Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
The Pope's first encyclical drops by the end of the month, and it's about AI. Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15, frames the challenge as "not technological, but anthropological." Meanwhile, a California jury took less than two hours to toss Elon Musk's case against Sam Altman on a statute of limitations. A OpenAI IPO may follow lifting its valuation to heaven. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.
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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party
Italy's Lexroom closes a €42.9m Series B eight months after Series A
Milan-based Lexroom raised a €42.9m Series B led by Left Lane Capital, only eight months after its €16.2m Series A and bringing total funding to €62.7m. The legaltech is making a contrarian bet: build civil-law AI from a data layer of six million verified legal sources, instead of fine-tuning a generalist LLM. 8,000 law firms already use it daily.
Berlin's Peec AI doubles ARR to $10m in months
Berlin's Peec AI has more than doubled annualised revenue to $10m in six months, TechCrunch reports, six months after a $21m Series A at a $100m valuation. The 16-month-old startup builds the GEO version of SEO: tracking and improving brand visibility inside ChatGPT and other AI answer engines.
Viktor pulls $75m and $15m ARR out of ten weeks
Warsaw and Munich's Viktor raised a $75m Series A from Accel and reached $15m ARR within ten weeks of launch. Built by ex-Meta engineers Peter Albert and Fryderyk Wiatrowski, it drops an AI coworker into Slack and Microsoft Teams to handle reports, drafting and data entry. 12,000 teams installed.
What do you meme?
In support of our One Good Read today
Food for thought
€800k vested. €0 accessed.
François Veronat puts a number on a problem nobody is fixing: an employee vested €800k in options at a European scale-up between 2016 and 2020. The company is now worth €1.2bn. In 2026, she has accessed exactly €0. The US has Forge, EquityZen and Carta for pre-IPO liquidity. Europe's institutional brokers want €20m minimum tickets and nothing below them. What is you option book worth if you can’t sell it?
Could Europe's red tape finally be a moat?
An EU-Startups essay flips the standard narrative: Europe's most regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, insurance, legal, energy) hold trillions in enterprise value and are almost entirely untouched by software. AI is the first technology that can absorb that complexity at speed. A European founder who builds compliance, data residency and procurement readiness into the architecture from day one sits in a position non-European AI companies cannot reach. The red tape that hurt the last generation might be the moat the next one is built on.
Smart hack
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From us
Most founders sign their first term sheet without knowing what half the words mean. a16z just published a clean 8-term cheat sheet:
Equity and dilution. Equity is ownership as a percentage. Every new round shrinks every existing slice.
Pre-money vs post-money. Pre-money is the agreed value before cash arrives. Post-money is pre-money plus the cash (€9m + €3m = €12m).
Angel vs lead investor. Angels write personal cheques. The lead writes the biggest one, sets the terms and runs due diligence.
Board seat and pro-rata. Leads typically get a board vote on hires, raises and exits, plus the right to maintain their stake in future rounds.
Save it for the next term sheet that lands in your inbox.
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
Digital Marketing Graduate Internship (12 months) [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Working Student Applied AI Solution Consulting (Nordics) [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Workplace Experience - Working Student [📍Warsaw, Poland], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Mandatory Internship Business Process Digitalization - Central Controlling in the Area of Mobility Electronics [📍Reutlingen, Germany], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Data Analyst Intern [📍Paris, France], Marketing & Advertising, adikteev loho [Apply]
Intern - Product Management (x/f/m) [📍Milan, Italy], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]
People Transformation & Enablement Intern [📍Madrid, Spain], Planetly [Apply]
Customer Success
Strategic Programme Manager - Customer Experience [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Pleo [Apply]
Grocery Account Manager Apprenticeship [📍Paris, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Enterprise Customer Success - Team Lead (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Team Lead Customer Success - French speaking [📍Paris, France], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
(Senior) Customer Success Manager Spain [📍Madrid, Spain], Fintech/Payments, bezahl.de [Apply]
Shift Supervisor [📍Brussels, Belgium], Automation; Robotics, BEUMER Group A/S [Apply]
Key Account Manager Soluzioni Acqua Domestica [📍Cagliari, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
Junior Customer Service [📍Giugliano in Campania, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
Marketing & Comms
Junior Marketing Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], HealthTech, Happl [Apply]
Lead, Communications Sweden [📍Stockholm, Sweden], Neko Health [Apply]
Events & Regional Marketing Specialist [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Machinery, Hubs [Apply]
Senior Growth Marketing Manager (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Hospitality Tech, Limehome [Apply]
Junior Marketing Manager / Projektmanager (m/w/d) – Brand Marketing [📍Munich, Germany], Check24 [Apply]
Sales
Head of Sales - Germany [📍Munich, Germany], Tandem Health [Apply]
Senior Engineer (Salesforce) [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive, Switzerland [📍Switzerland], API Infrastructure, Kong [Apply]
(Senior) Account Executive | VC | UK [📍London, United Kingdom], Juro [Apply]
Account Manager - Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille) - CDI [📍Marseille, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Account Management - Long Tail - Spain [📍Barcelona, Spain], Perk [Apply]
Business Development Representative - English Speaking [📍Paris, France], Prelude [Apply]
Director of Field Sales, Central Region [📍Napoli, Italy], Block [Apply]
Strategy & Ops
Finance Director, HelloFresh Holding (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], HELLOFRESH [Apply]
Head of Legal [📍London, United Kingdom], Causaly [Apply]
Lead, FP&A and Controlling [📍Berlin, Germany], TOURLANE [Apply]
Legal Counsel [📍London, United Kingdom], 9fin [Apply]
Security Compliance Officer [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Healthcare AI, Corti [Apply]
Operations Lead - Supply & Onboarding [📍Milan, Italy], Unobravo [Apply]
Product & Tech
Senior ML Engineer - Kimchi (LLM Inference Optimization) UK [📍United Kingdom], Cast AI [Apply]
Senior IoT Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Fuse [Apply]
Senior Backend Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, Payrails [Apply]
Senior Front End Engineer [📍Barcelona, Spain], Financial Planning, Abacum [Apply]
Senior Software Engineer (GoLang / PHP) [📍Berlin, Germany], Gelato [Apply]
Android Engineer | Mid-Senior [📍Poland], nexos.ai [Apply]
Product Domain Specialist DAF/PME [📍France], Pennylane [Apply]
Software Engineer [📍Stockholm, Sweden], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]
Final words — take what you need
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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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