What Sifted journalists will be covering in 2024

Good morning there,

First thing’s first: happy New Year! I’ve only been in Europe for a few months, but it’s been a wild ride covering the startup ecosystem so far, and I can’t wait to see what 2024 brings.

On that note, I want to know what big stories I should be covering this year in the newsletter? What are you planning to invest in or build in 2024 that I should know about? And what trends do you think will shape the ecosystem in the next 12 months? Get in touch.

We'll be bringing you VCs’ top predictions for 2024 a bit later on this week, but today, we’re giving you a taste of the coverage that Sifted’s editors will be assigning this year, the big AI trends to watch out for in 2024 and what our editorial team thinks is in store for European tech this year.

—Anne Sraders, senior reporter

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The stories Sifted reporters will be chasing in 2024

I think we can all agree that 2023 was a bit crap, in many ways. A new war broke out, fundraising dropped off a cliff, founders became less optimistic and signs of impending climate doom came thick and fast. 

I have higher hopes for 2024. 

Climate tech investment will, I hope, continue to go up and up — and an increasing number of climate tech solutions will, more importantly, come to market and start having an impact in the real world. The chatter around AI will sober up, and we’ll start getting excited about fintechs once again, as significant companies in the sector make big moves. Startup exits will pick up, VCs will start returning more capital to their LPs and the wheels of the ecosystem will start turning, faster, once again. 

So, here’s what I’m asking Sifted’s reporters to watch very closely this year. What else would you add to their radar? Message me — it’s always a pleasure to hear from our readers. 

Climate infrastructure 

We called it early — 2023 was the year of the climate infrastructure startup. All of the year’s biggest tech deals went to climate infrastructure companies — H2 Green Steel, Northvolt, Zenobe Energy and Verkor — and we expect to see a whole lot more this year. Subscribe to our climate tech reporter Freya Pratty’s weekly newsletter for all the latest. 

AI 

Silly season should be coming to an end soon. Everyone and their grandma will no longer be able to raise an above-average-sized round at an above-average valuation just because their company name includes the word ‘AI’. Instead, a handful of companies will rise to the fore — and we’ll be tracking them closely. Lots of large-language model AI companies that raised this year are trying to sell now, but are the big companies they want to land as customers really ready to implement AI? And are their products even fit for purpose? 

Staying skinny and living forever 

We’ve just seen the start of the impact drugs like Ozempic will have; both on people’s health, and a whole range of industries, from pharmaceutical giants to food companies and healthcare. The popularity of nutrition app Zoe in the UK, and body scanning startup Neko Health in Sweden, suggest investing in companies helping us to live healthier and longer isn’t a bad idea. But will companies on the more experimental end of the spectrum — those offering stem cell therapies or working on gene therapies to help us live much longer — take off? 

M&A 

Investors and founders widely anticipate that 2024 will be a big year for M&A. We want to tell you about those deals as they’re happening, but we also want to get into the dynamics of what makes a good deal — for founders, for investors, for employees — and how investors and startups can best position themselves to get good deals to happen. We expect we’ll see a lot of this in the fintech sector, in particular; you can follow that trend by signing up to our Fintech newsletter. And, for heaps of practical advice and tips from top startup operators on everything from M&A to DEI, hiring to firing, sign up to our Startup Life newsletter.

The investors who aren’t VCs 

Family offices, lone angels and angel syndicates, corporates, pension funds and universities; I want to better understand who they are, what they’re thinking and where they’re allocating their money. Sign up to my weekly newsletter on investors for more on this. 

The ‘murky’ side of things

Europe’s startup scene is far from perfect. Funding is clustered in the coffers of a fairly homogenous bunch; bureaucracy holds back innovation in a few too many places; some universities don’t commercialise research as well as they could; and startups and investors all too often fail to look after their people. We want to write about those issues, so they can change. Sifted has multiple ways for you to contact us confidentially. 

— Amy Lewin, editor

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🔮 What do Sifted’s journalists see in their crystal balls for 2024? Our team rounded up their predictions for what the new year will bring. Among them: 

• AI reporter Tim Smith predicts 2024 is the year where VCs’ old and new favourite drugs — SaaS and AI — come together in a vicious cocktail, and that’s where I see most of the activity happening.
• Deputy editor Eleanor Warnock thinks that with the deadly effects of climate change even more evident, and geopolitical tensions increasing, governments need to work with tech. They want to encourage more climate tech and deeptech innovation to stay competitive and resilient, which will provide a massive headwind to companies working in those spaces. US VCs have long had lobbyists in Washington. Now it’s time for European VCs to do the same thing in Brussels.
• And Nordics correspondent Mimi Billing notes that, with the coming US election this autumn, companies will either have to decide on a quick entry on a stock exchange at the beginning of the year or face a lack of investor FOMO come the autumn. European companies are still heavily reliant on US capital so, unfortunately, the big IPOs for European tech companies will wait until 2025.

🔥 AI was the hottest trend of 2023. What will 2024 bring? AI reporter Tim Smith polled VCs and founders to find out. Among their top predictions: 

• Amelia Armour, partner at Amadeus Capital Partner — “Emerging high-performance but smaller AI models, which now require minimal compute power, will be deployed at a larger rate at the edge of the network over the coming year (on physical devices, for instance). This will speed up the acceleration of industrial automation and increase productivity, for example in autonomous robots in distribution centres.” 
• Rick Hao, principal at Speedinvest — “As enterprises rush to adopt the latest capabilities, questions of transparency, trust and governance are becoming top of mind for more and more people. However, we predict that AI safety will continue to be underinvested in, when compared to capabilities.”
• Vanessa Cann, cofounder of GenAI startup Nyonic — “Current LLMs are limiting business use cases. They are too generic — essentially at the level of a high school graduate. In 2024, we will see more specialised models, trained on industry knowledge and jargon and tailored to different industry verticals and tasks that will enable companies to get much better results and pave the way for more complex use cases.”

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