Sifted

Europe’s fastest-growing startups, revealed live at Sifted Summit 🚀 Johnny took to the stage to unveil the Sifted 250, our ranking of the startups growing revenue fastest across Europe. Top spot went to London wellness marketplace Healf, which went from €207k to €47.7m in revenue in just two years. Neko Health and Aikido Security completed the top three. Watch the moment from the room. And that’s only the top three: there are 247 more names to discover. See the full list here 👉 https://lnkd.in/e_-Zv-yP

"Give an agent a thousand ways to do something, and it'll pick the one you didn't want." Mick McNeil, founder and CEO of London-based https://hubs.ly/Q04zK4QZ0, learned that the hard way building his own AI agents. It's exactly the kind of lesson buried in our new guide with Salesforce. The startup agentic AI playbook, sponsored by Salesforce, draws on founders and CTOs across Europe who've already built, broken and rebuilt their first agents: how to pick a first task worth automating, when to keep a human in the loop and what actually separates a working system from an expensive demo. Download it for free (Link in comments) #AIagents #Startups

The Sifted 250 crowned Healf, Nubank walked away from Monzo, and AI founders took aim at non-competes - all this and so much more happened at Summit. Johnny has your 90-second catch-up 👇 Want more? Discover what other in-depth reporting and market intelligence you can unlock with Sifted Pro : https://lnkd.in/d2qWqjWk

Over a week has passed since the fifth Sifted Summit, and we're already preparing for next year. To continue the conversation with Europe's fastest-growing tech companies on what it takes to scale effectively, secure your space for 2027 now. Our launch pricing is live for this month only — guaranteed to be the biggest saving all year. 🔗 Save up to 75% on your ticket: https://lnkd.in/erpQyKyi

NEW: Daedalus, a German factory automation startup founded by former OpenAI technical lead Jonas Schneider, has entered insolvency proceedings, according to court filings.  An insolvency court in Karlsruhe, where Daedalus is based, opened proceedings into the company at the start of August. At the start of September, a court-appointed supervisor said Daedalus’s assets were unlikely to cover the debts it has run up since proceedings opened. The company is wholly owned by a Delaware-registered parent company, which is not party to the German proceedings. Schneider did not respond to multiple requests for comment as to whether the parent company was still solvent. More details here: https://lnkd.in/eUhagbdh

Who's backing Europe's fastest-growing startups? Notion Capital and Accel are the most active investors in this year's Sifted 250, with 10 portfolio companies each. Notion made the biggest leap, up from 2 to 10. Y Combinator and Bpifrance follow with 9, then Balderton, Plug and Play, Seedcamp and Kima Ventures with 8. In total, 1,713 investors have backed the 250, down from 2,018 last year. See the Top 50 investors and lenders in the report in the comments

My first ever Sifted Summit, and it did not disappoint. The short version: a great room, great energy, and a lot of honest conversations about what it actually takes to build and scale right now Juicy stuff, as promised - so much so that they’re getting their own recap next week 👀 You’ve had my takeaways. Here’s what it actually felt like 👇🏽 Thanks to the Sifted team for an awesome event. Looking forward to doing more together.

Bending Spoons has acquired more than 50 companies, including WeTransfer, Vimeo, Airtable and AOL. So when CEO Luca Ferrari explains why M&A fails, it's worth listening. Ferrari joined Miki Kuusi, cofounder and CEO of Wolt, on stage at Sifted Summit last week, alongside Sifted senior reporter Daphné Leprince-Ringuet. Ferrari on what makes deals go wrong: "M&A is guaranteed to fail if you don't have a very sharp definition of what you're trying to accomplish and a very clear plan of why you'll probably be able to accomplish that." "If you have someone running M&A, you're probably going to do M&A whether you should or not." — Kuusi on the risk of hiring someone to run M&A full-time, advice he took from an investor. 🔗 Dig into more of their insights here: https://lnkd.in/e3bizx5q ⬇️ Keen to continue the conversation on all things European tech? Join us in 2027 — link in the comments.

We launched our Top 100 Women in Tech list at Sifted Summit, and this is only the start! Some moments from the launch (and lunch) 👇 Missed it? Follow along, and pre-book your ticket for Summit 2027 : sifted.eu/summit #WomenInTech #EuropeanTech