Good morning Sifted reader,

Happy Friday. Coming up today we have a talent exodus at Stability AI, a fintech telling "predatory landlords" to "eff off" and a €426m funding hole bringing Poland's early-stage market to a standstill. Scroll on for that, plus:

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🏥 Swedish healthtech Doccla has acquired its SaaS partner OTH. With the acquisition the company is expanding its clinical services into the nine European countries in which OTH operates, and hoping to make its virtual wards the answer to hospital troubles.

🇵🇱 €426m funding hole brings Poland's early-stage market to a standstill. Last July the country's VCs were promised cash from state-owned fund of funds PFR Ventures. But a year-long delay means some funds are struggling to close. Investors tell Sifted that this could cause chaos across the early-stage market.

🛍 Klarna is outsourcing its customer service staff and cutting 250 roles. The move by the BNPL fintech will affect employees in Germany and Sweden. Staff affected have been offered a transfer job at a new employer, Foundever, where they would continue to provide services to Klarna.

➡️ Stability AI’s talent exodus. The GenAI company that burst onto the scene with a $101m Series A in October last year has been having a tough time lately. And now it’s having to deal with a wave of departures. Ten senior employees have left the company in recent months, from roles ranging from product design to strategic deal-making.

One of the highest-profile leavers is David Ha, Stability's former head of research and the guy who used to lead the Google Brain research team in Tokyo. Yesterday he announced he’s setting up a new research lab in Tokyo with Llion Jones, the Welsh AI research scientist who pioneered the transformer model architecture (which makes up the "T" in ChatGPT).

Sakana AI is aiming to develop a new kind of foundation model based on “nature-inspired intelligence”, which the two hope will be more efficient and smarter than existing systems.

They say that their vision for a new type of model could open up a new market for AI chip hardware, which is currently dominated by US-based Nvidia, by making use of “neuromorphic” semiconductors (chips that mimic brain functions) like those produced by UK-based Graphcore.

💸 The fintech saying "eff you" to “predatory landlords” and “sadist bosses". Ex-Habito CEO Daniel Hegarty's new venture, a savings app for cash-strapped millennials called Communion, offers competitive interest rates and financial advice. It's raised a £2.5m seed round led by Target Global.

📉 Adyen shares plunge by 40.6%. The dip came after H1 of 2023 brought the fintech its lowest revenue growth since the company went public in 2018.

💰 A new £1bn fund for UK fintechs. The Fintech Growth Fund will invest between £10m-100m into the country's growth-stage fintechs. It plans to kick things off by the end of the year and is backed by LPs including Mastercard, Barclays and the London Stock Exchange Group.

🛒 9 marketplace startups to watch, according to VCs.

🎙️ This week on the Sifted Podcast, Amy speaks to Sifted’s Tim and Freya about their story on sexual harassment allegations at a leading European VC firm.

🤝 How to hire a chief partnerships officer — Dominique Airey, carbon removal startup CUR8’s partnerships director, shares her top tips.

🇺🇸 Which US VC partners are doing deals on the ground in Europe?

👀 Inside the rise of enterprise AI. (Sponsored by Sapphire Ventures)

Carbon removal is catching the attention of VCs — but the complexity of the technology remains fairly opaque for non-experts. Wondering how it actually works? In a nutshell, the different forms of carbon capture on the market are:

Direct air capture: methods vary, but this involves (as it says on the tin) removing carbon dioxide directly from the air.
Carbon capture and storage: where carbon is removed at the precise source of emissions via a large fan system and transported to offshore wells to be injected deep underground.
Biochar: a stable form of biocarbon produced when trees and plants are heated in a certain way. It can potentially store emissions for millions of years and remove them from the atmosphere.
Afforestation and reforestation: planting more trees to create forests that act as carbon sinks, either on non-forested or deforested land.
Carbon mineralisation: when CO2 reacts with the minerals in rocks to become a solid mineral, like carbonate. This naturally occurring process can be sped up by industry.

More climate tech news from around the web: The UK government announces nearly £4m in funding for green AI | Electric car market sees a battle of batteries | Who's winning the US investment race in America?

For weekly climate tech news dropped into your inbox every Thursday, sign up to Sifted's climate tech newsletter, brought to you by Freya Pratty.

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💰 M&A

Turkey's embedded finance provider Param has acquired Czech BNPL startup Twisto.

💰 Series A+

Lindus Health, a UK startup working to make clinical trials faster and easier to run, has raised an $18m Series A from investors including Creandum and previous investor Peter Thiel.
UK-based UCL spinout Phasecraft, which is developing new quantum algorithms, has raised a £13m Series A led by Playground Global.

💰 Pre-seed and seed

German procurement platform Mercanis has secured $10m in seed funding from Singals.VC, DI Technology and Speedinvest.
Georgia-based crypto payments startup CityPay.io has raised a seed round of more than €2m, including $500k of crypto purchases.

💰 Undisclosed

Apica, a Sweden-based startup that offers web performance monitoring tools, has raised $10m and acquired US-based data observability platform LOGIQ.AI.
Danish tech event TechBBQ has raised €4m for its flagship conference in Copenhagen.
Scotland-based BDD, which works on clinical trial services and drug discovery technology, has raised £2m from the British Business Bank, and existing investors Archangels and Scottish Enterprise.