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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Two teenagers took a Waymo on a drunken joyride last week, firing gel pellets out of the window, until employees watching the live in-cabin feed called the police, remotely disabled the car, and told the pair it was having trouble while officers moved into position. Autonomous vehicles come with surveillance. Something to keep in mind before your next confidential fundraising call from the back seat. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week's cocktail party
Lovable seeks to double its valuation to $13.2bn
Sweden's Lovable is in talks to raise $300m at a $13.2bn post-money valuation, led by Menlo Ventures, according to Sifted. That would double the $6.6bn it commanded last December, on $500m+ in annualised revenue from just 146 staff.
Yann LeCun's VC fund lasted one day
'AI godfather' Yann LeCun was announced as general partner of Extelligence Invest, a new €200m fund for AI, robotics and deeptech. Within a day the firm shut down after it emerged LeCun had existing exclusive relationships with other funds. He just raised a $1bn+ seed for his own lab, AMI, in March.
Europe has its first fusion unicorn
Munich's Proxima Fusion raised €411m at a €2.4bn valuation, the largest private fusion investment in European history and the continent's first fusion unicorn. Google and RWE joined as strategic investors, and Bavaria matched the round with €400m in public funding. The Max Planck spin-out is building stellarator reactors, with a net-energy demonstrator planned in Bavaria.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Time to build for Europe?
In an open letter to Europe's technical students, Dominique Paul argues that the continent's future will not be built by governments but by the few people who actually know how to build foundational technology. ETH, EPFL and TUM produce absurd technical talent every year, and almost all of it talks itself out of founding, taking a job at Nvidia instead. His point: technology companies are not started by the most qualified person, they are willed into existence by people who refuse to stop.
AI startups really do run lean
HubSpot's masterclass in losing trust?
Hubspot collects vast amounts of outreach data from its customers. Last week, it announced that customer CRM enrichment data would be shared across accounts, opt-out by default. Four days of backlash later, chief product officer Duncan Lennox reversed the change entirely in a post titled “We got this wrong, and we are fixing it”. Is this the first sign that building data moats in an AI era will not be as easy as companies wish?
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From us
Everyone is wiring AI tools together. Almost nobody writes down the decisions those tools are meant to make. Operator Audra Carpenter's fix: build your own operating system before you automate anything:
Extract the decision, not the task. Before automating a recurring job, write down what you actually decide each time: the audience call, what you include, what you refuse. That hidden logic is the asset.
Architect, then operate, then automate. Wire tools together before the logic exists and you just get faster chaos. The order matters.
Keep it tool-agnostic. If your system is the logic, not the software, swapping to a new AI model is a dropdown, not a rebuild.
One good read
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
Working Student – Digital Customer Experience [📍Munich, Germany], EQS Group GmbH [Apply]
Robotics Engineering - 6 months internship [📍Luxembourg], Clearspace [Apply]
Sales Assistant Intern [📍Paris, France], SaaS, Finance, Pennylane [Apply]
Internship - Reinforcement Learning for Navigation [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Tangible, ANYbotics [Apply]
Founders' Associate - Strategic Projects Intern [📍Paris, France], Tryriot [Apply]
Mechanical Engineering Intern [📍Didcot, United Kingdom], Open Cosmos [Apply]
Business Development Intern [📍Zaltbommel, Netherlands], Cyclomedia Technology [Apply]
Customer Success
Customer Success Manager - Strategic Accounts [📍Paris, France], Spiko [Apply]
Customer Success Manager – Benelux [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Incision [Apply]
Account Manager [📍Bristol, United Kingdom], Financial Services, Dojo [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Brandwatch [Apply]
Customer Success Manager - Enterprise (Maternity Cover) [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Brandwatch [Apply]
Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager - Utility (all genders) [📍Munich, Germany], gridX GmbH [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Growth Operations Manager, China [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, LemFi [Apply]
Growth Marketing Manager: Self-Serve [📍London, United Kingdom], Metaview [Apply]
VP Marketing [📍Massy, France], Quandela [Apply]
Retention Specialist | Vilnius [📍Vilnius, Lithuania], Orbio World [Apply]
Performance Creative | Vilnius [📍Vilnius, Lithuania], Orbio World [Apply]
Sports Marketing Manager (f/m/d) [📍Vienna, Austria], Waterdrop [Apply]
Junior Influencer Marketing Analyst (f/m/d) [📍Vienna, Austria], Holzkern [Apply]
Sales
Founding Inside Sales Manager (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Buena [Apply]
Technical Sales Representative / AI Consultant [📍The Hague, Netherlands], Ubiops [Apply]
Sales Team Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Sales Development Representative - London [📍London, United Kingdom], Hiya Inc. [Apply]
BDR Team Manager | Italian Market (Barcelona) [📍Milan, Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Account Executive - French market [📍Paris, France], Spiko [Apply]
Sales Executive – Travel (m/f/d) [📍France], E-Commerce & Marketplace, Splendia [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Director, Expanded Access Program Operations [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], HealthTech, myTomorrows [Apply]
IT Infrastructure & Operations Manager [📍Milan, Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
VP Corporate Development (Chief of Staff) [📍Basel, Switzerland], Indivi AG [Apply]
HR Business Partner [📍Barcelona, Spain], Wallapop [Apply]
Product & Tech
Senior Product Designer – Inventory [📍United Kingdom], Nory [Apply]
Data Scientist [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, Lendable [Apply]
Production Engineer [📍Zurich, Switzerland], DeepJudge [Apply]
Lead Data Engineer [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Video Infrastructure, Stream [Apply]
Product Designer [📍Zurich, Switzerland], BioTech, Cradle [Apply]
Senior Computer Vision Engineer [📍Luxembourg], Clearspace [Apply]
Senior UI Artist [📍Helsinki, Finland], Supercell [Apply]
Lead AI Engineer [📍Paris, France], 360Learning [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!
Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.
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