Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

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 the world’s biggest pension funds.

Its investments include German AI translation company DeepL, German battery startup Instagrid, Swedish healthtech unicorn Kry, British chip scaleup Graphcore and French health insurance unicorn Alan. 

She sat down with Sifted editor Amy Lewin to discuss what’s top of tech companies’ minds at the moment, and why investors and board members without operational experience don’t always quite “get it”.

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’s also been a founder — starting two companies in Silicon Valley

We discuss what technologies he’s most excited about today, covering topics from neuroscience to “programmable plants” to fight climate change.

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 intercity transport startup; Monta, an app connecting charge point owners and electric car drivers; and Climate X, a platform which helps businesses analyse their exposure to and risks associated with climate change.

On this episode of the pod, we discuss what types of climate tech company Lindvall doesn’t need to see any more of, how Europe can compete with the US and how to balance VC investing with having two newborn babies.

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, Coursera and Deutsche Bahn. Kutylowski sat down with Sifted editor Amy Lewin to talk about DeepL’s technology, how it’s built an AI business with comparatively little VC funding and about how the craze around large language models is creating a new type of competition.

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 bust in 2022. 

On this month's episode of Startup Europe — the Sifted Podcast, we dig into what Martin has learnt from his time helping some of Europe's startup success stories scale, and some of the less fortunate company stories.

We hear about what he believes makes a great founder, improving stock options at European startups and why Revolut would probably IPO in the US.

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 market and about how the startup ecosystem has changed since her days at Spotify.

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 — and that general partner Sriram Krishnan was moving to the UK to run it. His first job in tech was at Microsoft — and he’s since led product teams at Twitter, Snap and Facebook.

Andreesen’s new London team plans to invest primarily in crypto and Web3 — and has already done a handful of investments in Europe. Sriram joins us on the podcast to talk about Europe’s crypto prospects, what he’s learning about the continent since his move over from Silicon Valley, the attributes of great CEOs, and why he remains optimistic about tech despite wider market doom and gloom.

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 of its new parent company. The business has 20m customers in 1,500 cities across 26 countries, including Spain, Italy, Ukraine, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan — and might consider further expansion soon, Pierre tells Sifted. On its app, you can order everything from a Burger King to groceries to flowers, from both independent high street businesses to big global chains.

It’s raised more than €1bn from investors and employs over 4,000 people, while working with around 65,000 riders.

On Startup Europe, The Sifted Podcast, editor Amy Lewin asked Pierre about his budding VC career, what’s going on in the southern Europe startup scene, the state of the food delivery market in 2024 — and if he’s thinking about his next move yet.

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 of Parisian startup mega campus Station F. 

In the years since Station F opened in 2017, France has seen startup funding more than triple and the number of unicorns more than quadruple. 

And now Paris is at the centre of the Gen AI boom too. Mistral, PhotoRoom and Poolside are just a handful of the buzzy AI startups based there raising huge amounts of funding.

As an angel investor (and one of Sequoia’s most active scouts in Europe) with more than 60 deals under her belt now, Varza is also getting to place some bets in the sector. 

In the first episode of the Sifted podcast this year, editor Amy Lewin speaks to Varza about what’s on founders’ minds right now, Station F’s expansion plans and what she’s learnt so far as an angel investor.