"No one does tech for good": interview with Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde ☠️

Good morning there,

Peter Sunde, the man who founded Pirate Bay — the world's most notorious file-sharing site — keeps a relatively low profile these days after an eight-month stint in prison for assisting copyright infringement. But that doesn't mean he holds back when it comes to sharing his views on climate tech's flaws, tech worker privilege or Klarna, as Freya Pratty found out on a recent visit to his secret office location in Malmö.

Elsewhere today, we look at how one of the world's leading AI labs, DeepMind, is responding to the race towards AI supremacy — and explore the dramatic fall from grace of Norwegian EV startup Easee.

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🛒 Grocery delivery is back as Crisp raises €35m. The Dutch startup, which offers next-day grocery delivery in the Netherlands and Belgium, hasn't run into the same struggles as its 10-minute delivery competitors. Why?

• Its average basket size is much bigger, meaning Crisp makes more margin on each delivery — and it services customers from one large distribution centre, rather than dark stores in the (expensive) city centre.
• Existing investors Target Global and Amsterdam-based Keen participated, along with a number of family offices and the founders of Mollie, Adyen and Vinted.

• The French startup buys second-hand electric bikes from retailers, manufacturers and users, and refurbishes them in its own warehouses before selling them to consumers with a one-year warranty.
• It currently has three warehouses — in Paris, Berlin and New York — and plans to double the size of its Paris-based warehouse and open a second US warehouse in Los Angeles. The goal is to refurbish a million bikes per year within 5-10 years.
• The raise comes after a tough year for some of the better-funded startups in the micromobility sector. Dutch electric bike maker VanMoof — which raised close to $200m from investors including Balderton and Felix Capital — went bust in the summer and German escooter company TIER is reportedly in acquisition talks.

Why top AI talent is leaving Google’s DeepMind

Long before there was OpenAI, there was DeepMind. The London-based AI lab, founded over a decade ago, built a team of researchers plucked from the UK’s top universities, who have since pioneered some of the world’s most high-profile breakthroughs in AI.

In 2016, it unveiled the champion-beating board game player AlphaGo, and in 2020, the protein structure prediction system AlphaFold. 

It didn't escape the notice of big tech players for long. In 2014, Google bought the company for $400m — a princely sum at the time — but it operated largely independently, while enjoying access to the financial and hardware resources of its parent company for years.

But as the race towards AI supremacy has sped up, DeepMind is changing. Its world-class talent have more options than ever — plenty of other well-funded AI labs they could join and plenty of starry-eyed investors willing to back them to start their own thing — and they are increasingly exploring those options.

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📉 How one of Norway’s rising startup stars fell foul of regulators. Earlier this year, EV charging startup Easee had 500 employees and had sold over 500k chargers across Europe. Then things started to go very wrong.

• In March, a Swedish regulator banned the company's chargers — and Norway's regulator promptly did the same. Easee was forced to ask resellers across the EU to stop selling two of its products until further notice.
• Layoffs and a big downround have followed. Easee has cut 350 jobs — equivalent to 70% of its workforce — and took a 97% valuation haircut. Mimi Billing finds out what on earth happened.

🥾 ‘Be hard on yourself’ and 8 other lessons for bootstrapping a startup. From meticulously ranking ideas to surrounding yourself with people who've been there and done it, one startup founder shares his top tips for building a company without external funding. 

💸 Founders are raising more downrounds — but that might not be such a bad thing.

• In Q2 2023, downrounds accounted for 26.3% of all European VC deal count, up from 19.8% in Q1 2023, according to PitchBook.
  
• But flat, down or bridge rounds needn't be as terrifying as some founders might think.

🧠 How to build a product with generative AI. According to one survey, 90% of VC-backed startups plan to launch GenAI in their products. But how do you take a GenAI project from a cool idea to a genuinely useful feature? Sifted spoke to one founder who helps companies do exactly that to find out. 

💰 Why a €3.5bn fund is supporting European deeptech. (Sponsored by the European Innovation Council.)

🔥🔥🔥 Danish biotech NMD Pharma, developer of treatments for patients living with neuromuscular diseases, has raised a €75m Series B led by Jeito Capital.

🔥🔥 Heatpump startup Qvantum, from Malmö, Sweden, has raised €23m from EQT's cofounder Thomas von Koch and IMAS Foundation.

🔥🔥 Madrid-based Lynx, the fraud and financial crime prevention platform, has raised a £15m Series A led by Forgepoint Capital.

🔥🔥 French startup Le Fourgon, which delivers and picks up returnable glass bottles and containers, has raised a €10m Series A led by id4 Ventures and Teampact.

🔥 Manchester-based SeeChange, which uses visual AI to monitor retail stores and warehouses for loss prevention, has raised £8m in funding led by Runa Capital.

🔥 Spanish restaurant software provider Last.app has raised €5m led by Nauta Capital, with backing from All Iron Group and bynd.

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

It doesn't look like tourists and Olympians will be exploring Paris in flying taxis next summer, after the French capital's council rejected plans from Aéroports de Paris group and German manufacturer Volocopter to offer a shuttle service from the airport to the city during the games.

The project had the backing of state and regional government, but councillors rejected the plans, describing them as "absurd" and an "ecological aberration", The Local reports. The dream isn't entirely dead, though; the French Ministry of Transport will make a final decision at the start of next year. 

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