Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast Sifted

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. 

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.