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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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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
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.
What do you meme?
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
Where your audience spends its time
The Go-to board for any marketeer
Is the AI SDR wave already over?
Ramp shut down their AI SDRs, despite VCs having poured $154m+ into AI SDR startups in the last year. As Jack Porter breaks down the world is experiencing cold-outbound fatigue.
The pivot of Ramp: unique data, things that don't scale, and letting sellers be storytellers again. Is the rest of the market doubling down on a sinking ship, or is Ramp the outlier?
Will Europe build its own AI future, or watch from the sidelines?
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that Europe is choosing to stand still in the global AI race: The US is moving toward closed-source proprietary models, China is pushing open-weight models for global adoption. Europe still regulates.
Without massive investments, the continent risks permanent technological dependence.
We recently talked to Proton founder Andy Yen about this. He made strong arguments about the importance of Tech sovereignty.
Smart hack
From our Partners
Better prompts. Better AI output.
AI gets smarter when your input is complete. Wispr Flow helps you think out loud and capture full context by voice, then turns that speech into a clean, structured prompt you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or any assistant. No more chopping up thoughts into typed paragraphs. Preserve constraints, examples, edge cases, and tone by speaking them once. The result is faster iteration, more precise outputs, and less time re-prompting. Try Wispr Flow for AI or see a 30-second demo.
From us
"I do not know a single successful person who was not struggling with mental health." This is what serial founder Adrian Locher told us in our latest conversation.
We have built a framework in order to help you navigate challenging situations in your work-life: The Energy Audit. It forces you to look at
where your energy actually goes
which areas of your life are draining and
what the warning signs are before it's too late
No scoring system, no gamification, just honest questions.
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.
💡💡 Show your future employer that you go the extra mile and let them know directly why you will be the perfect fit! We have added a link to the Hiring Manager’s LinkedIn where we think this helps. Do things differently - message them! 💡💡
Internships
Founders Associate [📍Zurich], Digital Sovereignity, Soverli [Apply]
CEO Founder Associate - Internship [📍Paris], Health InsurTech, alan [Apply]
Marketing Associate Intern [📍Brussels], Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Finance & Ops Intern [📍Berlin], Manufacturing, Deltia.ai [Apply]
Customer Success
Customer Success Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Sourcing, Valdera [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Frankfurt], Process Digitalization, Operations1 [Apply]
HR & Finance
Talent Acquisition Manager [📍Munich], Supply Chain Platform, Luminovo [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Communication Manager EMEA [📍London, Munich], AI, Anthropic [Apply, Hiring manager]
Sales
Senior Director of Commercial [📍Remote, Germany], Health, Oviva [Apply]
Listen to our conversation with Oviva Co-Founder Kai Eberhardt on his lessons from scaling across multiple countries and to hundreds of employees
Sales Development Representative [📍Hybrid, Berlin], Carbon Intelligence, Climatiq [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Strategic Project Manager [📍Remote, Europe], Circular Economy, refurbed [Apply]
Revenue Operations Specialist [📍Zurich], InsurTech, grape [Apply]
Product & Tech
Senior Product Manager - New Product [📍Remote, Europe], Streaming, Restream [Apply]
Senior Software Developer [📍Zurich], HR Tech, MoodTalk [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.
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