102 episodes

From 2024 on we'll be bringing you monthly long-form interviews with the biggest names in European startups. We'll 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 as they've built their businesses.

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast Sifted

    • Business

From 2024 on we'll be bringing you monthly long-form interviews with the biggest names in European startups. We'll 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 as they've built their businesses.

    Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures on how just much he made from investing in Deliveroo and Darktrace

    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 Deliveroo, Darktrace and Babylon.

    • 57 min
    Glovo's Oscar Pierre on the gig economy and building scaleups in Southern Europe

    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, 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.

    • 46 min
    Station F’s and Sequoia’s Roxanne Varza on how to stop tech companies moving to the US

    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 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. 

    • 41 min
    “We’ve made more money than we ever dreamed of”: RELEX Solutions’s Johanna Småros

    “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 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 about the company’s decades-long journey from academia to commercialisation, just how many millions of kilos of waste annually the company is helping to avoid and why RELEX’s engineers are tired of hearing about AI. 

    • 45 min
    Why is Stability AI changing its business model?

    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 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 

    • 26 min
    More layoffs at European scaleups as the tech slowdown bites

    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, Unicorn edtech Multiverse to lay off nearly a third of US employees
    05:34 GenAI biotech Cradle raises $24m Series A led by Index Ventures
    08:55 The top takeaways from Atomico’s State of European Tech report
    20:13 Why hasn't EIF announced a single investment from its €3.75bn fund of funds yet?

    • 26 min

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