Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Legora has had a busy year. The Swedish legal AI firm raised $550m in March, led by Accel, and has made five acquisitions since January.
The company is often pitted against its US rival Harvey. But while the two are comparable in many ways, they diverge on some key things, including whether to build their own AI models. Harvey has launched one ; while Legora says training a frontier model doesn't make business sense. 
This episode of the Sifted podcast comes live from TechBBQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Host Freya Pratty is joined by Legora CTO Jacob Lauritzen to discuss why Legora is steering clear of the model game, plus how the company is organising its engineering and product teams, what it looks for when it buys a company, and why Stockholm — not Copenhagen — is having a moment.
The two also chat about why Legora has  switched some tiers to consumption-based pricing — and why the technical team loves the move — as well as Legora’s recent integration with Google. 
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There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the momentum in the Nordic tech scene. Companies like legal AI firm Legora and vibe coding startup Lovable continue to bring in megarounds.  
But is the momentum spread across the region, or just confined to Stockholm? The Swedish capital has brought in the majority of funding in the region, thanks to Legora and Lovable, among others.
This episode of the Sifted podcast comes live from TechBBQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Host Freya Pratty is joined by Europe editor Mimi Billing to discuss the wider funding landscape across the Nordics, how Denmark compares to Sweden and what Stockholm is doing that other cities aren’t.
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This week on the podcast, host John Thornhill is joined by Uljan Sharka, the founder and CEO of Italian AI unicorn Domyn.

Uljan migrated from his home country Albania to Italy back in 2008 — without knowing a word of Italian. He soon developed a fascination with tech, later working for Apple in Silicon Valley. In 2016, he launched Milan-based Domyn, a company developing AI models and agents for enterprise use cases, as well as AI gigafactories.

The pair discuss the virtues of small language models, what Europe can hope to gain from the EU's Europa frontier model consortium — which Domyn is leading — and what founders can learn from Revolut’s Nik Storonsky. 

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Sifted's fintech reporter Damisola Sulaiman makes her first Sifted podcast appearance to discuss her recent reporting on the culture at Danish fintech Pleo.

Interviews with seven former employees revealed a company transformed by the leadership overhaul. They described a tougher management culture, internal friction among executives and growing internal concerns that Pleo’s product is losing ground to rivals.

Pleo cofounder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told Sifted: "As anyone who has scaled a business knows, this growth inevitably brings with it changes in structure, culture and approach which sometimes require tough decisions," he said. "We will always be a people-focused business, and we are incredibly proud of the talent and commitment of our high-performing team."

Dami also talks host Freya Pratty through her reporting on the culture at UK fintech Cleo, and reflects on the broader question of culture at Europe's fintechs.
Read our Pleo investigation here: https://sifted.eu/articles/pleo-culture-crisis
Read our Cleo investigation here: https://sifted.eu/articles/cleo-fintech-startup-toxic-workplace-allegations
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VCs taking on interim roles at their portfolio companies is something that’s happened for a long time — as is VCs making the permanent switch to the operator side. 
But a new trend seems to be gaining steam in Europe: VCs adding a CEO or operator title alongside their investor role, and doing both at the same time. 
Judith Dada, general partner at Visionaries, for example, has made that move this month, taking a role as co-CEO at AI startup Langdock, while Carmen Alfonso Rico, who founded UK-based angel investment firm Cocoa, announced she’s joining her portfolio company, British chip startup Fractile, as VP of business operations. Both are retaining investment roles at their firms.
Joining host Freya Pratty to discuss the trend is senior reporter Anne Sraders. The pair chat about why these moves are happening now and whether they could bring up issues for the firms further down the line. They also discuss further changes at Visionaries, as a number of partners transition from their full-time investment positions to entrepreneurial roles. 

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This episode was brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking.