Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Sifted brings you monthly long-form interviews with the biggest names in European startups. We hear from the founders, operators and investors behind the continent's biggest tech companies to learn what makes them tick and what they've learnt while building their businesses.
Episodes
114 episodes
Nord's Tomas Okmanas on why he had to launch an AI startup
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 fea...
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30:17
The 101 of angel investing with Jenny Tooth
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 actual...
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47:25
Replacing fossil fuels: Proxima Fusion’s Francesco Sciortino on his mission to revolutionise clean energy
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 ...
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30:33
Oura Ring founder Petteri Lahtela on fending off acquisition offers from Big Tech
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 ...
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36:17
General Catalyst’s Jeannette zu Fürstenberg on how to scale European moonshot ideas
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 inve...
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45:42
Mistral, DeepL and Kry investor Avid Larizadeh Duggan on where AI is creating value
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 a...
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45:55
Programmable plants and neurotech devices: Inside the UK government’s £800m “inventions” agency
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 AR...
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38:20
Climate tech’s growing pains with Pale Blue Dot’s Heidi Lindvall
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.P...
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41:27
DeepL founder Jarek Kutylowski on how his AI startup took on Google Translate — and won
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 t...
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32:10
Index Ventures partner Martin Mignot on where Revolut should list
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...
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47:19
Sophia Bendz on why Spotify's Daniel Ek hired people with "no track record"
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 m...
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46:35
Why Andreessen Horowitz is betting big on crypto in Europe with Sriram Krishnan
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...
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42:41
Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures on how just much he made from investing in Deliveroo and Darktrace
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 Delivero...
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57:29
Glovo's Oscar Pierre on the gig economy and building scaleups in Southern Europe
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, an...
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46:15
Station F’s and Sequoia’s Roxanne Varza on how to stop tech companies moving to the US
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 in...
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41:46
“We’ve made more money than we ever dreamed of”: RELEX Solutions’s Johanna Småros
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 ext...
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45:07
Why is Stability AI changing its business model?
This week we discuss:01:51 Hyme raises €8m for technology that could halve cost of storing energy05:12
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26:35
More layoffs at European scaleups as the tech slowdown bites
This week we discuss:01:05 Micromobility giant Tier lays off 22% of its workforce in push for profitability,
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26:10
HSBC’s Sonya Iovieno on undisclosed down rounds, startups trimming headcount and SVB’s collapse
Sonya Iovieno knows European tech’s secrets. As head of venture and growth at HSBC Innovation Banking, where she works with thousands of VCs, startups and scaleups in the UK and Nordics, she has a view on who’s done an undisclosed down round, w...
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38:44
Some tech workers are now earning $400k straight out of uni. Why?
This week we discuss:Nordic merger between online grocers Oda and Mathem
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37:56
Aleph Alpha raises one of Europe's biggest AI rounds, but is all as it seems?
This week we discuss:00:53 Aleph Alpha raises $500m Series B in one of Europe’s largest AI rounds ever03:56
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23:49
Klarna’s workers are going on strike as the company cuts more roles
This week we discuss:02:26 Web Summit announces former Wikimedia boss as new CEO04:16
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26:16
France’s big plan for startups
This week we discuss:02:05 French early-stage startups get a €500m funding boost in 2024 budget04:33
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29:22
Babylon: how it all went so wrong
This week we discuss:00:59 Germany is about to legalise cannabis. What does it mean for startups?03:49
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26:19
Interview: Wayve’s Alex Kendall on autonomous vehicles, embodied AI and Elon Musk's U-turns
This week on the podcast we’re joined by Alex Kendall, CEO of self-driving car company Wayve, for a long-form interview on the challenges of getting autonomous vehicles onto our roads. Alex discusses how to win public trust for this technology,...
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38:31
