Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

There's been talk all summer about who would fund Mistral's next round. This week it was confirmed: €3bn at a €21bn valuation, co-led by Samsung, the EU's Scaleup Europe Fund and US growth firm PSG Equity. A year ago Mistral was worth €11.7bn.
Mistral has always pitched itself as Europe's sovereign alternative to US AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. With few European investors capable of meeting its huge capital needs,many were watching closely who the French scaleup would seek money from — and whether the round would preserve the company’s independence.
With this trio of co-leads, has Mistral succeeded? What is the significance of bringing on a sizable strategic investor like Samsung, which makes the memory components Mistral's AI runs on?
In this episode of the Sifted podcast, host Freya Pratty is joined by senior reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet. They discuss who joined Mistral’s round and why Samsung led it and how long Mistral can keep up this fundraising rhythm. They also look at Daphné's scoop on the company's robotics chief raising €200m for his own startup.

This podcast was brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking.
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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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