For those of you who spent the weekend setting up Clawdbot, we hope it hasn’t bankrupted you yet. Managing agents can surely go both ways. Nvidia Founder Jensen Huang predicted that knowing how to manage an AI will be as important a leadership skill as managing humans. We can’t wait for HR to make us peer-review our own Slack bot. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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In a sweeping Davos speech, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a permanent reset in Europe’s economic and geopolitical posture. She pushed for “EU Inc.” to unify business rules, a capital markets union to unlock investment, and new energy and defence strategies. The announcement was received extremely positively by the startup community.

Oviva closed a €200m Series D to expand its fully reimbursed digital therapy programs for obesity, diabetes, and hypertension across Europe. Already embedded in the UK’s NHS, Germany’s DiGA, and Switzerland’s public system, the platform has treated over 1m patients. Backers include Kinnevik and A.P. Moller Holding.
Listen to our conversation with Oviva Co-Founder Kai Eberhardt on his lessons from scaling across multiple countries and to hundreds of employees.

UK-based Synthesia raised a $200m Series E at a $4bn valuation, led by GV with backing from Nvidia’s NVentures, and Kleiner Perkins. The AI video firm is betting on agent-powered learning tools to replace static corporate training, already used by 90% of the Fortune 100. It also enabled a secondary sale to offer early employee liquidity.

Language models might as well be the most powerful tech every created. How will it change humanity? Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari gave this thoughtful view on the future: AI may be more consequential than the industrial revolution, if we know one thing it is that we don’t understand its long-term implications as nearly as good as we think.