Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

DataOps platform Astronomer’s CEO stepped down after a kiss cam exposed his affair with his HR chief at a Coldplay concert. Safe to say, the firm’s SEO team hit sky full of stars status as search volumes skyrocketed. Meanwhile, the Finance team of Figma will be hoping for similar stellar trajectories once its rumoured $16bn IPO lights up the New York markets. After the botched Adobe takeover a few months ago, its Founders may soon have reason to dance on Viva la Vida. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Perplexity hits $18bn valuation as AI arms race heats up

AI search engine Perplexity is now valued at $18bn amid frenzied investor demand. The three-year-old Google challenger has quintupled its valuation since January, now pulling in $150mn in annualised revenue from a mix of subscriptions, ads, and ecommerce. With backing from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and SoftBank, it's eyeing an IPO despite takeover interest from Big Tech.

AI training shifts from gig work to elite expertise

AI giants are ditching low-wage data labellers for domain experts in biology, physics, and finance as they build more complex “reasoning” models. Scale AI, Turing, and Toloka are leading the charge. As tasks like labeling images become automatable, the focus has turned to quality control, human feedback, and field-specific problem-solving to push models beyond human intelligence.

Lovable becomes unicorn in record time

Stockholm-based Lovable has hit a $1.8bn valuation just eight months post-launch, raising $200m in a Series A led by Accel. The AI-powered no-code platform claims 2.3m users, 180,000 paying subscribers, and $75m in ARR - all with just 45 employees. It’s winning over non-technical creators and enterprise clients alike, with Klarna and HubSpot already on board.

What do you meme?

Founders! Here's how to get your decks into VCs without effort:

Food for thought

EU Inc: a missed opportunity?

“Rather unambitious” - this is just one of the more kinder descriptions of the proposal for the 28th regime, a proposal for EU companies to operate under a single set of rules. Yet many startup foundations criticise the plans as not going far enough, as Sifted points out in this comprehensive view.

Will Europe ever cut its red tape?

Ridiculous notary fees in Germany

…speaking of red tape: €58.984 in notary fees for a Series A in Germany. Main task of the notary? Read the shareholder documents aloud to all shareholders. Which century are we living in?

Turning off the taps?

European VCs have raised the lowest volume in a decade. What are the implications?

• VCs write fewer, larger checks to standout sectors only (think: Defense, AI)

• The entire innovation ecosystem will feel the squeeze for years to come

The substackification of VCs?

a16z and its content engine lived it first, now many of its peers follow suit: more and more VCs create their own content in order to attract and nurture their deal pipeline. Steph Bailey shared this insightful article on the new dynamics in the VC lead gen - will we get even more “insights” in our LinkedIn feeds?

Events happening this week

We constantly update this quarter’s must-attend events for startups in Europe list.

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From us

The question of performance is a at the heart of every team. How to drive it up is widely debated and spans entire leadership philosophies. Quantumlight, the VC arm of Revolut’s CEO, has shared its principles for driving team performance:

• Treat performance as a priority and focus on A-players - Make performance a top CEO priority, with a standardised approach to identify high performers

• Define a talent framework - Create a scientific and fair framework that accurately distinguishes great and poor performance

• Standardise assessments - Turn reviews into a simple and quick quarterly process that saves managers' time

• Incentivise A-players with performance-based equity bonuses - Give exponentially increasing bonuses based on individual, team or company performance

• Pay above-average salaries for above-average talent - Ensure you're always offering competitive salaries by maintaining benchmarks

One good read

Can Europe break free of American tech supremacy?

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Research Internship [📍London], AI, Cohere [Apply]
Internship / Working Student [📍Munich], SpaceTech, The Exploration Company [Apply]

Customer Success

Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Real Estate Marketplace, James Edition [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], API Infrastructure, Alpaca [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Germany], E Commerce, Constructur [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Senior Product Marketing Manager [📍Remote], SaaS, Room Price Genie [Apply]
Growth Marketer [📍Stockholm], AI, Lovable [Apply]

Sales

Account Executive [📍Hybrid, Berlin], Construction Industry, Cosuno [Apply]
Sales Director DACH [📍Remote, Germany], Digital Advertisement, OpenX [Apply]
Sales Engineer - DACH [📍Remote, Germany], Cybersecurity, Lookout [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Customer Success & Sales Operations Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Multilanguage Meetings, Interprefy [Apply]
Commercial Strategy Director [📍Berlin], Transportation, Via [Apply]

Product & Tech

Principal Product Manager [📍Remote], Digital Twin Technology, Istari [Apply]
Senior Product Manager [📍Remote, Spain, Germany], Hotel Revenue Management, Duetto [Apply]
Senior Product Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Hospitality Industry, Canary Technologies [Apply]

Final words — take what you need

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!