Show Notes
Last Friday, Europe’s tech ecosystem was abuzz with the news AI godfather Yann LeCun was launching an AI VC firm. Then, hours later, he quit. This week on the podcast, reporter Maya Dharampal-Hornby joins host Freya Pratty to discuss the curious tale of Yann LeCun’s shortly-lived firm, Extelligence Invest. The pair chat about where Extelligence was going to invest, who was involved and why Yann might have left the fund. The former Meta chief AI scientist still has a lot on his plate. Earlier ...
More from Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast
With former DeepMind researchers raising record sums for their own startups, few investors are better placed than Aaron Rosenberg. Once Demis Hassabis’s deputy and later head of strategy and operations at Google DeepMind, he now leads Canadian firm Radical Ventures’ UK presence and runs a 70+-member London alumni group on WhatsApp for the lab’s former staff. On this episode of the Sifted Podcast, Aaron tells host John Thornhill why he’s often among the first people DeepMind researchers call w...
Harry Stebbings needs little introduction. The founder of 20VC has built a venture and media empire, and a reputation for punchy takes. Among the most memorable: London is overrun by phone snatchers, the best founders have experienced some form of childhood trauma and people should be working 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Recorded live at Sifted Summit in October, this conversation sees Harry sit down with host Freya Pratty to walk back several of those claims and explain the difference be...
Few people have seen tech policy from as many angles as Nick Clegg. He spent five years as the UK’s deputy prime minister, then seven inside Meta as president of global affairs, defending Silicon Valley to the regulators he used to sit alongside. At Sifted Summit, Clegg sat down with Sifted founder and FT innovation editor John Thornhill to talk about where all of that leaves Europe. As AI reshapes the global balance of power, can Europe build champions of its own, or is it destined to be the...
This week at Sifted we launched the Sifted 250 — a ranking of the 250 fastest-growing startups by revenue-growth across the continent, as well as a new research report. London-based wellness marketplace Healf was crowned winner, followed by body scanning startup Neko Health and Ghent-based security management platform Aikido. Notion Capital, Accel, YC, BpiFrance and Balderton topped the investor rankings, backing the most companies on the list. On the podcast this week, host Freya Pratty disc...
Senior reporter Anne Sraders has just spent two weeks in New York, and one thing was impossible to miss: AI was everywhere. From subway ads to investor breakfasts, it was the only conversation in town. "Everyone wants to find the next Anthropic for every other domain," Abby Meyers of Bain Capital Ventures told Anne. And some US investors are looking to Europe's neolabs, from Yann LeCun's AMI Labs to David Silver's Ineffable, to find it. So how do New York VCs really feel about European tech? ...