Europe's flagship SaaS conference SaaStock rebranded itself to "Shift AI", saying the quiet part out loud about what's left of the category. Meanwhile, Allbirds sold its footwear brand for $39m, renamed itself NewBird AI and announced a pivot to GPU-as-a-Service. Its stock surge 582% in a day. When we all look back to this period in a few years, what will we say? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable worked through the night on a product update after reports Anthropic is building a rival to its core offering. The scramble exposes how much AI product companies depend on the US foundation labs whose tools they sit on top of.

AI coding unicorn Cursor is in talks to raise $2bn+ at a $50bn pre-money valuation. The company says it's on track for $6bn+ ARR by end of 2026, up from $2bn in February. Six months ago the valuation was $29.3bn. Enterprise is now gross-margin positive. Individual dev accounts are not.

Stockholm-headquartered Hexagon agreed to acquire Waygate Technologies from Baker Hughes for $1.45bn in cash, expanding into non-destructive industrial testing. Waygate generates around $630m in annual revenue at a 10% EBIT margin, with 1,500 employees across 25 locations and a German HQ. The deal closes in H2 2026, pending regulatory approval.

Chris Bakke beautifully captures what operators have actually lived through: pandemic, $600K engineers, SVB collapse, endless pivots from AI to crypto to defense tech, $2bn Series Bs for all your competitors, and now the "thunderclap of godlike LLMs" letting any customer rebuild your app in two hours. Where is this all going?

What is it that the European market actually needs? As Sifted argues, there's no capital shortage in Europe, only capital choosing not to go to tech. There is a surge of public money being pured into the Startup sector in Europe, but does pumping more public money into the sector risk distorting incentives before the systemic issues are addressed?

We talked to Tom Wehmeier of Atomico about the state of European capital markets (Youtube / Spotify / Apple). His data cuts right through the "more money will fix it" narrative.

Daniel Tomov of Eleven Ventures argues that AI-native companies now reach profitability on seed funding alone, making traditional growth rounds irrelevant. Meanwhile, $300m+ mega-rounds function as category-declaration events, not venture capital. The middle gets squeezed from both sides. We ask: if you are profitable at Seed, why need a Seed round and VC money in the first place?

Andreas Goeldi of b2venture made a related point in our conversation (Youtube / Spotify / Apple): AI compresses the time and capital to product-market fit, rewriting SaaS unit economics in the process.

Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.

That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.

5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.

Start free. $100 in credits →

Cool kids build agents these days. Or so it seems. But not all AI agents are created equal. Lenny Rachitsky's framework splits agent work into three categories and tells operators where to start.

Start at Category 1. Progress only when you've saturated it. Match the tool to the architecture, not the other way around.

OpenAI's Memos, Frontier, Amazon and Anthropic

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.

Internship - Risk Analyst [📍Paris, France], Verley Food [Apply]
Working Student/Intern Simulation Engineer (f/m/x) [📍Offenburg, Germany], HyperHeat [Apply]
Software Engineering Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Wexler [Apply]
Tourism & Operations Internship [📍Dusseldorf, Germany], Indiecampers [Apply]

Junior Customer Success Manger (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data Privacy, DataGuard [Apply]
Customer Success Manager European Universities (Medical Doctor) [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Customer Support Executive [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
Customer Support Agent [📍Berlin, Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]

Director, Product Marketing [📍London, United Kingdom], Pleo [Apply]
Social Media Manager [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Campaign and Marketing Project Manager [📍Prague, Czechia], Grocery Delivery, Rohlik [Apply]
Senior Manager, Marketing Effectiveness Consulting (Media Analytics) [📍Warsaw, Poland], Foxintelligence [Apply]

Sales Account Executive (UK Based) - Enterprise [📍United Kingdom], Gaming & Media, Kyra [Apply]
Sales Business Analyst [📍Madrid, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive | UKI [📍London, United Kingdom], AI Translation, DeepL [Apply]
Senior Revenue Operations & Enablement Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Sparta [Apply]

Solutions Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, Payrails [Apply]
Operations Analyst [📍Madrid, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Legal Counsel; Germany [📍Berlin, Germany], Iceye [Apply]
Senior Legal Counsel [📍London, United Kingdom], Multiverse [Apply]
Senior Strategy & Operations Manager | Menus and Value [📍London, United Kingdom], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]

Senior Product Engineer (AI) [📍United Kingdom], Plain [Apply]
Product Engineer (Full Stack) [📍London, United Kingdom], Plain [Apply]
Delivery Manager - Core Technology Platform [📍Brussels, Belgium], Skip to content [Apply]
Sr. Software Engineer - Machine & Workload Identity [📍United Kingdom], Teleport [Apply]

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