Hello Sifted reader,

The one-person VC party is well underway in Europe with a growing number of solo general partners raising funds of their own — but few, you won't be surprised to hear, are raised by women.

Gloria Bäuerlein is bucking that trend. She's just closed her own fund of €21.5m, and 95 out of the 100 LPs she approached coughed up money for the pot.

Sifted is also regularly updating a list of all the solo GP funds across Europe. Have we missed anyone out? Or do you know someone who's raising? Get in touch.

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— of founders told Sifted their investors advised them to make cutbacks over the past year, with more than half being told they should reduce their headcount.

“It feels like being gaslit,” said one reader. “[Our investors] are pushing multiple rounds of layoffs, benchmarking against bankrupt companies and not acknowledging that they have made a paradigm shift to preserve cash burn.”

Kai Nicol-Schwarz breaks down what else founders had to say.

🔥 Europe gets one of its first female solo GP funds. Berlin-based Gloria Bäuerlein has just bagged €21.5m to deploy into early-stage startups in Europe. Here's how she plans to invest and what she's looking for from founders.

💰 Sustainable investing platform Clim8 shuts down. The Channel 4-backed fintech is looking for a buyer, but says shareholders will likely lose money in a potential sale. Customers have been given 60 days to decide what to do with their investment portfolio.

🇬🇧 The UK’s AI rules. The British government is today unveiling its plans for how to regulate AI companies operating in the country. It says it wants to avoid heavy-handed legislation which could stifle innovation, and instead of drafting one rule for all or linking regulations to risk levels (like the EU’s AI Act), it’ll turn to existing regulators to come up with tailored, context-specific approaches that suit the way AI is used across their different sectors.

😇 The most active fintech angels in Europe. The founders of Monzo, Checkout.com and GoCardless make the list. But there are also some fresher-faced angels who've joined the game in the last year. Here's who they are, and what they're backing.

🔥 “We are super, super fucked.” Connor Leahy, the founder of Conjecture — which has been backed by the founders of Stripe, a former machine learning director at Apple and Tesla’s former head of AI — is trying to prevent an AI apocalypse by making controllable models. It's a journey that started with “a bunch of Ritalin” and two weeks of forced seclusion in a dorm room.

💸 How do you fund an infrastructure startup? Solving the climate crisis relies on building a whole lot of new infrastructure. But the startups meeting that need are capital-intensive and sit outside the typical VC playbook — so they're having to get creative with where they source their cash.

🧬 Are we too obsessed with spinouts? Improving spinout numbers alone won't close Europe’s innovation gap — so how else can scientific talent create commercial value?

💾 The quest for qubits. Do you know the difference between trapped ion and superconducting qubits? What about the pros and cons of photonics? Here are the different types of quantum startups, explained.

🦄 12 UK soonicorns to watch.

👀 6 founders-turned-investors VCs think you need to know about.

💰 Series A+

Isar Aerospace, a Munich-based rocket builder, has announced a $165m Series C — the biggest spacetech round closed globally so far in 2023. It's backed by the likes of luxury car manufacturer Porsche and former SpaceX executive Bülent Altan, and is trying to rival Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX for satellite launch services.
Germany's talpasolutions, an operations management solution, has raised a €15m Series B.
OQmented, a German startup building laser scanning technology for augmented reality glasses, has secured a $20m Series A.
UK-based Hazy, which produces synthetic data that mimics real datasets without jeopardising customer privacy, has raised $9m in Series A funding. The round was led by Conviction VC and was joined by existing investors including UCL Technology Fund and M12 (Microsoft).

💰 Pre-seed & seed

Connect Earth, a London-based platform to access and analyse the sustainability data of financial transactions, has raised $5.6m in seed funding.
ESG management platform Atlas Metrics, based in Germany, has raised a €5.2m seed round.
Romania-based Videowise, a platform for ecommerce video production, has secured a $3m seed round.
Flowla, a UK startup developing software to streamline B2B sales communication, has drummed up a $1.3m pre-seed round from investors including Antler and Fuel Ventures.

💰 Undisclosed

Cabify, a Barcelona-based international mobility startup, has raised $110m.
Oxford-based Mixergy, which is developing energy and heat storage technology for homes, has raised £9.2m.

A future without plastic packaging?

With plastics flooding the environment, companies are looking to leave a lighter footprint. From mushroom-based materials to self-destructing cups, our latest report explores the innovative startups promising to do better with sustainable packaging — and the challenges they face to wide scale adoption.

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