Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Defence tech unicorn Helsing — which raised a whopping €600m in June at a €12bn valuation — has swiftly become one of Europe's most intriguing and closely-watched startups.  Defence is top of the agenda for many policymakers and investors at the moment, and four-year-old Helsing has been crowned the poster child for the rising European defence tech wave.  But, despite all that, the Munich-bas...

French fintech Qonto is a rare beast in startup land: it's actually profitable. Founded in 2016, the company provides banking and other financial services to 500,000 small businesses customers across eight European markets, helping them do everything from banking to accountancy, lending, savings, and as of recently, payment terminals. And being in the black gives it plenty of opportunities to...

Secondhand marketplace Vinted needs little introduction, with tens of millions registered users around the world who use its app to sell everything from clothes to furniture to even lava lamps. But the (profitable) company is swiftly becoming far more than a marketplace: it also has its own shipping infrastructure, a payments business and — as of recently — a venture arm. Despite that, CEO Thomas...

This week on Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast, Amy speaks with Rob Lacher, founding partner at early-growth VC Visionaries Club. Rob unpacks the challenges of defence procurement, why Europe has less than a year to get serious about its military capabilities and how VCs can do more than just write cheques in this space. He also shares why Visionaries  doesn’t have an AI investment thesis, why n...

If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard about Lovable — the AI agent startup that's helping users make websites without writing a line of code. The company hit $50m in annual recurring revenue earlier this year — just 12 months after launching — and recently poached a team member from 20VC. Not bad for a startup most people hadn’t heard of this time last year. But how’s Lovable actually gr...

If you’re in venture, it’s quite likely you’re already a Granola user, and if not, you’ve probably heard VCs bang on about how much they like it.  The London-based note-taking startup is growing fast, with users increasing 10% week on week, and last week announced a $43m Series B at a $250m valuation — just a year after launching.  But the 20-person team faces stiff competition — there are plenty...

Today on Startup Europe — the Sifted Podcast, Amy is joined by Dinika Mahtani, London-based partner at European early-stage VC Cherry Ventures. Dinika explains why she thinks deeptech is 'back', why Europe is having a moment — and what impact tariff turmoil is having on her portfolio companies. She also shares how she made the jump from general manager at Uber to angel investing and then...

On this episode of Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast, Amy sits down with Tom Leathes, CEO and cofounder of used car marketplace Motorway. The company, founded in 2017, has helped more than half a million people sell their cars, and has raised $273m from investors like Index, Iconiq, LocalGlobe and BMW i Ventures. Tom and his two cofounders have launched four startups before Motorway, with three...

Tomas Okmanas is no stranger to scaling a company in a highly competitive space. When he launched NordVPN in 2012, the market was crowded with competitors, but today his company has 15m users, a $3bn valuation and a consistent stream of new features and products in development. Now, as if he wasn't busy enough, Tomas is launching a new startup — Nexos.ai, a platform that helps enterprises to...

To kick off 2025, we're talking "business angels": the people who take big bets investing their personal wealth into startups at their earliest stages, and without whom most companies would never get off the ground. So, how do you actually become an angel investor? How much money do you need to commit? How many investments should you be making? And how can the UK and Europe lay the...

On 2024's last episode of the Sifted Podcast, Amy is joined by an entrepreneur on a very big mission. Munich-based startup Proxima Fusion is developing a nuclear fusion reactor — a technology which many hope could help solve the climate crisis by producing clean, cheap and abundant energy that could replace a lot of fossil fuel power. But the technical challenges are considerable. Nuclear fus...

Podcast host and Sifted editor Amy Lewin sits down with Petteri Lahtela, founder of smart wearable company Oura Ring, to discuss how the business has grown to making $500m in revenue, hitting profitability and selling more than 2.5m devices in the process. They discuss the big idea behind Oura, how Petteri has turned down multiple offers from buyers and how the company is well poised to pounce on...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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, Co...

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 bu...

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 marke...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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