Europe finally has its answer to America's FAANG, and it is a pastry: BRIOCHE, for Bolt, Revolut, Iceye, Oura, Celonis, Helsing and ElevenLabs. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Mark Zuckerberg has told a team to build a prediction-market app called Arena, where Llama writes the questions and you bet play money on the future. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Berlin strike-drone maker Stark raised €500m led by Sequoia and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, roughly tripling its valuation to over €3.5bn just two years after launch. Stark builds loitering munitions already deployed in Ukraine. The pitch is a software-defined European answer to the big US defence primes, at drone prices no tank can match.

Visionaries Club partner Judith Dada is joining AI platform Langdock as co-CEO, the second prominent European investor to cross the table after Project A's Uwe Horstmann took Stark's top job. Langdock, which lets teams switch between Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral, recently hit $40m ARR and is profitable.

Judith was our guest on episode 58, on euro-realism and building with agency.

French health-insurance company Alan raised €480m led by Prosus at a €5.5bn valuation, one of Europe's largest non-AI rounds this year. Index Ventures and Teachers' Venture Growth joined the Series G. Alan is betting that AI-driven prevention, catching problems before they become claims, can reshape an industry built on paying them.

Andreas Klinger has a sharp breakdown of Jeff Bezos's stealth venture, Project Prometheus, which has now raised around $12bn at roughly a $41bn valuation. The goal is not another chatbot but an "artificial general engineer": AI that designs physical things, from aircraft to chips. If software ate the world, Bezos is betting the next course is hardware.

Lovable CEO Anton Osika argues Europe never had a talent shortage, it had a confidence one. Founders were told for years that a serious AI company had to be built in San Francisco, and his Stockholm startup, reportedly nearing $500m ARR, is the counter-argument. Others say the real constraint is capital, that European rounds are simply too small. Which is it, belief or balance sheet?

Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.

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How do the most talked-about companies actually market themselves? Marketing Ideas author Tom Orbach studies nine of them obsessively and keeps finding the same five moves.

None of it is advertising. All of it is distribution.

Marc Andreessen on the questions to ask yourself for cultivating your own luck

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.

Quantitative Treasury & ALM Risk Intern [📍Madrid, Spain], FinTech, Ebury [Apply]
Working Student - Accounting (AR) [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
iOS Engineering Intern | Mobile Platform [📍Bucharest, Romania], Showpad [Apply]
Intern - GTM (Visiting) [📍London, United Kingdom], Duku AI [Apply]
Social Media & Influencer Marketing Intern [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], HELLOFRESH [Apply]

Head of Customer Success [📍Stockholm, Sweden], Tandem Health [Apply]
Director, Customer Success (Large & High Growth) [📍United Kingdom], Pleo [Apply]
Customer Success Manager - Mid Market [📍Milan, Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Solution Expert [📍Berlin, Germany], 360Learning [Apply]
Team Leader Aftersales [📍Paris, France], Treatwell [Apply]

Market Research & Insights Lead [📍London, United Kingdom], Carwow [Apply]
Freelance Senior Visual Designer [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], DataSnipper [Apply]
Manager of Product Marketing [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], DataSnipper [Apply]
Community Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], Peec AI [Apply]
Brand Designer [📍Barcelona, Spain], Consumer, Preply [Apply]
Founding GTM Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], AI Phone System, telli [Apply]
Data Scientist, Marketing Analytics [📍Geneva, Switzerland], SonarSource [Apply]
Senior Performance Marketing Specialist [📍Barcelona, Spain], Vertical Software, Amenitiz [Apply]

Commercial Associate [📍London, United Kingdom], Omnea [Apply]
Senior Account Executive, Enterprise [📍Milan, Italy], Behavox [Apply]
Account Executive I - Danish Speaking [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Pleo [Apply]
Team Lead Sales Development (SDR) DACH [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Mid Market Account Executive - LATAM [📍Paris, France], Prelude [Apply]

Finance Lead [📍Barcelona, Spain], Financial Planning, Abacum [Apply]
Talent Acquisition Partner [📍London, United Kingdom], OLIX [Apply]
Revenue Strategy Project Manager | Cover for Chief of Staff (d/f/m) [📍Munich, Germany], Electronics Supply Chain, Luminovo [Apply]
Head of Talent Acquisition [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Finance Counsel [📍Dublin, Ireland], Fintech & DeFi, Wayflyer [Apply]

Technical Product Manager [📍Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]
Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Portugal [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Defense & Space, ICEYE [Apply]
Forward Deployed Engineer - Healthcare AI [📍Madrid, Spain], Idoven [Apply]

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