Scaling Europe
Sebastian Johnson
32 episodes
Carl Johann Simon-Gabriel, Co-founder and CEO at Mirelo.AI: NVIDIA backed Mirelo.ai to build frontier audio models for every creator
4 Nov · 23 min
- Nvidia is investing in Mirelo, one of four German startups Jensen Huang announced Monday.
- Mirelo's Sound Effect 2.0 generates all sound around a video from an optional prompt, preserves dialogue, and handles ten-minute clips.
Dimitris Samouris, Co-Founder and CEO at Junior: Junior has just surpassed $30m ARR fully bootstrapped
3 Nov · 51 min
- Junior reaches $30M ARR fully bootstrapped, scaling from 25 to 75 people and 60-plus customers after about 60 funds passed on its 2023 raise.
- Junior launches a voice agent and pushes into investment banking, betting the voice intelligence layer outlasts the workflow layer as software goes headless.
Margarethe Böhme, Managing partner at Wave Ventures: Wave is Europe’s largest Gen Z-run VC firm
30 Oct · 21 min
- Margarethe Böhme says Wave Ventures is Europe's largest next generation venture capital firm, and its third fund is about €10m, its biggest yet.
- Wave Ventures began in 2016 at Slush in Helsinki as what Böhme calls the first dorm room fund in Europe, and its early bets included Safon and Inven.
Thore Graepel, CEO & Co-Founder at Metis Reasoning: AI needs to reason like a scientist before we can trust it
28 Oct · 22 min
- Metis Reasoning, launched at GTC Berlin, is building AI that reasons like a scientist by testing hypotheses against evidence, with auditable reasoning.
- Thore Graepel argues large language models have no notion of truth and only predict the next token, so they cannot update beliefs.
Yinon Costica, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Wiz: Wiz’s AI agents protect companies from cyber attacks around the clock
23 Oct · 35 min
- Yinon Costica, Wiz co-founder and VP of Product, says AI adoption will compress a decade of cloud-style change into less than a year.
- Costica argues defenders should attack themselves with AI first, using Wiz's red agent to find exposures before attackers do.
Carlos Trenchs Sainz de la Maza, Co-Founder at Masia: BREAKING: Masia closed first €18m fund
22 Oct · 19 min
- Masia closed its first fund at €18m, backed by more than 70 individual LPs, mostly successful founders, senior tech leaders and well-known investors.
- Carlos Trenchs Sainz de la Maza says six to eight funds scout Barcelona every week, arguing that money in the city is no longer local.
Omer Kaplan, Co-Founder & CEO at ZyG: Helping e-commerce brands scale faster with AI agents
19 Oct · 34 min
- Omer Kaplan, founder of ZyG, says scaling an e-commerce brand tenfold is far harder than opening a store on Shopify or Amazon, and ZyG sells that as an outcome service run by AI agents.
- ZyG Score requires brands to sell at least $1m a year with a $40 average order value, then spends about $10,000 of media over seven days testing real users.
Nicolas Sharp, Founder & CEO of Attio: BREAKING: Attio powers 1.6 billion API calls a month
14 Oct · 21 min
- Attio says MCP usage grew 50% month over month, with roughly 36 to 37m MCP calls this month, per CEO Nicolas Sharp.
- Nicolas Sharp says early agent products were skeuomorphic, copying roles like the SDR, when agents should give teams leverage to research thousands of daily sign-ups.
Raffi Kamber, General Partner & Co-Founder at Singular: Europe has unique talent for building AI and science companies
8 Oct · 22 min
- Singular's Raffi Kamber says Europe has a unique edge in AI and science, citing distributed scientific talent and a new generation of researchers with entrepreneurial instincts.
- Walmart acquired Vibe, an ad tech company Singular led the Series A in, for $1.4bn this summer, letting Singular repay half its fund in year four.
Laura Connell, Partner at Atomico: Deep tech is reshaping Europe’s growth stage funding
5 Oct · 23 min
- Laura Connell, partner at Atomico, says the number of European tech companies created last year matched the United States at the top of the funnel.
- Connell says about 38% of European growth-stage rounds over $100m go to next-generation compute, as funding shifts toward the supply chain beneath generative AI.
Siadhal Magos, Co-founder & CEO at Metaview: BREAKING: Metaview Raised $60M Series C
30 Sept · 22 min
- Metaview raises $60m led by Insight Partners, with GV, Intrepid, Growth Partners, Seed Camp and Plural participating, to expand its agentic recruiting platform.
- Metaview launches fillmore, a Slack-based sourcing agent that Siadhal Magos says gives recruiters four to five times their prior productivity.
Alex Higginbottom, Founder at Zenithon AI: BREAKING: Zenithon AI raised $10m
30 Sept · 20 min
- Zenithon AI, a London and San Francisco frontier lab building world models for physics, raised a $10m round led by backers including Lunar, Seraphim and MMC.
- Alex Higginbottom says Zenithon's first world model, launching next week, covers different fusion confinement types and matches simulations in milliseconds, a million times faster.
Oliver Vince, Co-Founder at Basecamp Research: BREAKING: Basecamp Research raised $140m Series C
23 Sept · 23 min
- Basecamp Research raises $140m in a Series C led by S32, with new and existing tech and pharma investors, after its $60m Series B led by Singular at the end of 2024.
- Co-founder Oliver Vince says Basecamp's Eden models are GPT-4-scale, the largest biological models ever trained, and that an antibiotic designed with Anthropic's Claude works in the lab and early preclinical studies.
Hugo da Silva, CEO at Morphotonics: Morphotonics raised over €40m Series B
23 Sept · 18 min
- Morphotonics, a European deep-tech company, has closed a €40m Series B after a difficult fundraising process, and CEO Hugo da Silva says the money will fund hiring top engineers.
- Da Silva says the company's goal is now to convert its existing pipeline rather than pursue new customers, after narrowing from ten to fifteen applications to one or two.
Neil Daly, CEO of Skin Analytics: Helping detect skin cancer using a phone
21 Sept · 18 min
- Skin Analytics has regulatory clearance across Europe for its smartphone-only skin cancer tool, which can run without a clinician, launched in May.
- Neil Daly says the NHS could cut dermatology appointments and free capacity for wait lists, with UK trusts spending about £80m a year on wait-clearing initiatives.
Gustav Bang, Co-founder & CEO of Complir: BREAKING: Complir raised $11m Seed
16 Sept · 17 min
- Complir raised an $11m seed round led by General Catalyst, eight or nine months after its pre-seed round.
- Complir pivoted to enterprise-only customers right after Y Combinator, discarding €2m of pipeline and raising average contract value from 27,000 to 55,000.
Matt Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of Jack & Jill: BREAKING: Jack and Jill raised $40m Series A
15 Sept · 21 min
- Jack and Jill raises a $40m Series A led by Air Street Capital, with Creandum and Madrona participating, after growing revenue about 40 times since its $20m seed round.
- Matt Wilson says Jack and Jill raised its minimum engineer pay to £360,000 from £240,000 nine months earlier, because AI agents let one product engineer do work that once needed a full team.
Gianni Cuozzo, Founder & CEO at Exein: BREAKING: Exein raised $270M at a $1.7B valuation
15 Sept · 21 min
- Exein is raising $270m at a $1.7bn valuation to fund an expansion focused mostly on physical AI, announced from the New York Stock Exchange.
- Gianni Cuozzo, Exein's founder and CEO, says the round was oversubscribed and closed at a set ticket size, after 400% year-on-year growth for three years.
Lukas Saari, Co-Founder & CEO of Tandem Health: BREAKING: Tandem Health raised $100M Series B
14 Sept · 22 min
- Tandem Health raises a $100m Series B led by the Scale-up Europe Fund, managed by EQT, to accelerate go-to-market in existing countries and expand its team.
- Lukas Saari says clinicians are pushing for AI tools that remove documentation work, making adoption bottom up rather than top-down.
Christoph Klink, GP at Antler: Europe's funding gap is also its biggest opportunity
10 Sept · 21 min
- Christoph Klink of Antler says European company formation is 50 to 60 percent above the 2020 peak, yet early-stage rounds fell 40% to 55% from 2021 into 2026.
- Klink says Europe's rocket ships reached unicorn status in under three years on average, versus 7.2 years before 2020, with about seven investors on the cap table at seed.
Simon Schaefer, Co-initiator at EU-INC: EU INC unlocks the simplest way to fund and scale a company in Europe
10 Sept · 18 min
- EU-INC launches a 100-day campaign after its community-backed legal proposal, which started with 26,000 sign-ups, reached the European Commission.
- Simon Schaefer says the Commission's March proposal drops the virtual 28th regime by localising conflict resolution courts, leaving EU-INC with 27 different courts, and excluding labour law and taxation.
Jack Miller and John Daley, Co-Founders of HelmGuard AI: BREAKING: Helmguard raised $7.3M Seed
9 Sept · 24 min
- HelmGuard raises $7.3m in seed funding from UK and US investors to grow its ten-person team, expand its product and enter the US market.
- John Daley, a former Palantir employee, says frontier AI models made security and compliance workflows obsolete and must be rethought from the ground up.
Zeynep Yavuz-Willson, Partner at General Catalyst: GC is an early stage investor and AI transformation firm
8 Sept · 34 min
- General Catalyst, per partner Zeynep Yavuz-Willson, is an investment company that is also an AI transformation firm focused on early-stage bets.
- Zeynep Yavuz-Willson says fragmented service markets like property management and real estate resist AI adoption because buyers do not follow each other, unlike law where firms copy one another.
Quddus Pativada and Dominic Raab, Founder and Founding advisor of Index Law: BREAKING: Dominic Raab joins Index Law
4 Sept · 20 min
- Dominic Raab has joined IndexLaw as a founding adviser, advising on institutional, legal, policy and commercial issues and medium-term strategy.
- Quddus Pativada says IndexLaw is a second generation of legal AI that sells directly to clients, unlike Harvey and Legora, which sell to law firms, with licensed lawyers giving final judgment on outputs.
Dan Lifshits & Ilia Drozdov, Co-founders of Dwelly: BREAKING: Dwelly raised $170m Series B
28 Jul · 17 min
- Dwelly, an AI-native residential lettings company, raises a $170m Series B, $95m of it equity, led by EQT Growth with General Catalyst co-leading.
- Dwelly has passed 15,000 lettings, is already a top 10 UK letting agency, and expects to exceed 20,000 once pending deals close.
JP Haas, Co-Founder & CEO at Conduct: BREAKING: Conduct just raised $60m in a Series A
17 Jun · 21 min
- Conduct raises $60m Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP joining as strategic investor.
- Conduct says the round was preemptive and follows a new global partnership with BCG that pulls it into BCG's big SAP accounts.
Dan Lifshits & Ilia Drozdov, Co-founders of Dwelly: Entering the London market.
14 Apr · 25 min
- Dwelly enters London, where the founders say the capital represents roughly 40% of the industry's GMV, requiring more preparation and enough capital for several acquisitions.
- Dwelly's founders moved their families north and spent fifteen months there to learn British lettings before its first acquisition.
Fuse exceeds $500m ARR: Alan Chang, Founder and CEO at Fuse Energy
17 Mar · 42 min
- Fuse Energy finished 2025 on over $400m in ARR, roughly tenfold growth driven mainly by customers after its mid-2025 gas launch.
- Alan Chang says growth is constrained by engineering talent rather than capital, and doubling or tripling the engineering team would accelerate it.
Chaz Englander: Co-Founder and CEO At Model ML on how he raised $75m 6 months after their seed
23 Jan · 24 min
- Model ML, a financial services AI workflow automation company, raised $75m about 12 months after launch, after five or six lead offers arrived while CEO Chaz Englander was onboarding a customer in San Francisco.
- Chaz Englander argues Model ML behaves like a consumer business because AI products change so fast that neither vendor nor buyer knows what will be sold in twelve months, so the team stays close to users.
Bar Winkler, Co-founder and CEO of Wonderful on how they raised a $100m Series A
22 Jan · 20 min
- Wonderful raised a $100m Series A in August, just three months after its May seed round, because investors thought the opportunity was too big to pass on.
- Wonderful is expanding through local offices staffed with delivery teams, field CTOs and AI engineers rather than traditional sales teams, planning seven APAC and five LatAm markets.
Mark Swan: CEO & Co-Founder at Nevis announcing their $35m Series A led by Sequoia!
2 Dec 2025 · 23 min
- Nevis raises a $35m Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with ICONIQ and Ribbit Capital also investing, to accelerate product shipping.
- Mark Swan, Nevis co-founder and CEO, says advisors spend over 80% of their time on admin and rejects robo-advisers, arguing financial advice will always be human led.
Alan Chang, Co-Founder and CEO @ Fuse Energy
23 Sept 2025 · 17 min
- Alan Chang says Fuse Energy's full-stack model lets it switch off its own solar sites when power prices go negative, earning money twice.
- Chang says Fuse finished its first solar site with about 30 percent less capital expenditure per megawatt peak than the market can build.