Sifted - AI salary gold rush

Web Summit has grown to be the biggest and shiniest event in the European conference agenda — but as people flock to Lisbon for the event this week, many are wondering if that will remain the case. 

This year’s conference has been overshadowed by a PR disaster, after its founder and now ex-CEO, Paddy Cosgrave, provoked an uproar over his comments about the Israel-Hamas war. As a result sponsors including Meta, Google, Stripe and Intel, as well as several high-profile speakers, withdrew their participation and support from the event. 

In response, Cosgrave stepped down and a new CEO, Katherine Maher, was announced just two weeks before the event. 

The organisers are putting on a good face: Web Summit says that changes to the agenda happen all the time, and that the impact of the CEO change has been minimal. Without naming names, it says that multiple partners who had cancelled have actually re-confirmed their attendance. It says that the startup programme has sold out (and broken its own record) with more than 2,600 startups exhibiting. 

But just by looking at the agenda (which is constantly changing), you get a somewhat different impression. Unlike previous years, there are few really intriguing big names to listen to, and the press conference agenda is heavy with footballers, rather than investors and founders. Multiple European politicians have backed out, including European commissioners and Germany’s vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, while Portugal’s former prime minster Antonio Costa, a big supporter of the event, resigned last week over a corruption scandal.

None of this seems to have fazed attendees much, however: most of them are coming to Lisbon not to listen to panels, but to network. And even if the lineup isn’t the greatest, and some of the sponsors’ parties have been cancelled, they’ll still have plenty of occasions to drink vinho verde, eat pastéis de nata and have a good old gossip.

— Zosia Wanat, senior reporter

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AI talent raking in 400k salaries fresh out of school

Want to make the big bucks? Think about studying machine learning. Since ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, companies have been clamouring to hire AI specialists for a variety of roles — and if you’ve got a degree in machine learning and AI, you’ve got a good chance of earning a hefty paycheque right out of school. 

Today’s PhD students are raking in upwards of $400k in salaries fresh out of university (at least in the US); top executives, meanwhile, are earning figures well above $1m in the increasingly hyped AI space, according to four specialist AI recruiters who spoke with our AI reporter Tim Smith. 

One tidbit that really made my eyes water: some people who’ve worked at prestigious research labs like DeepMind are frequently getting $800k salary offers from recruiters, according to one investor close to the company. Jeez. 

— Anne Sraders, senior reporter

💰 Embattled AI startup Stability AI has nabbed new financing from Intel, Bloomberg reported late last week. The London-based startup, best known for its image generator software Stable Diffusion, reportedly raised nearly $50m in a convertible note (debt that becomes equity) from chipmaker Intel back in October. Stability’s CEO Emad Mostaque said in a recent tweet that the company had raised strategic funding last month. 

• Stability has been in the headlines numerous times this year, but likely not for the reasons the team would hope. It’s seen a talent exodus in recent months, and a leaked pitch deck seen by Sifted also raised questions about whether the firm overstated its AI capabilities in its Series A pitch. Meanwhile, reports surfaced this spring about Mostaque’s alleged history of exaggeration. 
• What’s more, Bloomberg reports that partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue have left their board seats at the company.

🇪🇺 The European Central Bank isn’t planning on cutting interest rates anytime soon, the FT reports. Soaring interest rates have been a thorn in the side of VCs and companies in the last year, but the ECB is not planning to cut rates for the ‘next couple of quarters’, president Christine Lagarde told the Financial Times Global Boardroom conference on Friday.

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🇫🇮 Europe has a secret weapon to beat Big Tech on GenAI: models in non-English languages. Finnish AI company Silo has today released the first results for a multilingual large language model.

• Called Poro, Finnish for reindeer, it’s trained on Finnish and English text.
• Silo says that early results show that it’s competitive with Meta’s open source Llama models. 
• It’s been built in collaboration with the University of Turku, using an EU-funded data set which includes 80 languages — and has a whole lot more terabytes of text data than GPT-3.5 was trained on. (155 times more, in fact.) 

🇳🇴 Norwegian unicorn Gelato wants to reduce shipping costs (and emissions) by bringing production closer to home. Investors like SoftBank, Insight Partners, Goldman Sachs, Harald Mix and Dawn Capital like the idea.

🔭 The European spacetechs one small step away from unicorn status. 

💻 63 no-code and dev tools startups in Europe at pre-seed, seed and Series A. (Exclusively for Sifted Pro members.)

💰 Seven fintech predictions for 2024 (Sponsored by Mangopay)

For companies raising funding in Europe, this year has been a particular challenge. That’s certainly still true of the EU’s largest economy, Germany, as VC dealmaking activity slumped in Q3 this year, according to new PitchBook data. 

• As of the end of September, 213 startups had raised €1.5bn — down from 329 startups raising €2.9bn in the same quarter last year, and 259 companies raising €2.1bn last quarter. 
• The quarter’s slump is “quite disappointing if you put into context how deal value has been trending since Q4,” PitchBook’s senior EMEA private capital analyst Navina Rajan told Sifted. “The dip in Q3, although you can’t hang your whole hat on it and be like, ‘the recovery is not happening,’ at the same time it is quite a significant step down.” 
• One bright spot was, of course, an AI deal. The country’s biggest deal of Q3 was AI defence startup Helsing’s €209m Series B led by General Catalyst. Even in a soft market, AI companies don't seem to have trouble winning cheques.

🤝 Join our consumer tech pitch event. Opportunities still remain for B2C startups to make their mark. Will any of our pitchers be household names in 10 years’ time? Join us on November 14 to hear from five industry rising stars — we'll also be joined by Paddy Dillon, investor at Left Lane Capital, for an exclusive interview. RSVP — exclusively for Pro.

💰 What’s top of mind for Europe’s CFOs? It’s been a tough year for startups, so where does spending make sense? What outgoings should be slashed off the balance sheet? Learn the finance strategies of Epidemic Sound, Motorway and Omio. Register now.

🇵🇹 Senior reporter Zosia Wanat will be at WebSummit this week. Say hi.

🇫🇮 Fintech reporter Amy O'Brien and deputy editor Eleanor Warnock will be at Slush at the end of the month.

🔥 Paris-based Jimini AI, a startup using AI to assist lawyers with time-consuming and repetitive tasks, raised €1.9m led by Polytechnique Ventures and joined by J12 Ventures, Galion.exe, Evolem, Zebox Ventures and Better Angle. 

🔥 London-based Fyma, which uses AI for property management software to analyse real-time video feeds, raised $2.1m led by Quadri Ventures and joined by Second Century Ventures. 

🔥 London-based Cult Mia, an online fashion marketplace, raised a €2.8m seed. Fuel Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including David Wertheimer, Morgan Stanley and Womankind Ventures.

🔥🔥 Helsinki-based Noice, which is developing a platform that combines livestreaming and multiplayer gaming, raised a $21m round from investors including Sedona Holdings, Team Builder Ventures, BITKRAFT Ventures, F4 Fund and angel investors. 

🔥🔥🔥 France-based Technique Solaire, a solar energy producer, raised €200m from Bpifrance and Groupe Crédit Agricole.

If you’d like to submit a deal, get in touch.

Amazon has a reputation for surveilling its employees — with warehouse staff frequently complaining about strict working conditions like timing workers’ toilet breaks.

So, when the company announced that its new office in the Netherlands is in a former prison, the internet had a field day. To make the choice of building even more perfect, the prison is built on the “panopticon” design — a circular structure with a central watchtower — to give inmates the feeling they’re being watched, even when they’re not.

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