Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

This week at Sifted we launched the Sifted 250 — a ranking of the 250 fastest-growing startups by revenue-growth across the continent, as well as a new research report.

London-based wellness marketplace Healf was crowned winner, followed by body scanning startup Neko Health and Ghent-based security management platform Aikido. Notion Capital, Accel, YC, BpiFrance and Balderton topped the investor rankings, backing the most companies on the list.

On the podcast this week, host Freya Pratty discusses the findings of the leaderboard — including the rise of digital health startups and the emergence of hubs like Oslo and Prague — with her colleague from Sifted’s Intelligence team, Jonathan Sinclair. 

Read the report here: https://sifted.eu/intelligence/reports/sifted-250-2026

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Senior reporter Anne Sraders has just spent two weeks in New York, and one thing was impossible to miss: AI was everywhere. From subway ads to investor breakfasts, it was the only conversation in town.

"Everyone wants to find the next Anthropic for every other domain," Abby Meyers of Bain Capital Ventures told Anne. And some US investors are looking to Europe's neolabs, from Yann LeCun's AMI Labs to David Silver's Ineffable, to find it.

So how do New York VCs really feel about European tech? And what are a16z's plans for Europe after closing its London office?

Joining host Freya Pratty on this episode of the Sifted podcast is senior reporter Anne Sraders. The pair also dig into why FirstMark's Matt Turck thinks Europe is underrated, a16z partner Anish Acharya's case for startups that are "unapologetically European", and why some US investors are bullish on the European consumer. 

Sign up to Anne's newsletter Upround here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

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Last week, the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon catapulted the discussion over AI safety into the mainstream. A thread he posted on X quickly garnered millions of views.

“The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity,” Coxon later told tech publication Wired. “From [my former colleagues’] perspective, this is when Anthropic and its competitors decide the fate of humanity.”

How is this debate materialising in Europe, where no AI company is pushing the frontier? What are startups’ take on safety and security? And what do investors make of it? 

Joining host Freya Pratty on this episode of the Sifted podcast is senior reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet. The pair also dig into Europe’s rising wave of defensive startups, as well as everyone’s favourite topic: the EU AI Act.

Sign up to Daphné’s AI newsletter here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

Are agents moving faster than Europe can regulate them? Read here: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-agents-anthropic-openai-eu-uk-laws

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There's been talk all summer about who would fund Mistral's next round. This week it was confirmed: €3bn at a €21bn valuation, co-led by Samsung, the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund and US growth firm PSG Equity. A year ago Mistral was worth €11.7bn.

Mistral has always pitched itself as Europe's sovereign alternative to US AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. With few European investors capable of meeting its huge capital needs,many were watching closely who the French scaleup would seek money from — and whether the round would preserve the company’s independence.

With this trio of co-leads, has Mistral succeeded? What is the significance of bringing on a sizable strategic investor like Samsung, which makes the memory components Mistral's AI runs on?

In this episode of the Sifted podcast, host Freya Pratty is joined by senior reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet. They discuss who joined Mistral’s round and why Samsung led it and how long Mistral can keep up this fundraising rhythm. They also look at Daphné's scoop on the company's robotics chief raising €200m for his own startup.

This podcast was brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking.

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Check out Sifted Summit here: https://summit.sifted.eu/

Legora has had a busy year. The Swedish legal AI firm raised $550m in March, led by Accel, and has made five acquisitions since January.

The company is often pitted against its US rival Harvey. But while the two are comparable in many ways, they diverge on some key things, including whether to build their own AI models. Harvey has launched one ; while Legora says training a frontier model doesn't make business sense. 

This episode of the Sifted podcast comes live from TechBBQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Host Freya Pratty is joined by Legora CTO Jacob Lauritzen to discuss why Legora is steering clear of the model game, plus how the company is organising its engineering and product teams, what it looks for when it buys a company, and why Stockholm — not Copenhagen — is having a moment.

The two also chat about why Legora has  switched some tiers to consumption-based pricing — and why the technical team loves the move — as well as Legora’s recent integration with Google. 

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Check out Sifted Summit here: https://summit.sifted.eu/

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the momentum in the Nordic tech scene. Companies like legal AI firm Legora and vibe coding startup Lovable continue to bring in megarounds.  

But is the momentum spread across the region, or just confined to Stockholm? The Swedish capital has brought in the majority of funding in the region, thanks to Legora and Lovable, among others.

This episode of the Sifted podcast comes live from TechBBQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Host Freya Pratty is joined by Europe editor Mimi Billing to discuss the wider funding landscape across the Nordics, how Denmark compares to Sweden and what Stockholm is doing that other cities aren’t.

Sign to Sifted's newsletters here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

Check out Sifted Summit here: https://summit.sifted.eu/

This week on the podcast, host John Thornhill is joined by Uljan Sharka, the founder and CEO of Italian AI unicorn Domyn.

Uljan migrated from his home country Albania to Italy back in 2008 — without knowing a word of Italian. He soon developed a fascination with tech, later working for Apple in Silicon Valley. In 2016, he launched Milan-based Domyn, a company developing AI models and agents for enterprise use cases, as well as AI gigafactories.

The pair discuss the virtues of small language models, what Europe can hope to gain from the EU's Europa frontier model consortium — which Domyn is leading — and what founders can learn from Revolut’s Nik Storonsky. 

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Check out Sifted Summit here: https://summit.sifted.eu/

Sifted's fintech reporter Damisola Sulaiman makes her first Sifted podcast appearance to discuss her recent reporting on the culture at Danish fintech Pleo.

Interviews with seven former employees revealed a company transformed by the leadership overhaul. They described a tougher management culture, internal friction among executives and growing internal concerns that Pleo’s product is losing ground to rivals.

Pleo cofounder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told Sifted: "As anyone who has scaled a business knows, this growth inevitably brings with it changes in structure, culture and approach which sometimes require tough decisions," he said. "We will always be a people-focused business, and we are incredibly proud of the talent and commitment of our high-performing team."

Dami also talks host Freya Pratty through her reporting on the culture at UK fintech Cleo, and reflects on the broader question of culture at Europe's fintechs.

Read our Pleo investigation here: https://sifted.eu/articles/pleo-culture-crisis

Read our Cleo investigation here: https://sifted.eu/articles/cleo-fintech-startup-toxic-workplace-allegations

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VCs taking on interim roles at their portfolio companies is something that’s happened for a long time — as is VCs making the permanent switch to the operator side. 

But a new trend seems to be gaining steam in Europe: VCs adding a CEO or operator title alongside their investor role, and doing both at the same time. 

Judith Dada, general partner at Visionaries, for example, has made that move this month, taking a role as co-CEO at AI startup Langdock, while Carmen Alfonso Rico, who founded UK-based angel investment firm Cocoa, announced she’s joining her portfolio company, British chip startup Fractile, as VP of business operations. Both are retaining investment roles at their firms.

Joining host Freya Pratty to discuss the trend is senior reporter Anne Sraders. The pair chat about why these moves are happening now and whether they could bring up issues for the firms further down the line. They also discuss further changes at Visionaries, as a number of partners transition from their full-time investment positions to entrepreneurial roles. 

Sign up to Sifted's weekly newsletter about VC here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

This episode was brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking.

Mistral’s latest fundraise has got the ecosystem chattering. 

The French AI darling is reportedly raising a €3bn Series D round at a valuation of around €20bn. Last week, Sifted broke the news that the EU’s €5bn Scaleup Fund, managed by EQT, is in talks to lead or co-lead the round.

This week on the podcast, senior reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet joins host Freya Pratty to discuss the EU Scaleup Fund’s potential involvement and who else might get in on the deal. And, as Mistral increasingly positions itself more like Europe’s answer to Palantir, Freya and Daphné discuss how the new positioning will play into the pricing of its latest round. 

Read our reporting on the round here: https://sifted.eu/articles/e5bn-scaleup-fund-mistral-eqt

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