Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Within a relatively short space of time, Laura Modiano has come to play a fairly unique and valuable role in Europe’s startup scene. 

Laura, who leads OpenAI’s startup team in Europe, hops from city to city, attending hackathons, events and dinners with Europe’s leading AI companies and investors.

This week she sits down with host Amy Lewin to discuss what the best startups have in common, how she’s automated her work and what she looks for as an angel investor.
This podcast was brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking.

This week at Sifted we launched our third UK and Ireland Leaderboard — a ranking of the 100 fastest-growing startups by revenue-growth across these two countries, as well as a new research report, in partnership with law firm Marriott Harrison. 

The timing was fortuitous, given all the ‘Londonmaxxing’ going on at the moment. The capital looks set to have a very strong first quarter of 2026, at least in comparison to its usual competitors Paris and Berlin, with a lot more deals done and equity raised.

On the podcast this week, Amy discusses the findings of the leaderboard — along with why London is ‘in’ again with the tech crowd and why Fuse Energy’s Alan Chang is an amusing person to interview — with her colleagues from Sifted’s Intelligence team, Éanna Kelly and Jonathan Sinclair. 

Read Sifted's interview with Sovereign AI Unit's Joséphine Kant here: https://sifted.eu/articles/josephine-kant-sovereign-ai-unit

Hélène Huby, founder and CEO of spacetech startup The Exploration Company, is not afraid to take risks — or fail.

Her company, which is only five years old, builds reusable and refillable vehicles to carry cargo to and from space stations in low-Earth orbit — and beyond. 

It’s already (semi-) successfully sent cargo into space — and back — at a fraction of the cost, and time, achieved by other companies. 

On this episode of the Sifted podcast, Hélène shares The Exploration Company’s roadmap for 2026, including fundraising plans for a “significant amount of money” to build a high-thrust rocket engine. 

Hélène and Amy also get into: 
Why the space industry is set to more than double in value over the next decade 
Collaborating in space during a decidedly antagonistic geopolitical moment
Contracts in the works 
The ideal funding roadmap for a deeptech company 
Dealing with very public failure as a CEO 
And Hélène’s hopes and dreams for Europe’s space future

Last month, the US AI giant Anthropic released a new Claude tool for the legal industry, triggering a sell-off in publicly listed firms like Salesforce and reigniting concerns that AI-native startups could wipe out traditional SaaS giants.
So will Europe’s VC-backed SaaS giants survive the AI area? And what about the VCs who’ve heavily backed them?
In this episode of the Sifted Podcast, host Amy Lewin is joined by senior reporters Freya Pratty and Anne Sraders to unpack what the rise of AI means for Europe’s VC-backed software companies — and the investors who’ve poured billions into them.
Read more here: https://sifted.eu/articles/european-vc-saaspocalypse

The AI debate has been dominated by large language models used to power the likes of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. But could the next wave of AI look very different?
Yes, some European AI watchers say. Attention is shifting to so-called “world models” — systems designed to build internal representations of how the world works, rather than simply predicting the next word in a sentence. 
A number of prominent researchers, including former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, have argued this approach could overcome some of the limitations of today’s LLMs — and have launched startups to prove it.
On this week’s episode of the Sifted Podcast, host Freya Pratty is joined by senior reporters Daphné Leprince-Ringuet and Anne Sraders to unpack the hype around world models. What exactly are they? What real-world applications might they unlock? And with researchers like LeCun choosing to base new ventures in Europe, could this be an area where the continent builds a competitive edge in the global AI race?

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