Which AI apps boost your daily work?
Plus: Why some employees know where the bodies are buried
· 779 words
Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese
September 30, 2025 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Microsoft said it will be introducing “vibe working” functionalities for its Office suite, bringing new features to Word and Excel. If we finally can vibe away our spreadsheet work, we might be able to spend more time on a reported new TikTok-like social network of AI-generated videos by OpenAI. Will humanity be captured in an eternal AI entertainment mode? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
Btw: we just published our must-attend-Q4-events in Europe-list - where will we meet you?
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Germany’s Black Forest Labs eyes $4bn valuation
Freiburg-based AI start-up Black Forest Labs is in talks to raise $200–300m at a $4bn valuation, up from $1bn just a year ago. The Stability AI spinout builds Flux, an image-generation model already powering Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Azure. With under 50 staff, the company is positioning itself as Europe’s top rival to Google, Midjourney, and OpenAI in the visual AI arms race.
Nvidia goes on a $100bn AI investment spree
Nvidia is pouring $100bn into OpenAI, its largest investment ever, just a week after dropping $5bn on Intel and nearly $1bn across Wayve and U.K. cloud firm Nscale. The chipmaker has already made 51 deals in 2025, cementing its role as Silicon Valley’s ultimate kingmaker.
EU startup funder EIT faces funding cliff
The European Institute of Innovation and Technology, which has backed 9,900 startups, has no allocation in the EU’s proposed 2028–2034 budget. Its €2.96bn funding under the current budget expires in 2027, raising fears of closure. EIT’s future remains murky amid fraud probes and political sensitivities in Hungary.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Who’s the one who knows where all the bodies are buried?
Knowledge is key in any organization, especially in a startup when you need to deploy hacky workarounds for years. As Isaiah N. Granet points out in an impressive post, this knowledge often lies with individual people. Not the leadership people, not shiny star new joiners, but with employee numbers 3 - 7 who are there when you need them most. Are you appreciating these people enough?
Experiences from bootstrapping
Bootstrapping vs. VC money is one of the oldest friction points in startupland. Rob Snyder has been bootstrapping his business from the ground up and shares his reflections: It is slow and goes against conventional wisdom, it is services-driven - but also liberating. With the advent of AI, is bootstrapping more possible than ever?
Listen to our conversation with Rob on How to find real PMF
Software costs or business case?
AI tools and their most powerful versions come with a price point. Yet they do allow you to achieve more with a smaller team. Amit Rawal refers to this as the AI payroll: instead of looking at these costs and comparing them to your traditional software costs, compare them to what a larger team would cost you…
Events happening this week
💥 We just released the latest must-attend events for startups in Europe list: Q4 Edition - check it out! 👀
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From us
Which AI tools should you use for your daily work? It is hard to keep an overview on what is out there, and how it performs. In this article, VC firm a16z provides an overview of the most used tools out there. You can generally think about them in different categories:
General Assistants
Agentic Browsers
Browser Extensions
Email Assistants
Presentation Tools
Note & Document Tools
Spreadsheet Tools
