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Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Sifted
129 episodes
13 hours ago
Germany-based defence tech Quantum Systems is one of Europe's leading makers of military drones, having completed thousands of missions in Ukraine and signed contracts with governments around the world. The company raised a €160m Series C in May 2025, hitting unicorn status, and is seeing its revenue double year on year. On this week's episode of the Sifted Podcast, host Amy sits down with Quantum Systems’ CEO Florian Seibel to hear about what peace in Ukraine will mean for the growing defenc...
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Investing
Technology,
Business,
Entrepreneurship
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Germany-based defence tech Quantum Systems is one of Europe's leading makers of military drones, having completed thousands of missions in Ukraine and signed contracts with governments around the world. The company raised a €160m Series C in May 2025, hitting unicorn status, and is seeing its revenue double year on year. On this week's episode of the Sifted Podcast, host Amy sits down with Quantum Systems’ CEO Florian Seibel to hear about what peace in Ukraine will mean for the growing defenc...
Show more...
Investing
Technology,
Business,
Entrepreneurship
Episodes (20/129)
Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Meet Europe’s ‘other’ defence tech unicorn: Tekever
You might be forgiven for thinking Europe had just two big drone makers — Germany’s Helsing and Quantum Systems — given how many headlines both attract. But there’s a third defence tech unicorn on the continent: Lisbon-based surveillance drones maker Tekever. Its drones are used all over the world — by the European Maritime Safety Agency to survey the coastline around Europe and by the UK Home Office to keep an eye on the English Channel, by the Spanish police and Brazilian Navy and — unsur...
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6 days ago
14 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
‘We don’t need to raise capital to grow’: Factorial CEO Jordi Romero
Barcelona-based Factorial has come a long way since its early days as an HR software startup: it’s now a full-blown business management platform used by over 13k businesses for everything from expense tracking to project management. With more than 1,300 employees and €110m in fresh funding from General Catalyst under its belt, Factorial is scaling fast — and CEO and founder Jordi Romero is finding ways to keep that momentum going, having onboarded 300 people in just six months. What does he l...
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2 weeks ago
38 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
The secret behind Revolut's product blitz
Revolut is Europe’s most valuable private tech company — and is set to become even more so soon, with a fundraise in the works which would see it valued at a reported $65m. The digital bank manages to churn out new features at breakneck speed — from pet insurance to travel bookings, and now mortgages and mobile plans — despite having over 50m customers around the world. The secret? Its “new bets team”: small, startup-like squads tasked with testing and scaling new products fast. On this...
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3 weeks ago
18 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen: "Europe doesn't need to become Silicon Valley"
Supercell is one of Europe's leading video game companies — with enduring hit titles like Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars under its belt. But, as CEO and cofounder Ilkka Paananen explains on this episode of Startup Europe — the Sifted Podcast, developing new and popular games is a tough business. He sits down with Amy Lewin to explain how Supercell tries to foster creativity by empowering its game development teams by giving them maximum autonomy, and by taking the fear out of failure through ...
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3 weeks ago
33 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Is Mistral worth $6bn?
Once upon a time, Mistral was Europe’s buzziest tech company — raising a huge €105m seed round in 2023 to build GenAI models and compete with the likes of OpenAI. But as the sector's matured, and we’ve seen application-focused AI startups like app maker Lovable and defence tech Helsing rise to the top of the hype pile, how is the Paris-based startup living up to its early promise? The company has won some big clients, announced partnerships with giants like Nvidia and grown substantial annual...
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1 month ago
25 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
The days of making easy money from coding are over, says former Stripe UK CTO turned founder Emma Burrows
If you work in tech, you’re likely in one of two camps: thinking about using AI agents, or already deploying tens of them. That’s why Emma Burrows cofounded Portia AI, a platform which helps businesses build and use AI agents securely, in-house — and which secured £4.4m in a seed round led by General Catalyst back in April. Emma's no stranger to a breakneck sector: before founding Portia, she was UK chief technology officer at payments giant Stripe, and previously built out the ecommerce stac...
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1 month ago
35 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Helsing: Challenges ahead for the defence tech unicorn
Defence tech unicorn Helsing — which raised a whopping €600m in June at a €12bn valuation — has swiftly become one of Europe's most intriguing and closely-watched startups. Defence is top of the agenda for many policymakers and investors at the moment, and four-year-old Helsing has been crowned the poster child for the rising European defence tech wave. But, despite all that, the Munich-based company is remarkably secret about what it actually does. On this episode of the Si...
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1 month ago
13 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Tackling financial fraud with AI: Qonto CEO Alexandre Prot
French fintech Qonto is a rare beast in startup land: it's actually profitable. Founded in 2016, the company provides banking and other financial services to 500,000 small businesses customers across eight European markets, helping them do everything from banking to accountancy, lending, savings, and as of recently, payment terminals. And being in the black gives it plenty of opportunities to expand further, via new product development, acquisitions — and by becoming a fully-licensed bank. In...
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1 month ago
37 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga: ‘Vinted is not a company that’s going to exit’
Secondhand marketplace Vinted needs little introduction, with tens of millions registered users around the world who use its app to sell everything from clothes to furniture to even lava lamps. But the (profitable) company is swiftly becoming far more than a marketplace: it also has its own shipping infrastructure, a payments business and — as of recently — a venture arm. Despite that, CEO Thomas Plantenga is far from complacent: “If we really want to make secondhand first choice, then everyt...
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2 months ago
43 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
'Defence is where we can play all our superpowers': Visionaries Club’s Rob Lacher
This week on Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast, Amy speaks with Rob Lacher, founding partner at early-growth VC Visionaries Club. Rob unpacks the challenges of defence procurement, why Europe has less than a year to get serious about its military capabilities and how VCs can do more than just write cheques in this space. He also shares why Visionaries doesn’t have an AI investment thesis, why new general partner Judith Dada is the 'single best person' he could have hoped to team up wi...
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2 months ago
45 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
What's so special about Lovable?
If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard about Lovable — the AI agent startup that's helping users make websites without writing a line of code. The company hit $50m in annual recurring revenue earlier this year — just 12 months after launching — and recently poached a team member from 20VC. Not bad for a startup most people hadn’t heard of this time last year. But how’s Lovable actually growing so fast? What’s its CEO Anton Osika really like? And is the hype justified? On this experimental...
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2 months ago
13 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
'We haven’t made a pitch deck since we started the company': Granola CEO Chris Pedregal
If you’re in venture, it’s quite likely you’re already a Granola user, and if not, you’ve probably heard VCs bang on about how much they like it. The London-based note-taking startup is growing fast, with users increasing 10% week on week, and last week announced a $43m Series B at a $250m valuation — just a year after launching. But the 20-person team faces stiff competition — there are plenty of other ‘knowledge work’ tools out there — and there’s a lot to discover about how we ...
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2 months ago
33 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
How to make partner in less than three years: Cherry Ventures' Dinika Mahtani
Today on Startup Europe — the Sifted Podcast, Amy is joined by Dinika Mahtani, London-based partner at European early-stage VC Cherry Ventures. Dinika explains why she thinks deeptech is 'back', why Europe is having a moment — and what impact tariff turmoil is having on her portfolio companies. She also shares how she made the jump from general manager at Uber to angel investing and then VC — and talks us through how she ensured she made partner within just three years of joining Cherry Ventu...
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3 months ago
43 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Three exits and a failure: Motorway's Tom Leathes on how to disrupt big industries
On this episode of Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast, Amy sits down with Tom Leathes, CEO and cofounder of used car marketplace Motorway. The company, founded in 2017, has helped more than half a million people sell their cars, and has raised $273m from investors like Index, Iconiq, LocalGlobe and BMW i Ventures. Tom and his two cofounders have launched four startups before Motorway, with three resulting in successful exits, and one having to shut its doors. Tom and Amy discuss what he's le...
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4 months ago
46 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
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 features and products in development. Now, as if he wasn't busy enough, Tomas is launching a new startup — Nexos.ai, a platform that helps enterprises to make the best use of AI models. On this episode of the Sifted Podcast, he tells Amy why he believes he...
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6 months ago
30 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
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 actually become an angel investor? How much money do you need to commit? How many investments should you be making? And how can the UK and Europe lay the groundwork for a more representative next generation of investors?Amy poses these questions to Jenny Tooth, a vet...
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6 months ago
47 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
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 by producing clean, cheap and abundant energy that could replace a lot of fossil fuel power.But the technical challenges are considerable.Nuclear fusion reactors need to remain stable at incredibly high temperatures, while confining volatile plasma with...
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8 months ago
30 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
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 the process.They discuss the big idea behind Oura, how Petteri has turned down multiple offers from buyers and how the company is well poised to pounce on the AI boom with the data it holds.
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8 months ago
36 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
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 investments include companies like HR platform Deel, logistics startup Forto, HR tech unicorn Personio, defence unicorn Helsing and AI unicorn Mistral. She also sits on Helsing and Mistral’s boards, giving her a front seat at two of Europe’s most closely-watched a...
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10 months ago
45 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
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 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, Ger...
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11 months ago
45 minutes

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Germany-based defence tech Quantum Systems is one of Europe's leading makers of military drones, having completed thousands of missions in Ukraine and signed contracts with governments around the world. The company raised a €160m Series C in May 2025, hitting unicorn status, and is seeing its revenue double year on year. On this week's episode of the Sifted Podcast, host Amy sits down with Quantum Systems’ CEO Florian Seibel to hear about what peace in Ukraine will mean for the growing defenc...