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Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Stripe is paying $7.5bn for OpenRouter, a company worth $1.3bn at its Series B in May, and marking a serious move of the FinTech into AI. The next day Ramp released a model router of its own, free for the rest of the year. It had been running it internally for three years to keep token costs under control. Seems like Startupland is starting to look at the cost of AI, as opposed to opportunities, only. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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PPS: We will be back with the podcast in September.
Your talk track for this week's cocktail party
An ETH spin-off turned excavators into robots
Gravis Robotics raised a $200m Series A led by SoftBank at a $1bn valuation, the largest round construction robotics has seen. Founded in 2022, it does not build machines. It bolts sensors and software onto excavators that already exist, so they dig, level and load lorries on their own. The fifth unicorn to come out of ETH Zurich.
A UK startup raised $100m to route AI around chips
Callosum raised one of Europe's largest seed rounds, led by Atomico with Plural, DCVC and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund. Two Cambridge neuroscientists founded it and came out of stealth in February on $10.25m. Its software splits an AI workload into subtasks and sends each one to whichever chip and model handles it best, instead of putting everything on Nvidia.
What do you meme?
Who needs SaaS, if you have Claude Code?
Food for thought
What is a dead airline's inbox worth?
Google has won the auction for Spirit Airlines' data with a $10m bid: 100m emails, 500m Teams chats, and records covering revenue, operations, fraud and employee productivity. Identifying details get stripped before it changes hands. Frontier labs want data pools their competitors do not have, and Forbes reports they are already circling the Gmail and Slack archives of failed startups. The runner-up bid, at $7.5m, came from an AI data company.
What did your favourite product look like on day one?
We loved this post by a16z…
What happens if you just drive to 58 companies?
Benedikt Seidel left Munich with two meetings booked and came back three weeks later having visited 58 companies. He got a real conversation at 28 of them, never made it past reception at 25, and found five closed. What was your latest Outbound Sales experiment?
Smart hack
From our Partners
Thinking about hiring globally? Start with an EOR.
The best person for your next role might not live near your office—or even in the same country.
More companies are realizing they don't need to open entities everywhere just to access global talent. Instead, they're using EOR to hire internationally faster, stay compliant, and avoid building local infrastructure before they're ready.
Oyster's EOR helps companies hire, pay, and support employees in 180+ countries while Oyster handles payroll, compliance, taxes, and local employment requirements.
From us
Growing fast and worried what it is costing you? Dan Hockenmaier spent five years as Faire's Chief Strategy Officer and wrote down nine lessons. Three you can start with this week:
Treat recruiting like a product. Give it an owner, a funnel and a conversion rate, and keep running it in the weeks when nothing is open.
Watch org debt like tech debt. It builds every time you take a shortcut on a hire, a promotion or a reporting line, and you repay it later with interest.
Send the doc before the meeting. Everyone reads and comments in advance, and the meeting itself only covers the responses.
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
Business Strategy Intern [📍Paris, France], Singulier [Apply]
Working Student Growth Operations & Business Development [📍Munich, Germany], Consumer Food, Air Up [Apply]
Working Student Marketing and Communications (m/f/x) [📍Frankfurt, Germany], Data & AI, Rail-Flow [Apply]
Intern Corporate Finance [📍Berlin, Germany], Cloover [Apply]
Customer Success
Technical AI Project Manager [📍The Hague, Netherlands], Ubiops [Apply]
(Junior) Customer Success Manager (w/m/d) [📍Frankfurt, Germany], moveXM GmbH [Apply]
Key Account Manager - Boats Group [📍Barcelona, Spain], Click&Boat [Apply]
Key Account Manager Romandie (h/f/d) [📍Bern, Switzerland], Homie [Apply]
Customer Success Manager Benelux [📍Gent, Belgium], Peripass [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Senior Growth Marketing Manager (10Bet) [📍Sofia, Bulgaria], OpenTag [Apply]
Growth Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Kota [Apply]
Head of Brand Marketing [📍London, United Kingdom], Togather [Apply]
Head of Paid Acquisition [📍Barcelona, Spain], Click&Boat [Apply]
Marketing Manager – B2B Tech [📍Munich, Germany], Imfusion [Apply]
Product Marketing Lead [📍Leiden, Netherlands], ChannelEngine [Apply]
Senior Brand Designer [📍Paris, France], Gladia [Apply]
Sales
Sales Enablement Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
FlexiPay Sales Team Leader [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Partnerships Manager (Invoicing & Accounting) [📍Madrid, Spain], Zervant [Apply]
Account Executive - Bilingual German/English speaker - fully remote [📍Austria], Uberall [Apply]
Bid & Proposal Manager [📍Paris, France], Malt [Apply]
GTM Operations Specialist (f/m/d [📍Munich, Germany], B2B SaaS, Apaleo [Apply]
Sales Representative [📍Thessaloniki, Greece], Mobility & Transportation, Spotawheel [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Chief of Staff - Customer [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
People Business Partner [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], HealthTech, myTomorrows [Apply]
Executive Assistant [📍London, United Kingdom], OLIX [Apply]
People & Culture Business Partner (m/f/d) [📍Dusseldorf, Germany], DISH Digital Solutions GmbH [Apply]
Product & Tech
Applied AI Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Elyos AI [Apply]
Senior Infrastructure Engineer [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Video Infrastructure, Stream [Apply]
Senior Data Product Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Senior Backend Engineer [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], HealthTech, myTomorrows [Apply]
Infrastructure Engineer - Deployments (d/f/m) [📍Munich, Germany], Arculus [Apply]
Product Manager - Physical AI (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Saeki [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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