Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
H Company's last operational cofounder stepped down as CTO this week, two years after the €220m seed that was supposed to make Paris a frontier AI capital. At the same time, DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1bn to keep cracking drug discovery. One way or the other, Europe’s AI map is cooking. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.
Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Fractile lands $220m to take on Nvidia, from London
UK chip startup Fractile raised $220m, with Accel and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund leading. The company is building inference silicon optimised to run large models locally, ~100x cheaper.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Is internal marketing the real GTM moat?
Davide Grieco, Head of Growth at Clay, argues that GTM teams obsess over tools and AI when they should obsess over customer experience first. His sharper claim: internal marketing, the work of aligning your own sales team around the story, drives more than 50% of the success of a sales-led growth campaign. Clay's own "How Clay Uses Clay" series works because it talks about outcomes, not features.
Is the "AI honeymoon" already over?
Linear CEO Karri Saarinen offers a six-month reality check: the binary hype-vs-doom framing is over, and what's left is the unglamorous middle. Teams are not 10x faster, they are differently constrained. The bottleneck moved from typing to thinking, and most orgs haven't redesigned around that yet.
YC’s wishlist for the next decade
Y Combinator's Summer 2026 Requests for Startups opens with a single line: "AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation." The 16 categories that follow are not subtle. AI-native service companies replacing accounting and insurance. Counter-swarm drone defence. Inference chips for agent workflows. Industrial capabilities in space. What are you building?
Smart hack
From our Partners
Turn Google Ads into predictable customer acquisition
Echelonn manages over $15M/mo in Google and YouTube Ads for 300+ ecommerce brands. One vertical. One channel. Total focus. If you're not confident your account is performing the way it should, book a free audit.
From us
Everyone is selling you a hack for ranking in AI answers. Google just quietly published their first official AI optimization guide, its key points:
SEO is still the foundation. AI Overviews and Gemini retrieve from the same index as classic search. No separate AI ranking system.
Skip the LLM hacks. Don't write llms.txt, don't chunk content for bots, don't rewrite for crawlers. Google's words: people-first content.
Commodity content is dead. Generic "7 Tips for X" pages are precisely what AI replaces in the answer. Replace them with first-hand expertise, case studies, unique viewpoints.
"Inauthentic mentions" are the new link scheme. Paid reciprocal brand mentions now fall under Google's spam policy for AI features.
Stop optimising for the bot. Start being the thing it has to cite.
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
Fintech Sales Internship [📍Madrid, Spain], Financial Services, Dojo [Apply]
Strategic Project Intern (Sales Training, Retail Excellence) [📍Paris, France], Apparel & Fashion, ANINE BING [Apply]
Working Student Logistics Planning [📍Romania], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Science Team Internship [📍London, United Kingdom], Climate X [Apply]
Operations Intern – Offline Business Development [📍Milan, Italy], Marketplaces & Consumer, GoStudent [Apply]
Data Research Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Climate X [Apply]
Influencer Marketing Stage [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Consumer, Butternut Box [Apply]
Working Student Applied AI Brand Solutions [📍Munich, Germany], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Customer Success
Account Manager [📍Dublin, Ireland], Kota [Apply]
Customer Success Manager - German Speaking (EMEA) [📍Berlin, Germany], Workflow Automation, n8n [Apply]
Customer Success Specialist [📍London, United Kingdom], Mast [Apply]
Customer Growth Specialist - Pflegewegweiser Onlineshop [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Healthcare, Entyre [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Senior Performance Marketing Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Digital Banking, Zopa Bank [Apply]
Marketing operativo Tecnologie Comfort Quotidiano [📍Rimini, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
B2B Organic Growth Marketing Manager [📍Barcelona, Spain], BEST TABLES [Apply]
Sales
Founding (Senior) Account Executive [📍Berlin, Germany], AI Phone System, telli [Apply]
Sales Development Representative (SDR) [📍London, United Kingdom], Carwow [Apply]
Account Executive - Mid Market, Barcelona Sales Hub [📍Barcelona, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Field Account Executive - Campania [📍Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Head of Sales - France [📍Paris, France], Tandem Health [Apply]
Sales Team Leader [📍Dublin, Ireland], Consumer, Butternut Box [Apply]
B2B Sales Manager - Corporate Events (m/f/x) in Köln [📍Cologne, Germany], Marketplaces & Consumer, Konfetti [Apply]
Head of Growth/GTM Engineer [📍Paris, France], Payflows [Apply]
Senior Sales Executive [📍Madrid, Spain], FinTech, Ebury [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Head of FP&A [📍London, United Kingdom], XYZ Reality [Apply]
People Operations Coordinator [📍Berlin, Germany], FATMAP [Apply]
Legal Counsel - IP [📍Stockholm, Sweden], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]
Chief of Staff [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Talent Acquisition Specialist - Spanish Speaker [📍Madrid, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Senior Accountant [📍Stockholm, Sweden], Tandem Health [Apply]
Product & Tech
Staff Brand Designer [📍London, United Kingdom], Fonoa [Apply]
AI Engineer - London [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, Sequence [Apply]
Group Product Manager - Finance Automation [📍Barcelona, Spain], Perk [Apply]
Data Analyst [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Product Manager [📍Porto, Portugal], Luxury Goods & Jewelry, FARFETCH [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!
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.
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.
