Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Chinese authorities are forcing Meta to unwind its $2bn acquisition of Manus months after the deal closed. Seems like someone will have to sell their Ferrari. Meanwhile, the EU has issued its first preliminary findings against the social media giant for failing to keep minors off Facebook and Instagram. Two regulators, two continents, one very long week in Menlo Park. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
SAP buys Prior Labs, pledges €1bn for a European frontier AI lab
SAP has agreed to acquire German AI startup Prior Labs and will invest more than €1bn over four years to scale it as an independent frontier AI lab in Europe. Founded by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, Prior Labs built TabPFN, a foundation model for tabular data, the structured spreadsheet and database content early AI ignored.
Ineffable Intelligence raises $1.1bn at a $5.1bn valuation
London-founded Ineffable Intelligence has come out of stealth with a $1.1bn Seed at a $5.1bn post-money valuation, possibly the largest ever in European history. Founder David Silver wants to use reinforcement learning to build a superlearner that discovers knowledge without human data.
The British defence-tech unicorn nobody can find
Resilience Media's Ingrid Lunden investigates Roark Aerospace, whose founder claims to have built the first British defence tech unicorn. Lunden calls it "the unicorn we couldn't find" and picks apart whether the $1bn+ valuation claim holds up. A useful reminder that not every European unicorn announcement survives daylight.
What do you meme?
Is AI coming for us?
From the community
Our friends from Revent are conducting a survey for the AI Efficiency Benchmark 2026. They’ll be keen to get your input. Complete the survey here, it takes a couple of minutes and be sure to get the results once they’re in.
Food for thought
Do we still have the attention span we need?
Isaiah N. Granet shared a striking observation: at a San Francisco dinner of eight founders, only one of them had finished a book that year. The replacement was podcasts at 2x, Twitter, and long voice memos from other founders. Throughput is genuinely useful, right up until the moment you realise that every interesting person you've ever met got that way by spending long stretches being bored by something difficult. Are you still reading?
The hiring secret: Don't lie.
Amanda Zhu breaks down how to hit $1m+ revenue per employee: tell candidates the boring, unglamorous truth about the role and watch half of them disqualify themselves. Her VP of Sales was told upfront he would carry a quota and sell himself. Her first GTM hire was warned the company might not exist in four months. Hire for the long term, not for the contract signing.
We talked to Tony Beltramelli who sold to Miro (Youtube / Spotify / Apple) about the exact same instinct. His framework: hire only when it hurts.
1,000 days of stealth. Was it worth it?
Nicolas Sharp, founder of Attio, spent 1,000 days in stealth perfecting an AI-native CRM architecture before going to market. They have raised $52m on the back of that conviction. In a category as crowded as CRM, taking the time to get the architecture right may be the only real moat. What is your moat?
Smart hack
From our Partners
Are you tracking agent views on your docs?
AI agents already outnumber human visitors to your docs — now you can track them.
From us
One of the hardest part of managing a team isn't the people, it's the context-switching. Michael Ruml, Engineering Director at Mews, shares the system he uses to offload that discipline to Claude across his 30-engineer org:
One registry table: Status, priority, owner, and deadline for every active topic.
One journal file per initiative: Current state, open questions, and timestamped entries (newest first).
A knowledge wiki: Entity profiles, recurring concepts, and major decisions that compound over time.
A daily AI scan: Across Slack, Confluence, and the calendar to refresh journals and flag anything stale.
Obsidian to navigate it all: A graph of topics, decisions, and people you can actually browse.
The goal: make information retrieval cheap and easy.
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 Backend Engineer (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], E-Commerce / Marketplace, Raisin [Apply]
Partner Sales Manager - Intern - 6 Months [📍Paris, France], Dataiku [Apply]
Working Student Multimedia [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
R&D Internship [📍Paris, France], Technology & Software, Esri R&D Center Zurich AG [Apply]
Intern Learning & Leadership Development [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Working Student for Maintenance [📍Romania], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Intern (Part Time) - Partnerships [📍Madrid, Spain], Planetly [Apply]
Customer Success
Senior Operations Account Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Relay Technologies [Apply]
Commercial Customer Success Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Incident Management, incident.io [Apply]
Strategic Enterprise Success Manager (French speaking) [📍Madrid, Spain], Contentsquare [Apply]
Account Manager - Firms Expansion - Paris [📍Paris, France], Pennylane [Apply]
Scaled Customer Success Manager - French Speaker [📍Dublin, Ireland], Notion [Apply]
Technical Customer Success Manager [📍Vienna, Austria], Sentry.co [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Director, Product Marketing [📍Stockholm, Sweden], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]
Social Media Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Lawhive [Apply]
Content Lead [📍Berlin, Germany], Peec AI [Apply]
Community Manager [📍Milan, Italy], Sibill [Apply]
Sales
Account Executive | Österreich [📍Munich, Germany], AI Translation, DeepL [Apply]
Head of Pre-Sales [📍London, United Kingdom], 9fin [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive, Deliveroo for Work [📍London, United Kingdom], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
SDR Inbound Germany [📍Berlin, Germany], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Outbound Key Account Executive (Switzerland) [📍Geneva, Switzerland], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Head of SDR, Europe [📍Milan, Italy], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Account Executive, Platforms (Hunter) [📍Paris, France], FinTech, Stripe [Apply]
Strategic Account Executive Nordics [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Associate Account Executive, Mirakl Connect [📍Barcelona, Spain], Marketplace Tech, Mirakl [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
People Lead [📍London, United Kingdom], AI, Tessl [Apply]
Data Analyst, Financial Enablement [📍Dublin, Ireland], FinTech, Stripe [Apply]
FP&A Product Support [📍Barcelona, Spain], Financial Planning, Abacum [Apply]
Product & Tech
Product Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], HealthTech, Happl [Apply]
Machine Learning Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Travel Tech, Captaintrain [Apply]
Rust Developer - Product (d/f/m) [📍Munich, Germany], Arculus [Apply]
Senior Systems Engineer – Performance & Reliability (Analysis) [📍Poland], Semiconductors, Graphcore [Apply]
DevOps Engineering Intern [📍Netherlands], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Digital Designer [📍Paris, France], Synthesia [Apply]
Senior Back End Engineer (Integrations) [📍Spain], Financial Planning, Abacum [Apply]
Product Designer (100% Remote within Spain) [📍Barcelona, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Final words — take what you need
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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