Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Europe's in a state of emergency — but when will we all wake up and recognise that?
That’s the question posed on this week’s episode of the Sifted Podcast by Judith Dada, general partner at European VC Visionaries Club, newsletter author, mother and setter-upper of numerous side projects. 
Judith started her career in venture almost a decade ago at La Famiglia, the Germany-based early-stage investor, which later went on to merge with US megafund General Catalyst. She’s now come full circle, joining forces with La Famiglia founding partner (and fellow former Sifted podcast guest) Rob Lacher at Visionaries.  
Visionaries’ portfolio includes plenty of companies that are on a tear right now — Lovable, Black Forest Labs, N8n, Solve Intelligence and Tandem Health — and their thesis, that Europe is in a fantastic position to shape the next wave of disruption in business, seems more relevant than ever.
Amy and Judith sit down to discuss whether legacy SaaS companies can survive in this AI era, why Europe is in “a state of emergency” and what we can do about it, and when Visionaries will raise a new fund.
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This episode was sponsored by HSBC Innovation Banking.

How do European startups like Lovable and Black Forest Labs find and hire top tier talent? 
This week Amy Lewin sits down with VP of talent at European VC Creandum Michelle Coventry, who spends a lot of time advising super fast-scaling companies on how to build out their teams and what, exactly, the scaling playbook should look like in the age of AI. 
The pair discuss how hiring is changing, what happens when buzzy European companies scale in the US, when exactly startups should bring in senior talent and what founders should know before they set their pay. 
Read highlights from Creandum’s founder compensation report here: https://sifted.eu/articles/founder-salaries-2025/ 
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It’s been a busy start to the year for Europe’s tech ecosystem.

We’ve already had five new unicorns born, €5.2bn raised, a $1bn acquisition and Sifted’s landed several scoops revealing that some of the continent’s most interesting investors — the likes of Plural and QuantumLight — are raising big new funds.

To discuss the bumper start to 2026, host Amy Lewin is joined by contributing editor Éanna Kelly, who spends his days sussing out which companies are fast on the rise, which investors are getting in on the buzziest deals and which ecosystems and sectors are hotting up.

They also cover the 26 startups Sifted will be watching especially closely (and why) and what investors tell us they have planned for the next 12 months.
Read Sifted Predicts here: https://sifted.eu/studio/sifted-predicts-european-tech-2026
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How do you spot Europe’s next unicorn founder before anyone else does? And where can investors still make outsized returns?
This week on the Sifted Podcast, host Amy Lewin is joined by Linda Rottenberg, founder of global tech network Endeavor, one of the world’s most influential communities of high-growth entrepreneurs.
For nearly three decades, Linda has backed founders long before they hit the mainstream, including Bending Spoons’ Luca Ferrari and ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski. Endeavor is built on a simple idea: that world-class entrepreneurs can come from anywhere — not just Silicon Valley. Today, Endeavor supports more than 3,000 entrepreneurs across 50+ countries, whose companies include over 90 unicorns. 
Amy and Linda discuss what Europe’s most successful founders have in common, why investors should be looking beyond the usual hotspots and how Endeavor Catalyst, the organisation’s investment arm, is backing companies at the scale-up stage as it raises a new fund.

If you’ve been following the recent wave of data centre announcements across Europe, you’ll have noticed one thing: governments are suddenly obsessed with compute. Why is that — and how will France, the UK and others fare in the AI infrastructure arms race? Can startups really compete with Big Tech and is this a sector VCs can play in?

This week, host Amy Lewin is joined by senior reporters Daphné Leprince-Ringuet and Freya Pratty to dig into the fast-moving — and expensive — world of AI infrastructure, from data centres and GPUs to energy and political power plays.

The conversation also explores the risks of overbuilding, parallels with failed battery gigafactories and the unresolved tension between Europe’s dreams of “sovereign AI” and reliance on Nvidia. Plus: what does all this mean for climate tech and local communities  — and is AI infrastructure the safest bet investors can make, or the next bubble waiting to burst?
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