Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Amazon is retiring Mechanical Turk, the marketplace it named after the eighteenth-century chess automaton that turned out to have a man hidden inside it. The service existed so that machines could rent human judgement for the work they could not do, and by 2023 researchers found up to 46% of its workers were quietly using LLMs to supply it. The internet hid humans inside machines, trained machines on those humans, and has now filled the human marketplace with machines pretending to be human. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
The podcast is on its summer break until September. Two years, 76 episodes and 200 editions in, tell us what to keep and what to change: thirty seconds, three questions, open until 15 August.
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Your talk track for this week's cocktail party
Uber buys Delivery Hero in a €13bn deal
Uber agreed to acquire Berlin's Delivery Hero for €13bn, an all-cash offer at €41.50 per share that creates a delivery platform spanning 99 countries. Uber committed to keeping the Berlin headquarters and workforce through at least 2029, plus €2bn of investment in Germany by 2031. Europe's biggest delivery group now reports to San Francisco.
Helsing raises $1.8bn at an $18bn valuation
Munich's Helsing closed a $1.8bn Series E at an $18bn valuation, among the largest rounds ever raised by a European startup. Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorganChase, CPP Investments, Lightspeed and Dragoneer all came in, with demand well above the allocation. Helsing keeps widening out from battlefield software into drones, underwater surveillance and autonomous aircraft.
Neko Health raises $700m before its US launch
Daniel Ek and Hjalmar Nilsonne's body-scanning company raised $700m at close to a $7bn valuation, roughly four times its January 2025 mark. Lightspeed led, and Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Ferriss and will.i.am joined personally. The first US clinic opens in Manhattan this summer, against a waiting list the FT puts at around 350,000 people.
We talked to Neko's Chief People Officer Noa Perry-Reifer about scaling culture without breaking.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
The sceptics just changed their minds
More than 200 economists and AI researchers signed a four-sentence statement organised by Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, warning that AI could reshape the economy faster than the Industrial Revolution did and asking governments to prepare now. The letter itself is restrained. What matters is who signed it: Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson spent years arguing that near-term labour disruption was overstated, and they signed anyway. When the doubters start hedging, is it worth asking what they can suddenly see?
Own the technology, and the money behind it
Klaus Hommels closed an oversubscribed $300m defence and dual-use fund at Lakestar and used the announcement to argue that Europe's reliance on American technology has become a strategic vulnerability. His trigger was Washington moving to restrict exports of advanced Anthropic models: access you do not control is not access. The fund already backs Helsing, Isar Aerospace and Arx Robotics, and BAE Systems came in as an LP.
We talked to Proton's Andy Yen about European tech sovereignty.
Smart hack
From our Partners
Your competitor's growth lead already saw the spend spike.
While your team is still in standup, the other growth lead already got the alert. Viktor is an AI employee that lives in Slack. It watches your Meta and TikTok spend overnight, flags the underperformer by 7am, and drafts the new brief before your first meeting.
From us
Hiring in 2026 means drowning. The average posting now draws 242 applicants, and LinkedIn logs 11,000 applications a minute, up 45% year on year. Foundra's playbook for hiring inside the flood is refreshingly analogue:
Ask 20 people for one name each. Not a share on LinkedIn, one name. Referred candidates convert 7x better than job board applicants.
Read the applications yourself. The famous "75% get auto-rejected by the ATS" line traces back to a 2012 sales pitch, not to research. Fifty applications read properly beats 500 scored by a model.
Pay for the work sample. Two hours maximum, $100+ for anything longer, and designed so that generic AI output cannot pass it.
Do the arithmetic before you post. Fully loaded cost is salary plus 25 to 30%. If you cannot name the six-month milestone, you are not ready to hire.
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 Relocation Specialist (all genders) [📍Munich, Germany], Avelios [Apply]
Working Student Digital Customer Success (all genders) [📍Cologne, Germany], Apparel & Fashion, ARMEDANGELS [Apply]
Internship: Customer Success Project Manager [📍Paris, France], Shippeo [Apply]
DevOps Intern [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Supertext [Apply]
Intern GovTech Business Development (f/m/x) [📍Berlin, Germany], Enterprise, Polyteia [Apply]
Customer Success
Customer Success Manager (m/w/d) for UK market - remote within Germany [📍Cologne, Germany], foodforecast [Apply]
Junior Customer Experience Representative [📍Bidart, France], Sophia Genetics [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager - eCommerce [📍London, United Kingdom], Truelayer [Apply]
Customer Delivery Lead [📍Rotterdam, Netherlands], Payter B.V. [Apply]
Key Account Manager Retail - ITALY [📍Munich, Germany], Consumer Food, Air Up [Apply]
Customer Success Manager Marchés Publics (H/F - CDI) [📍Paris, France], Mooncard [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Content Manager (m/f/d) - AI & Localization [📍Munich, Germany], Fitness Tech, EGYM [Apply]
Senior Technical SEO Specialist - Remote Europe [📍United Kingdom], Marketplace, Reedsy [Apply]
Influencer Marketing Manager (Romania) [📍Warsaw, Poland], Tradedoubler B.V. [Apply]
Email Marketing Specialist [📍Vilnius, Lithuania], Orbio World [Apply]
Sales
Account Executive (UK) [📍London, United Kingdom], Mobility & Transportation, Neural Concept [Apply]
Junior Commercial Operations Manager [📍Madrid, Spain], Carwow [Apply]
Enterprise Sales & Partner Manager (f/m/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Retail, Zenjob [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive (f/m/x) [📍Munich, Germany], Mindfuel [Apply]
Account Executive (Health center segment) [📍Paris, France], HealthTech, Vocca [Apply]
Business Development Manager [📍Edinburgh, United Kingdom], Treatwell [Apply]
Country Manager, The Netherlands (all genders) [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Ficus Health GmbH [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Senior Revenue Operations Manager (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data Privacy, DataGuard [Apply]
Regulatory Compliance Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
Leasing Administrator [📍Winnersh, United Kingdom], Carwow [Apply]
Credit Controller [📍Porto, Portugal], Carwow [Apply]
Integration Manager (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Buena [Apply]
HR Officer per sistemi acqua di qualità [📍Imola, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
Deputy CFO [📍Brussels, Belgium], iBanFirst [Apply]
People Business Partner [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Optics11 [Apply]
Product & Tech
Senior Product Manager - LATAM [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, LemFi [Apply]
Senior Data Scientist [📍London, United Kingdom], Carwow [Apply]
Lead Product Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], Forto [Apply]
Business Developer - Hotel Sourcing Spain / España (m/f/d) [📍France], E-Commerce & Marketplace, Splendia [Apply]
Senior Software Engineer (Data Platform) [📍Warsaw, Poland], Stepstone [Apply]
Product Designer [📍Valencia, Spain], Shakers [Apply]
Account Development Representative I - Italy/Israel [📍Italy], Camunda [Apply]
Senior DevOps Engineer [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], HealthTech, myTomorrows [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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