Why you don't have to move to SF
Plus: Europe finally gets its own FAANG
· 624 words
Christian Woese & Melanie Gabriel
June 30, 2026 • Read time: 3 minutes
Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Europe finally has its answer to America's FAANG, and it is a pastry: BRIOCHE, for Bolt, Revolut, Iceye, Oura, Celonis, Helsing and ElevenLabs. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Mark Zuckerberg has told a team to build a prediction-market app called Arena, where Llama writes the questions and you bet play money on the future. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Stark raises €500m to become Europe's defence prime
Berlin strike-drone maker Stark raised €500m led by Sequoia and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, roughly tripling its valuation to over €3.5bn just two years after launch. Stark builds loitering munitions already deployed in Ukraine. The pitch is a software-defined European answer to the big US defence primes, at drone prices no tank can match.
Another top VC just switched to operator
Visionaries Club partner Judith Dada is joining AI platform Langdock as co-CEO, the second prominent European investor to cross the table after Project A's Uwe Horstmann took Stark's top job. Langdock, which lets teams switch between Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, recently hit $40m ARR and is profitable.
Judith was our guest on episode 58, on euro-realism and building with agency.
Alan raises €480m to bet on prevention
French health-insurance company Alan raised €480m led by Prosus at a €5.5bn valuation, one of Europe's largest non-AI rounds this year. Index Ventures and Teachers' Venture Growth joined the Series G. Alan is betting that AI-driven prevention, catching problems before they become claims, can reshape an industry built on paying them.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
What Jeff Bezos is actually building
Andreas Klinger has a sharp breakdown of Jeff Bezos's stealth venture, Project Prometheus, which has now raised around $12bn at roughly a $41bn valuation. The goal is not another chatbot but an "artificial general engineer": AI that designs physical things, from aircraft to chips. If software ate the world, Bezos is betting the next course is hardware.
Is Europe's AI gap confidence, not talent?
Lovable CEO Anton Osika argues Europe never had a talent shortage, it had a confidence one. Founders were told for years that a serious AI company had to be built in San Francisco, and his Stockholm startup, reportedly nearing $500m ARR, is the counter-argument. Others say the real constraint is capital, that European rounds are simply too small. Which is it, belief or balance sheet?
Smart hack
From our Partners
Your creative brief is due Friday. Viktor wrote it Tuesday.
Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.
From us
How do the most talked-about companies actually market themselves? Marketing Ideas author Tom Orbach studies nine of them obsessively and keeps finding the same five moves.
Product as marketing. Make the product itself the ad, the way Anthropic built a one-click "import from ChatGPT" button.
Characters and series. Run recurring narratives, not one-off campaigns.
Community as distribution. Turn your audience into the channel, like Lovable's 24-hour build events.
Memorable creativity. Make the idea weird enough that people spread it for you. Ramp livestreamed someone filing 600,000 expense reports by hand.
Intentional conflict. Pick a fight with a competitor or a category norm on purpose.
None of it is advertising. All of it is distribution.