Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

This week on the Sifted Podcast, host John Thornhill is joined by James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital. Since joining the firm in 2012, James has led investments in second-hand shopping platform Depop, AI agent maker Convergence and bank payment fintech GoCardless — as well as AI frontier lab Prior Labs, which was acquired by German software giant SAP earlier this month.
James discusses how the acquisition came about, including his meeting with the cofounders before the company even existed. 
James also shares about his new gig as chair of the Sovereign AI Unit, a £500m initiative launched by the UK government earlier this year. He talks through its investments to date — which include Isomorphic Labs, Ineffable Intelligence and Callosum — and responds to the backlash it has received.
The pair also discuss AI's public perception problem, James's biggest investment miss and whether Europe is ready to seize the moment in the race for AGI.
For quarterly updates of the Sovereign AI Unit’s progress, check out James’ blog: https://www.jameswise.com/author/james-wise/
Sign up to the Sifted Daily Newsletter here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

This week on the Sifted Podcast, host John Thornhill is joined by James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital. Since joining the firm in 2012, James has led investments in second-hand shopping platform Depop, AI agent maker Convergence and bank payment fintech GoCardless — as well as AI frontier lab Prior Labs, which was acquired by German software giant SAP earlier this month.
James discusses how the acquisition came about, including his meeting with the cofounders before the company even existed. 
James also shares about his new gig as chair of the Sovereign AI Unit, a £500m initiative launched by the UK government earlier this year. He talks through its investments to date — which include Isomorphic Labs, Ineffable Intelligence and Callosum — and responds to the backlash it has received.
The pair also discuss AI's public perception problem, James's biggest investment miss and whether Europe is ready to seize the moment in the race for AGI.
For quarterly updates of the Sovereign AI Unit’s progress, check out James’ blog: https://www.jameswise.com/author/james-wise/
Sign up to the Sifted Daily Newsletter here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

On this episode of the Sifted podcast, associate editor Freya Pratty sits down with news editor Martin Coulter, to unpack how Silicon Valley giant Anthropic is making big waves in European tech.
The LLM builder and OpenAI rival has released new products that go head-to-head with some of Europe's buzziest AI companies like Loveable and Legora, raising questions about the defensibility of businesses built on top of third-party models.
Freya and Martin also discuss how Europe's fintechs are scrambling for access to Anthropic's new model Mythos and a possible deal with chip maker Fractile, an Oxford spinout that's winning support from the UK government.
Sign up to Sifted's Daily and Deeptech newsletters here: https://sifted.eu/newsletters

With over 700k women in the UK waiting for gynecological care, why is half the population still so underserved by its health system?

Yes, women have historically been left out of clinical trials, but there are logistical reasons as to why, Hertility CEO Helen O’Neill tells host Amy Lewin. “ Collecting data from women on the third day of their menstrual cycle at scale is actually feasibly and technically very difficult to do.”

Helen is more familiar with these difficulties than most: Hertility has built a diagnostic testing system to support women through their fertility journeys, and provides onward clinical care — from telemedicine gynecological appointments and ultrasounds to IVF and egg freezing.

The result? Hertility, Helen says, can diagnose endometriosis with 98-99% confidence in eight days — the same condition which takes on average nine years to diagnose via the UK's National Health Service (NHS).

In this episode of the Sifted podcast, Helen shares how she’s building a foundational model for women’s health, why Hertility “started off trying to be a baguette and has twisted itself into a pretzel for every investor” and why it’s important to demystify the “homogeneous idea of women’s health”.

On this episode of the Sifted podcast, host Amy Lewin is joined by Marianne Vikkula, CEO of delivery giant Wolt — one of Europe’s only ‘superapps’ — and chair of Slush, the iconic European startup conference. 

Wolt began life delivering restaurant food to customers in Helsinki, before steadily expanding into groceries, medicine, electronics and offering services like revenue-based financing. It was acquired by American delivery giant DoorDash in May 2022.

Marianne and Amy discuss how European superapps can compete globally, Wolt’s newest partnership with Dott and why the company posts all vacancies externally.

Get tickets to Sifted summit here: https://summit.sifted.eu/2026-tickets