Amy Lewin

1 week ago | sifted.eu | Amy Lewin

Secondhand marketplace Vinted needs little introduction, with tens of millions registered users around the world who use its app to sell everything from clothes to furniture to even lava lamps. But the (profitable) company is swiftly becoming far more than a marketplace: it also has its own shipping infrastructure, a payments business and — as of recently — a venture arm.

1 week ago | sifted.eu | Amy Lewin

Rob Lacher, founding partner at early-stage VC Visionaries Club, has thrown investment hypotheses out the window. “It’s a bit ‘21,” he said, on the latest episode of the Sifted Podcast. “The moment you have a hypothesis, it's outdated — just look at AI.”Also binned: the certainty that SaaS unicorns will return funds (“a lot of the software companies have become old timers, and I think will die”).

3 weeks ago | sifted.eu | Amy Lewin |Anne Sraders

You’ve all heard of the PayPal ‘mafia’, and here in Europe, the Skype ‘mafia’. Other tech companies that have given birth to a generation of other tech startups include Revolut, Palantir, Monzo and Deliveroo. But what’s less talked about is that VCs are at it too. By Sifted’s count, former Seedcampers have started seven other VC firms. Earlybird, Accel and Atomico also have numerous offspring.

3 weeks ago | sifted.eu | Amy Lewin

2025 is a great time to be an early-stage founder, says Sequoia partner George Robson — as long as you’re willing to really go for it. “Europe, particularly at the seed stage, is an incredible place,” he told an audience at the inaugural SXSW in London this week. “But the rate of change of companies is the greatest that it's ever been.”He says: “In the era of AI is how people are building more with smaller teams in less time.

3 weeks ago | sifted.eu | Amy Lewin

Unlike most VCs, Sasha Trower — an early backer of Runna, the wildly popular app for runners which was acquired by Strava in April — does not think consumer is dead. “Most of the big outcomes we’ve seen in VC have come from consumer. If you think about consumer tech in the sense of ecommerce and marketplaces and also consumerised SaaS, like Canva, Notion and Miro,” Trower, a former investor at London-based VC Venrex, tells Sifted.