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3 weeks ago | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly |Anne Sraders |Martin Coulter
When Elon Musk’s SpaceX pulled off yet another feat of technical wizardry last year — not only flying the biggest rocket ever built back to its launch site, but using two giant mechanical arms to pluck it out of the air — you could almost hear the groans from European competitors. As US spacetech basked in glory, doleful Europeans were left to wonder if their big space moment would ever arrive.
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1 month ago | 
sifted.eu | Mimi Billing |Federico Scolari |Ãanna Kelly
VCs have Lovable fever. The Swedish startup, which has developed an AI tool that lets people without coding skills create apps and websites in minutes, is one of the fastest-growing companies ever in Europe, had the mettle to turn down famed US accelerator Y Combinator and had investors such as Creandum coughing up $15m for a pre-Series A round a couple of weeks ago. Why the hype?
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1 month ago | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly |Jonathan Sinclair |Federico Scolari
Will we see a dealmaking bump in 2025? Or will it be another year of muted M&A? Many predicted an explosion in tech deals in 2024. It didn’t happen. But there were standouts, including London-based biotech EyeBio’s acquisition by US pharma group Merck for $1.3bn and Italian unicorn Bending Spoons’s takeover of Dutch file transfer service startup WeTransfer for a (Pitchbook reported) $700m. So far in 2025, M&A activity hasn’t meaningfully ticked up.
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1 month ago | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly |Martin Coulter
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of European Accelerationism (otherwise known as “eu/acc”). Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, the US has ruthlessly pursued its America First agenda — threatening to impose tariffs on rival nations, stripping back regulation and promising billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure across the country.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly |Zosia Wanat
Coming to bookshelves sometime in the near future: business self-help guides describing the grit and adaptability of Ukraine’s founders. Consider Yaroslav Azhnyuk, a tech entrepreneur and self-described geek (also a lindy-hop dancer, according to his LinkedIn). Azhnyuk’s big success is Petcube, a company making GPS tracking collars for pets, sold across Europe and the US.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
sifted.eu | Zosia Wanat |Ãanna Kelly
This week we launched the Sifted 30: Eastern Europe and the Baltics, sponsored by Google for Startups, a ranking of 30 startups with the strongest revenue growth in the region in the past three financial years. Seventeen eastern European and Baltic countries were considered for the leaderboard. Only six made the cut. While we’d hoped for broader representation, the result isn’t surprising.
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly
Riga-based digital banking startup Jeff App has topped the Sifted 30: Eastern Europe and the Baltics — while being the only Latvian startup on the ranking. The newly launched Sifted 30: Eastern Europe and Baltics leaderboard, sponsored by Google for Startups, ranks 30 startups with the strongest revenue growth in the region over the past three financial years.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly
Swiss-Italian company xFarm Technologies, which develops digital tools to help manage agricultural work, today announced a €36m Series C raise. The startup says it’s Europe’s biggest “smart farming” deal to date, and Sifted couldn’t find any other contenders. Farmers use the xFarm app to manage expenses or help tend to speciality crops like olives and grapes; some also use it to combine data from sensors and satellites to guide high-tech tractors and other machinery around fields.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly
Car subscription startup Finn has topped the newly launched Sifted 50: Germany — a ranking of the 50 startups with the strongest revenue growth in the country over the past three financial years. Munich-based Orbem, a company that uses AI to rapidly make sense of MRI scans, places second on the ranking; WhatsApp marketing platform Charles is third.
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Sep 6, 2024 | 
sifted.eu | Ãanna Kelly |Freya Pratty |Tom Nugent |Daria Dmytrenko
Who doesn’t love a good founder biopic? Daniel Ek, Travis Kalanick, Adam Neumann, Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes have all had the Hollywood treatment in recent years. So we thought, wouldn’t it be great to see more founders on screen? Here’s an idea that started life on Sifted Slack and grew legs (to the extent that it put us all severely behind on our work one evening…). Here’s our dream casting — tell us yours.
