Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
Get to know the brightest and boldest names in European tech with Sifted’s weekly podcast, hosted by Amy Lewin. She interviews the founders, operators and investors building Europe’s most exciting startups and, in conversation with Sifted’s expert journalists, pulls back the curtain on the most intriguing companies they’ve been reporting on.
- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 30 minutes
- Episodes
- 131
- Years Active
- 2021 - 2025
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 profita…
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 Gener…
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 …
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 Ar…
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 c…
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 d…
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…
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 ear…
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, Inst…
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…
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 b…
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 …
“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 — …
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 W…
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 Cra…
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 vi…
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 ever
03:56 What the pitch deck from Adaptive, a new AI startup raising at a $100m valuation, tells us
0…
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 CEO
04:16 More unions sign up to Klarna strike on Nov 7
06:36 Benetton scion moves into tech investing with new €30m fund
09:…
