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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Not even an international AI summit could get OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to hold hands for a photo op. AI is not only causing friction on a personal level: AWS admitted that last year's 13-hour outage was caused by its own AI bot Kiro, which tried to fix a bug by nuking an entire environment. We hope that won’t be its response to heal humanity’s problems. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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IQM becomes the first listed European quantum company
Finnish quantum computing company IQM went public on Nasdaq at a $1.8bn pre-money valuation. The deal will leave the company with over $450m in cash. IQM has delivered 15 quantum systems to 13 customers, including four of the world's top ten supercomputing centers. Revenue hit at least $35m in 2025.
Berlin's Sanity Group sells for 250 million euros
Cannabis startup Sanity Group is being acquired by Canada's Organigram Global for EUR 250m. One half flows immediately, the other half is tied to milestones. The cap table included HV Capital, Cherry Ventures, and Redalpine, alongside celebrity backers Snoop Dogg, and TV host Klaas Heufer-Umlauf. A welcome signal that mid-market exits in Europe are coming back.
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Food for thought
What is the 20x startup?
YC argues AI has changed what a startup needs to look like. The new north star: revenue per employee. Companies in the current YC batch are hitting $10m+ in revenue with fewer than 10 people, and roughly a quarter have 95% of their code written by AI. On that: Palle Broe highlights that ElevenLabs sets new-hire sales quotas at 20x base salary. A rep making $150K needs to bring in $3m. That kind of quota only works when insane product-market pull is doing the heavy lifting, not outbound.
