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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Anthropic roasted its arch enemy OpenAI in Super Bowl ads. If that wasn’t awkward enough, Sam Altman’s reply made it worse. Surely, the Tech world needed a laugh after first signs of the AI bubble bursting send markets spiralling. Meanwhile, Elon Musk was unimpressed executing a mega merger inside his own empire. Tech never gets boring. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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ElevenLabs lands $500m to scale conversational AI
Text-to-speech unicorn ElevenLabs raised a $500m Series D at an $11bn valuation, led by Sequoia, with a16z and ICONIQ doubling down. The company claims it’s on track for $330m+ ARR by end of 2025, fueled by its ElevenAgents platform, already used by Revolut, Deliveroo, and Square. A new emotionally expressive conversational model launches this week.
Fractile cofounder leaves over links to China
Fractile CTO Yuhang Song quietly left the UK chip startup in 2024 after internal concerns over his ties to China, including past attendance at a university linked to the Chinese military. The company, which is building Nvidia rivals, confirmed his departure but framed it as a personal decision.
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Food for thought
The real gap between Europe and the US?
What separates European founders from their American counterparts? Talent, capital, access? Steven Bartlett shared his thoughts after meeting 600+ founders in SF:
Founders pitching in bathrooms, listing their failures like credentials, sleeping on sofas to fund their dream. The difference is not resources. It is one word: permission. Permission to be obsessed, to look stupid, to fail without collective ridicule.
"We often think the difference between Europe is talent, access, capital. But honestly... the real gap is something else entirely."
For first-hand perspectives on what Europe's startup ecosystem needs to compete, we talked to Andreas Klinger on Europe's next moonshots and checked in with Kitty Mayo of Project Europe
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