Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
OpenAI spent last week explaining how its own models attacked software company Hugging Face. While testing GPT-5.6 Sol on cyber capabilities, the agents found a zero-day in OpenAI's own sandbox, broke out, and ran thousands of actions against Hugging Face, whose CEO is now asking for the raw agent traces and $100m of compute to build defences with. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week's cocktail party
Europe's newest robotics unicorn is built by Bosch
London's Humanoid raised a $152m Series A led by Prime Movers Lab, taking it past a $1bn valuation two years after founding. Bosch, Schaeffler, Aglaé Ventures and Fubon joined, lifting total funding to $270m. The detail that matters is downstream: Robert Bosch Robotics is the contract manufacturer, supplying hardware design, production capacity and supply chain.
Google takes the first DMA fine at €890m
The European Commission fined Google €890m on 23 July, its first penalty under the Digital Markets Act. €460m covers search self-preferencing, €430m covers Play Store rules that stopped developers pointing users to cheaper options. Google has 60 days to comply or face daily fines of up to 5% of Alphabet's worldwide turnover.
CuspAI raises $450m to let AI design materials
Cambridge's CuspAI raised a $450m Series B at a $2.6bn valuation, up from $520m last September. Kleiner Perkins and NEA led, with Bezos Expeditions, AMD Ventures and the UK's Sovereign AI Venture Fund joining. It also launched the AI Materials Foundry, pooling compute and lab access across more than 45 partners including Nvidia, Meta, Samsung and Lam Research.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Cheap prototypes made us worse at deciding
Whoop's Hilary Gridley found her team could build demos faster than it could judge them. Thirty prototypes spread across six times more ideas did not produce better choices, only more noise. Her fix was to define the outcome before building anything, give teams lanes inside it, and put rough versions in front of 12,000 opted-in members instead of demoing to internal stakeholders. Artifacts are not decisions. When execution stops being the bottleneck, commitment becomes one.
Europe's money is not missing, it is hidden
Max Rumpler mapped 671 grant calls across 27 portals in 16 EU countries. The take away: Horizon Europe is €14bn, national R&D budgets run past €128bn a year, European VC lands around €125bn for 2026-2027. That is roughly €375bn against the €500bn American VCs expect to deploy over the same period. The gap is real, but much smaller than the folklore. Most of Europe's share is simply sitting behind logins and obscure forms.
Same money, six times the valuation cap
Carta's Peter Walker pulled 239 US startups that all raised roughly $1m on post-money SAFEs and found caps running from $5m at the 10th percentile to $30m at the 90th, with the median sitting at $10m. Same cheque, six times the spread. His read is that a pre-seed cap prices the founder, not the business: teams spinning out of AI labs clear high caps with no product, while everyone else needs revenue, a live product and a waitlist to raise at all.
Our summer reads
Smart hack
From our Partners
The toughest room in advertising. Ad Studio just cleared it.
Major brands just took over a Times Square billboard, and every ad was built in Hightouch Ad Studio. Sweetgreen, HelloFresh, and Tripadvisor cleared the toughest room in advertising. Create, edit, and launch on-brand ads in a few clicks.
From us
How do you run a Weekly Business Review? Basedash wrote the practical version:
Forty-five minutes, same slot, hard stop. Predictable beats thorough.
A metric earns its place three ways. Someone can move it inside a week, it actually changes week to week, and it has a named owner.
Discuss variance, not levels. Anything inside the normal range gets one line from its owner and no discussion.
Nothing leaves the room without an owner and a date. Big strategic questions get their own session.
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 - Technical Support (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Working Student - Recruiting (Volume Hiring) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Working Student - Product Marketing [📍Prague, Czechia], Privacy Tech, Usercentrics [Apply]
Legal Werkstudent [📍Utrecht, Netherlands], NextEnergy BV [Apply]
Working Student (m/f/d) Sim2Real [📍Munich, Germany], Agile Robots SE [Apply]
Intern Customer Growth (f/m/d) [📍Cologne, Germany], Infrastructure, ONIQ [Apply]
Intern to the Chief of Staff (m/f/x) @ E-Mobility Startup [📍Munich, Germany], Aampere GmbH [Apply]
Working Student - Culture & People [📍Munich, Germany], EQS Group GmbH [Apply]
Customer Success
Customer Success Manager - DACH [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], DataSnipper [Apply]
Associate Account Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
Customer Success Manager (German Speaking) [📍London, United Kingdom], Choco [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Paris, France], Dust [Apply]
Customer Service Executive [📍Luxembourg], Stepstone [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Growth Marketing – Intern / Working Student (d/f/m) [📍Munich, Germany], Electronics Supply Chain, Luminovo [Apply]
Product Marketing Manager | Senior [📍United Kingdom], nexos.ai [Apply]
Brand & Content Lead [📍Munich, Germany], Klar [Apply]
Senior CRM Manager - Automations [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, LemFi [Apply]
Performance Marketing Specialist | Spanish Market (Barcelona/Madrid) [📍Barcelona, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
SEO & GEO Specialist (w/m/d) [📍Vienna, Austria], FinTech, ready2order [Apply]
Marketing Analyst Intern [📍Barcelona, Spain], BEST TABLES [Apply]
Social Media and Influence Intern m/f/d [📍Paris, France], Deezer [Apply]
Communication & Brand Manager [📍Kongens Lyngby, Denmark], Spektr [Apply]
Perfomance Marketing Manager [📍Ukraine], Mental Health, Mindly [Apply]
Sales
Business Development Representative [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], DataSnipper [Apply]
Account Manager (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data Privacy, DataGuard [Apply]
Account Executive Manager | Spanish Market (Barcelona) [📍Barcelona, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Account Executive Mid Market | Italian Market (Barcelona) [📍Barcelona, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
AI Deployment Strategist [📍Paris, France], Dust [Apply]
BDR Team Lead International [📍Netherlands], Lobster DATA GmbH [Apply]
Senior Online Trading Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], ASOS [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Founder's Associate [📍London, United Kingdom], Energy, Tilt [Apply]
Accountant [📍Munich, Germany], RegTech, Hawk [Apply]
Junior Payments Analyst [📍Athens, Greece], Harbor Lab [Apply]
Finance Systems and FP&A Manager (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data Privacy, DataGuard [Apply]
Financial Planning & Analysis [📍Milan, Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Legal Engineer [📍Milan, Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Studios Lead [📍Netherlands], Luxury Goods & Jewelry, FARFETCH [Apply]
Talent Acquisition Specialist [📍Barcelona, Spain], Cycle0 Manage Ops S.L. [Apply]
Product & Tech
Senior Machine Learning Engineer [📍United Kingdom], Chattermill [Apply]
Senior Data Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Beamery [Apply]
Engineering Manager, Excel Agents [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], DataSnipper [Apply]
Head of Engineering (m/f/x) @ E-Mobility Startup [📍Munich, Germany], Aampere GmbH [Apply]
AI Agent Engineer (f/m/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data & AI, Datagon ai [Apply]
DevOps Engineer [📍Prague, Czechia], Confirmo [Apply]
Data Analyst (Data Partner) – m/f/d [📍France], E-Commerce & Marketplace, Splendia [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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