Sifted

From growth funding to AI bubbles, we covered it all at Sifted Summit ⛰️ Our final panel recap spotlights ‘The modern CMO: From brand builder to business leader’ — exploring how the CMO role has been redefined in European tech’s fast-moving landscape. Naomi Walkland (Motorway), Jada Balster (TravelPerk), Nina Mohanty (Bloom Money), and moderator Maya Dharampal-Hornby took to the stage to share their expertise. ⭐ CMOs are no longer just building brands – thanks to AI, tighter budgets, and shifting markets, marketing leaders are expected to balance creativity with commercial impact like never before. ⭐ Great marketing doesn’t just promote the story — it helps define it. As Jada puts it there is a need to create a clear sense of purpose — a North Star to guide the whole organisation. ⭐ Brand and growth are finally speaking the same language — channels like GEO, PR and comms are now critical to discoverability and trust.  ⭐ Staff need to be emboldened to use AI — CMOs should empower team members to confidently use AI to speed up work without feeling like they're "cheating". Thanks to our brilliant panellists and everyone who tuned in! Register your interest for Sifted Summit 2026: https://lnkd.in/evyxN8Dr

💻 The next wave of enterprise innovation won’t come from code: it will come from Riff. Founded by Trygve Karper, Martin Skow Røed, and Viral Shah, Riff is an AI app-building platform for businesses, empowering business “doers” to build their own custom applications, plug them into existing workflows, and see real-world results. Through their platform, the timeline from identifying a business need to implementing a solution is shorter than ever. 🚀 Today, we can announce that we are leading Riff’s $16M Series A, alongside Skyfall Ventures, Sondo, Maki.vc, and Illusian Founder Office, among others. Congratulations to Trygve, Martin, Viral, and the whole Riff team on this milestone. 💡 Our partner Michiel Kotting on why we invested: “Vibe coding is ushering in a transformational shift in software development, where anyone can create, launch, and maintain applications without having to be able to code. What makes Riff special in our mind is their relentless focus on providing doers with the ability to build tooling that works in production." Welcome to the Northzone family, Riff! Read more about why we invested: https://lnkd.in/enbDTPBt Alessandro De Benedetti | Simon Lovick | Aitana Giebels van Bekestein

Europe’s AI M&A deals in 2025 💼 Sifted data shows 100 M&A deals involving an AI-native startup have occurred so far this year, already ahead of the 85 acquisitions that happened in 2024. Pierre-Louis Cléro, partner at global law firm Latham & Watkins, tells Sifted most consolidation is currently happening “at the early stage”. Sifted data shows 16 deals this year were growth and late-stage, compared to 84 early-stage deals. ➡️ May — Salesforce acquired Convergence ➡️ July — NiCE acquired Cognigy (NiCE Cognigy) ➡️ September — Workday acquired Sana Labs Full list of M&A deals 👇 https://lnkd.in/evyVXsBM

Looking for Europe’s fastest-growing startups? 🚀 We've ranked the region’s high-growth companies in 2025 by revenue growth over the last three financial years, and followed their success stories to uncover the trends and challenges shaping the startup ecosystem. This year on the Sifted 250 Leaderboard, fintech takes the lead, with 78 companies (31.2%) making the list — up from 64 in 2024. B2B SaaS takes second place with 65 companies, followed by climate tech with 32 companies. Find out who’s leading the charge. ➡️ Download the report: https://lnkd.in/enQ4_-95 ➡️ Explore the ranking: https://lnkd.in/eqsTBw5n

Top French engineering school École Polytechnique has launched its second alumni fund with a first closing of €21m. It is part of a small but growing cohort of VC firms built by higher education alumni in Europe, and will back early-stage startups with a link to the school, either because one of the founders is an alumni, the technology was spun-off from Polytechnique’s labs, or the company went through the school’s incubator X-Novation Center. https://lnkd.in/eXjH9WMn

Did you miss our firesides? 🔥 🎙️ UK startups are ‘underwriting American R&D’ Alexandra Depledge, told an audience at Sifted Summit 2025. UK Treasury entrepreneurship advisor, Alex Depledge discussed the valley of death, removing red tape and the upcoming ‘budget for entrepreneurs’ on stage with Kai Nicol-Schwarz. 🎙️ Victoria Weller, leading operations at ElevenLabs spoke on the company's unconventional approach to skipping job titles, how ElevenLabs has maintained it's structure as it grows and her move from Palantir. 🎙️ Meanwhile Dr Ali Parsa took to the stage to talk through his learnings from Quadrivia and the past five years, Europe vs US and the AI Bubble. “AI valuations might be a bubble but there is not a bubble in the reality of how AI will impact on on the real world” says Parsa. Who do you want to see take the stage next year? Register for 2026 👉 https://lnkd.in/evyxN8Dr

There’s been a lot of talk about the young Stockholm startup Strawberry Browser. 🍓 The startup, founded in 2023 by Charles Maddock, Sebastian Thunman and Arian Hanifi, has set the bar high – it plans to become the new Chrome, designed to make our digital lives smoother alongside AI agents. But building a new browser is just the first step. “Our end goal isn’t to build a browser. It’s just the first step towards something much bigger. We want to build the most intuitive platform for any team to run powerful AI agents on,” says Maddock. EQT Ventures & Growth was one of the lead investors in Strawberry’s recent €6m seed round, alongside General Catalyst and founders from Lovable, Hugging Face and Supabase. ✍️ Mimi Billing | https://lnkd.in/ezCkS7rb

Sifted: This is Europe’s opportunity to win: agentic payments fintechs get ready to go to market. Landmark partnerships, such as those between OpenAI and Stripe, are paving the way for the emerging sector of AI-driven payment systems. Kaushik Subramanian, partner at EQT Ventures, says he's bullish on investments into startups building in adjacent sectors such as Paid, a startup which last month closed a $21m seed round to build a “results-based billing” mechanism for AI agents. 🇪🇺 Link in comments.

When Sifted last interviewed William Tunstall-Pedoe a year ago his new company, UnlikelyAI, was pre-launch. He told us he wanted to remedy the fact that the US has multiple businesses valued at more than $1tn, while Europe has none. Is he still bullish on that? “We want to be a very big, standalone business,” he tells me. “Businesses still don’t fully trust AI,” says the Alexa creator - and that’s exactly the problem UnlikelyAI is looking to solve. 🍳 Over Brunch Tunstall-Pedoe tells Sifted's Tom Nugent his plans to crack trust issues preventing AI adoption, views on the UK tech ecosystem and why he launched an internal startup academy at Unlikely. https://lnkd.in/ePmCUDRC