Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
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.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Lovable scrambles to ship under Anthropic pressure
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.
Cursor in talks to raise $2bn at a $50bn valuation
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.
Hexagon buys Waygate for $1.45bn
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.
What do you meme?
Food for thought
Still in business after six years of running a startup?
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?
Does European tech need more money, or fewer excuses?
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?
