Freya Pratty
Senior Reporter and Investigations Lead at Sifted
Senior reporter + investigations lead at the Financial Times' @Siftedeu | Wincott Young Journalist of the Year | Prev 🇱🇧 & 🇫🇷 | [email protected]
Articles
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1 week ago |
sifted.eu | Freya Pratty
Over the last four years, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy has become one of key lobbying forces in European tech, steering climate tech policy in startups’ favour and forging close ties with policymakers to do so. It helped lay the groundwork for the introduction of the EU’s Clean Industrial Act, which is significant because it foregrounds tech as a climate solution, and helped keep climate technologies on policymakers’ minds as their focus switched increasingly to defence and resilience.
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1 week ago |
sifted.eu | Freya Pratty |Tom Matsuda |Martin Coulter
Big businesses tend to have well-oiled lobbying machines, accustomed to swaying policymakers in their favour. Startups — comparatively time-poor and with smaller teams — have typically presented less slick operationsBut things are ramping up, and individuals with key government experience are choosing to take a punt and join a startup.
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2 weeks ago |
sifted.eu | Freya Pratty
German startup Enpal, which supplies green energy tech to consumers, has raised €110m, led by private equity firm TPG. The round, first reported by Handelsblatt, is the first equity raise for Enpal since 2023. In the meantime, the company had focused on securing debt facilities from banks to finance customers’ purchases. Last year, Enpal secured a €1.1bn debt vehicle from Barclays Europe, Bank of America and Credit Agricole CIB.
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3 weeks ago |
sifted.eu | Miriam Partington |Freya Pratty
Buzzy German AI startup Black Forest Labs is no longer working with Elon Musk’s xAI, Sifted has learned. The secretive startup, based near the Black Forest in Freiburg, burst onto the AI scene in August last year with a suite of text-to-image models that experts said surpassed US competitors like OpenAI and Midjourney. Black Forest Labs gained further attention after it inked a partnership with xAI, developing an AI-image generation tool for its chatbot Grok.
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3 weeks ago |
sifted.eu | Freya Pratty
The downfall of Swedish gigafactory Northvolt — which crashed into administration at the end of last year — has left many in Europe questioning whether the continent can ever hope to have a home-grown battery supply. But Northvolt isn’t Europe’s only shot. Five-year-old French company Verkor has raised $2.1bn for its EV battery factory, has backing from Renault and is set to deliver its batteries to customers this year.
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RT @AnneSraders: Scoop: German AI translation unicorn DeepL is “looking very closely” at an IPO, which could come in 2026, sources tell us.…
NEW: Since 2021, London-based VC firm Future Planet Capital has secured more than £100m in public funds without any competitive bidding process. Sources tell Sifted that government officials have raised questions over its suitability for the project. https://t.co/LNJGbIiBqM
Scoop: An ex-Mistral employee is raising $80m for his new company, sources tell Sifted. "Genesis Robotics is the big round happening in Paris at the moment,” says one investor. https://t.co/9l9yZOO3YC