lewin is joined by contributing editor Éanna...

How do you spot Europe’s next unicorn founder before anyone else does? And where can investors still make outsized returns? This week on the Sifted Podcast, host Amy Lewin is joined by Linda Rottenberg, founder of global tech network Endeavor, one of the world’s most influential communities of high-growth entrepreneurs. For nearly three decades, Linda has backed founders long before they hit the m...

If you’ve been following the recent wave of data centre announcements across Europe, you’ll have noticed one thing: governments are suddenly obsessed with compute. Why is that — and how will France, the UK and others fare in the AI infrastructure arms race? Can startups really compete with Big Tech and is this a sector VCs can play in? This week, host Amy Lewin is joined by senior reporters Daphné...