This week the internet quietly crossed a line: for the first time, bots are sending more traffic than humans, with agentic AI traffic up nearly 8,000%. Off-screen, two giants go live too: SpaceX is set to price the biggest IPO in history at a $1.75tn valuation, and the World Cup kicks off on Thursday. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Barcelona's Factorial raised a $150m Series D at a $2.5bn valuation. The HR platform is rebranding as an "AI workforce operations" suite spanning HR, finance and IT, now used by 16,000+ businesses in 90+ countries.

Salesforce is acquiring Berlin-founded Contentful, the API-first headless CMS used by 4,800+ brands, for an undisclosed sum. Contentful was last valued north of $3bn in 2021. Salesforce wants its composable content layer to feed Agentforce, so AI agents can assemble and personalise content at scale.

Quobly raised a €115m Series A to commercialise quantum computing built on standard silicon. First cloud systems are slated for 2026. A rare European deep-tech round at Series A size.

Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph shared that his first title at Looker was "ABC", as in Anything But Coding: he was simultaneously the CFO, head of sales, chief counsel and head of marketing, qualified for none of them. One by one he recruited people who did each job far better than he could. By the time Google bought Looker for $2.6bn, his title was simply "Board Member". The job, he argues, is to make yourself unnecessary.

No weekends, just work? More and more startups are embracing this. We appreciated the point of Sara Landfors to reflect on a crucial point the debate on working culture miss: output rises with hours, peaks, and then falls - but that curve sits in a different place for everyone. The real skill is knowing your curve honestly, then learning to optimise it over time.

Investor Pramod Gosavi shared his fundraising advice: Every VC meeting is a bullet you fire once, so don't run the "not raising, but also raising" game. Before you take one, ask who's attending and what the agenda is: casual catch-ups with junior VCs are the dangerous ones, because they're fishing for numbers you may not want to share yet. With senior partners, lead with vision, and walk out with market feedback and intros.

How does the CEO of a frontier AI lab spend his time? Mostly not on AI. Dario Amodei says he now spends 30 to 40% of his time on culture, not the product, after Anthropic scaled past 2,500 people. A few things he does on purpose:

The bet: hire people you trust, speak plainly, and you stop being the bottleneck on every decision.

Agents, not apps

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.

Internship Bioengineering / Molecular Biology [📍Lausanne, Switzerland], Healthcare, Adaptyv [Apply]
Operations and Fleet Manager Werkstudent (m/w/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Intern – Quantum Applications (f/m/d) [📍Siegen, Germany], eleQtron [Apply]
Marketing Communications Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Scandit [Apply]

Care Expert - Customer Training (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Key Account Manager - Secteur Industrie - CDI Paris - Theodo [📍Paris, France], Tech Consulting, Theodo [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Paris, France], FinTech, Stripe [Apply]
Customer Success Account Manager, Europe [📍London, United Kingdom], GoCardless [Apply]

Junior Creative Marketing Specialist (TikTok) [📍Ukraine], Holywater [Apply]
Community & Social Media Manager (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Senior brand designer [📍Paris, France], Healthcare, Lucis [Apply]
Partner Growth Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Head of B2C Marketing Italy (x/f/m) [📍Milan, Italy], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]
Google Ads Specialist [📍Ghent, Belgium], Aikido Security [Apply]

Sales Operations Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Go to Market Manager [📍France], Pennylane [Apply]
Account Executive (Paris) [📍Paris, France], Hiya Inc. [Apply]
Business Development Representative (m/w/d) Sell My Car [📍Munich, Germany], Carwow [Apply]

Head of Information Security [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
Accountant [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, LemFi [Apply]
Lead Talent Partner - Engineering [📍Barcelona, Spain], Consumer, Preply [Apply]
Junior HR Officer [📍Belgium], Foxintelligence [Apply]
Lead Talent Acquisition Partner [📍Munich, Germany], Helsing [Apply]
HR Business Partner Spain [📍Madrid, Spain], Malt [Apply]

Software Engineer Graduate [📍London, United Kingdom], Fintern [Apply]
Senior AI Engineer - LLMs and Finetuning [📍London, United Kingdom], 9fin [Apply]
Product Manager (Agile Delivery & Roadmap Execution) [📍Romania], Nexus [Apply]
Product Manager (Remote | HealthTech Startup) [📍Poland], Nexus [Apply]
Product Designer (f/m/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Juro [Apply]
Senior Product Manager - Vault Expansion [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Thought Machine [Apply]
Senior Product Engineer - Insights [📍Dublin, Ireland], Nory [Apply]

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!

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.