Sifted - A new drug-fuelled Olympics 💊

Good morning there,

I bet a fair few of you have joked with friends about what an Olympic Games fuelled by performance enhancing drugs would look like. Who doesn't want to see an athlete run 100m in five seconds?

So when Sifted’s Kai Nicol-Schwarz shared the news that one founder was trying to turn that into a reality, this tweet came to mind. That founder then announced they'd raised funding for the event from some pretty hefty backers. Scroll on for the full story.

Elsewhere today, there's fresh funding for AI drug discovery and nuclear reactors, a new fund in CEE and Octopus Energy hits profitability.

— Sadia Nowshin, editorial assistant 

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A new drug-fuelled Olympics

When seven-time Tour de France winner and Olympic gold medallist Lance Armstrong admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs in 2013, he had his titles stripped and was labelled a cheat. 

For Aron D'Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games — an Olympic-style competition where athletes can take performance enhancing drugs —  things aren’t as simple as that.

“Is it cheating when everyone else is doing it?” he says, pointing to a report in which 44% of elite athletes said they used banned performance enhancing substances.

Athletes competing in the Enhanced Games will be allowed to pump themselves with any performance enhancing substances they like — from anabolic steroids to growth hormones and testosterone replacement therapy. It’s all in the name of breaking world records in “sports that actually matter” — the Games will focus on a limited number of single-person events in the areas of track and field, swimming, gymnastics, combat and weightlifting. 

“We’re reinventing the Olympic Games for the 21st century,” D’Souza tells Sifted. “We need to design a Games for social media and broadcast television.”

D’Souza has just announced a “single digit millions dollar” raise ahead of a planned first event in the summer of 2025. He also has some hefty backers onboard, including Paypal founder Peter Thiel, Apeiron Investment Group — the family office of Christian Angermayer, who joins the company as a cofounder — and Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of crypto exchange Coinbase.

But the event raises a number of questions — namely, should you put your health at risk by taking performance enhancing drugs for the sake of running a sub-nine seconds 100m?

The prize money available is likely a big incentive. Anyone who does smash a world record could be paid handsomely. If an athlete could break the 100m sprint record, for example, there would be a possibility of tens of millions in bonuses, says D’Souza. 

There is also clinical supervision for the 200 or so athletes who will be competing. They will have full health insurance and undergo a “full system health check” before and after competing, D’Souza says. There could, however, also be thousands of athletes applying to qualify for the games who don’t have that support.

It has a host of critics. But battling the nay-sayers who have labelled the event a “danger to health”, “a clown show” and “a joke” is all part of the “civil rights struggle of our generation” that D’Souza says the Enhance Games is fighting. According to its website, the company wants to tackle “discrimination against athletes, and those who strive for human excellence.”

With 18 months to go until D’Souza hopes to launch the games, the big question is whether he can convince broadcasters and sponsors to get into bed with what’s certain to be a highly controversial event. Would you watch it? Dig into the full story here.

— Kai Nicol-Schwarz, reporter

💊 French biotech Aqemia closed a €30m extension to its Series A, bringing total funding for the round to €60m. The startup is building its own drug discovery pipeline, from identifying new drug candidates — a process it says it has boosted thanks to a mix of generative AI and quantum-inspired algorithms — all the way to clinical testing. 

• For now, three drug candidates produced by Aqemia’s technology to target different types of cancer are undergoing preclinical tests in animals. The startup expects more to come thanks to the recent fundraise — covering a wider range of therapeutics such as immunology, inflammation and the central nervous system.
• Although AI has sparked the interest of pharmaceutical companies in recent years thanks to its promise to make it cheaper and faster to find new drugs, the technology is yet to be proven. Late last year, US-based biotech Insilico Medicine progressed an AI-designed drug candidate to the clinical phase — an industry first, with results expected in 2025.

🇵🇱 Poland’s SMOK closes $25m second fund. The VC wants to back early-stage SaaS, AI and gaming startups from across central eastern Europe and the region’s diaspora abroad. It wants to invest in 25-35 pre-seed and seed startups, with cheques of $100k-1m.

• In its first close over a year ago, the VC raised money from more than 60 private LPs — most of them entrepreneurs from the region, including founders of three unicorns. SMOK’s financial boost at final close comes from PFR Ventures, Poland’s state-owned fund of funds.  

🇨🇭 Swiss startup Transmutex has raised a $23m Series A extension round co-led by Union Square Ventures and Steel Atlas. The company was cofounded by scientists from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, and is building a nuclear reactor designed to be safer than the process currently used by nuclear power stations. 

• The process currently involves neutrons colliding with uranium, which then releases more neutrons, producing a chain reaction. The heat that this generates is used to create electricity. 

• Transmutex is building a nuclear reactor which uses thorium — a lead-like metal that is “mildly radioactive”, according to cofounder and CEO Franklin Servan-Schreiber — as a feedstock rather than uranium. 

🐙 British energy supplier Octopus Energy, founded in 2015, turned its first profit in 2023. It made a £283m pre-tax profit in the year ending on April 30, 2023, compared to a £165.7m loss in 2022. Higher gas and electricity prices, plus a growth in customer numbers, led to the profit increase. 

• Sifted sat down with Octopus’ CFO last year to discuss how the company survived the energy crisis, and its plans for financing going forward.

🇮🇹 Italy’s privacy regulator has ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool and the way user data is collected are in violation of the country’s privacy laws, according to Bloomberg, after an investigation into the matter was launched in March 2023.

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💰 It’s not that often that European companies raise more VC money than their counterparts across the Atlantic. But in 2023, quantum startups in EMEA bagged $781m — more than three times the amount raised in the sector in North America ($240m) and almost two-thirds of the $1.2bn invested globally, according to a new report. EMEA was also the only region globally to see growth in quantum funding (+3%), while in North America, investments in quantum startups dropped by a bruising 80% compared to 2022, and by 17% in Asia-Pacific (APAC).

• Although Europe held strong, the global VC funding outlook for quantum remains challenging; overall funding globally for quantum startups in 2023 was nearly cut in half compared to 2022, as many VCs were put off by the technology’s high cost and long development cycles.
• The sector, however, can count on strong government support. Across all countries, government commitments (both historical and forward-looking) amount to more than $40bn, according to the report. European startups have nothing to envy from their competitors abroad: the UK, through its National Quantum Strategy, has committed a total of $4.3bn to quantum technologies, while Germany has pledged more than $3.7bn. And that money comes on top of EU-wide initiatives such as the Quantum Technologies Flagship, which has a €1bn budget.

— Daphné Leprince-Ringuet, French tech reporter

Balk, Netherlands-based Paques Biomaterials, which is working on biodegradable alternatives to plastic, raised €14m in funding. Invest-NL and NOM led the round.

Zurich, Switzerland-based CarbonPool, a carbon credit insurance startup, raised $12m in funding. Heartcore Capital and Vorwerk Ventures led the round and were joined by investors including HCS Capital and Revent Ventures.

Berlin-based akirolabs, an AI-powered SaaS platform for strategic procurement, raised $5m in seed funding from investors including High-Tech Gründerfonds, OTB Ventures, D11Z Ventures and Serpentine Ventures.

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