Sifted - For some founders, it's personal

Good morning there,

The tech world is obsessed with numbers: They keep investors up at night (especially if their portfolio is in the red) and they occupy founders' meetings, conversations and KPIs. But running a startup is about a lot more than figures — it's a deeply personal experience.

Today, my colleague Sadia Nowshin speaks to founders whose companies were launched after their experience with things like chronic illness, infertility and serious injury. Scroll on for that. 

Elsewhere, there's fresh funding for a Bill Gates-backed electric plane startup, a Dutch messaging app's reported (and daring) M&A plans and a look at VCs desperate to exit. 

— Anne Sraders, senior reporter

A letter from the future

This year, we’ve seen GenAI tools do all kinds of previously unimaginable things — but what will be the new normal in 2030? We asked founders, experts and investors to weigh in with their predictions, from the new meaning of hybrid to a potential three-day work week. 

For some founders, it's personal

A bunch of startups in Europe have been launched by alumni from the region’s startup factories, some have been spun out of academic research — while others have emerged after a life-changing event inspired a pivot into founder life.

This week, I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs whose deeply personal experiences with things like infertility, chronic disease and serious injury led to them founding a company. 

One of them, Craig Coulton, was diagnosed with a rare illness called Legg-Calve-Perthes disease when he was a child. It left him physically disabled: “It’s a chronic pain that will follow me through my entire life,” he tells Sifted. “I understand what it’s like to not know the answers: there are no treatments for rare diseases,” he says.

Coulton is the founder of patient-controlled health database GeneHub — the company allows patients to control which researchers can access their genomic data, and also allows companies developing treatments to access that data in one place. If, for example, a company was trying to develop a treatment for Legg-Calve-Perthes disease, it could ask patients on GeneHub with the disease for permission to use their data.

I also spoke to Jenny-Ann Axson Johnson, whose struggles while trying for a baby prompted her to cofound fertility support app Tilly. 

“We were on a long and bumpy fertility journey,” she says. “I didn’t feel there was anywhere I could turn to with my fears or feelings of loneliness. This was the first time that I lacked the tools on how to cope.” 

It’s common for tech founders to feel personally attached to their startup; several have joked with me that they spend more time with their business partners than they do with their spouses.

A couple of weeks ago, I even spoke to several cofounders who’ve taken that quite literally and started couples therapy together.

“In all of the daily hustle, we deprioritised the time we spent together,” Tatyana Eliseeva,  cofounder of mental health startup HealthCaters, told me. “It became clear that we needed someone to bring us back on track.”  

She and her cofounder have regular 90-minute sessions with a coach, which Eliseeva said has helped them unpack unpleasant topics that could hold their company back.  “The elephant is in the room, and we're discussing the elephant,” she said. 

Others, like Emilia Theye and Celina Messner — the cofounders of AI self-therapy startup clare&me — made therapy a “non-negotiable” from the beginning of their professional relationship. 

Going through coaching or therapy sessions together could indicate cracks are appearing in a company’s leadership team. As I was speaking with these founders, I kept thinking, ‘does going through therapy with your cofounder send the wrong message to investors?’ 

But it turns out VCs are onboard. 

“Getting a handle on things like this before complicated things happen in the company can help you better understand each other, and you can even go so far as to create structures, processes and a vocabulary to deal with things as they arise,” Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton, told me. The VC launched its own founder wellbeing programme last year. 

“We're being bold all the time, especially as founders, and there's not a lot of room for being vulnerable,” added Theye. “You have to become aware of your own vulnerability by understanding each other and seeing that we're all on a learning path — I think then you can become the kind of company that you want to lead.”

I’m curious to hear from founders: Have you been through counselling with your cofounder? Have you founded a company after a particularly tough personal experience? Why out of everything you could have built did you decide on your current startup? Drop me a note. 

— Sadia Nowshin, editorial assistant

✈️ Bill Gates-backed electric plane startup Heart Aerospace has raised a $107m Series B, bringing the total financing raised by the company to $145m. Its backers also include the European Innovation Council Fund and EQT Ventures. 

• Similarly to Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt, Heart has brought in backers that not only provide capital but also know-how and an appetite for its product, such as United Airlines, Air Canada and Mesa.
• It currently has 250 orders for its 30-seater ES-30 plane, and aims to run regional routes of 200km on electricity – the equivalent of travelling between  Amsterdam and Brussels — or 400km on hybrid by 2028. 

🛒 The grocery delivery startup Mathem has discontinued its ultrafast delivery service and closed its three dark stores in Stockholm. The Swedish company, which merged with Norwegian counterpart Oda in November of last year, said in a statement that it will focus on its core customer segment. 

• The ultrafast delivery services across Europe have seen a large drop in demand and Mathem’s closure of its speedy service was foreseen in the Sifted Podcast at the time of its merger with Oda. 

🇬🇧 UK has named the members of its AI safety advisory panel, including Britain’s chief scientific advisor Angela McLean; Juha Heikkilä, an AI adviser to the European Commission; Guillame Avrin, France’s national coordinator for AI; Antonio Krüger, CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence; and Yi Zeng, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The panel brings together experts from the 30 nations invited to the UK’s AI Safety Summit in November, as well as the EU and the UN.

• They will work together on an international scientific report on advanced AI safety — with initial findings due to be released in the spring, ahead of the second such summit taking place in South Korea. 

🇳🇱 Amsterdam-based messaging software startup Bird is reportedly trying to raise money to buy up its US-based rival Twilio, according to The Information.

• Formerly MessageBird, the Dutch company is reportedly in talks with investors to back its bid to buy up publicly-traded Twilio. Bird is backed by VCs including Accel and Spark Capital, and its last valuation, at $3.8bn (per PitchBook), is a fraction of Twilio’s $12bn+ market cap. 
• The report comes as Twilio is facing pressure from activist investors to sell itself or divest its business units. 

➡️ VCs need exits. 

👀 You need to start taking Web3 seriously

🇩🇪 In case you missed it: Is Bavaria finally becoming the ‘California of Europe’?

This week, London-based AI investment firm Air Street Capital released a five–year retrospective on its annual “State of AI Report.” One chart that jumped out — and which explains how language models (the type of AI that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT) have got to a level where they’ve reached mainstream appeal — covers how these systems are being trained on exponentially more data. 

• OpenAI’s first GPT model, released in 2018, was trained on around 110 parameters (a measure of the size of a training dataset), while GPT-3, the original model that ChatGPT was based on and was released in 2020, was trained on 175bn.
• There’s now a bit of a counter-swing in training AI models, as companies like Mistral and Meta are specialising in training smaller models that are cheaper and faster to run.

Amsterdam-based DataSnipper, an automation platform for audit and finance teams, raised $100m in Series B funding at a $1bn valuation. Index Ventures led the round. 

London-based NeoPhore, which is developing immuno-oncology therapeutics to treat cancer using small molecules, raised £9.6m in extended Series B funding from investors including CPF (managed by Sixth Element Capital), Claris Ventures, Astellas Venture Management, 3B Future Health Fund, 2investAG and NEVA SGR, the venture capital arm of Intesa Sanpaolo. 

Berlin-based Myosotis, which is developing an app focused on elders that enables care facilities, families and service providers to communicate with each other, raised €8m in Series A funding. TVM Capital Life Science led the round. 

Krakow-based edrone, a developer of marketing automation and customer relationship management systems for e-commerce, raised $5m in funding. INventures led the round.

Schlieren, Switzerland-based LimmaTech Biologics, which is developing vaccines for antimicrobial resistant pathogens, raised $3m in extended Series A funding from Tenmile. 

Berlin-based WAY, which helps small and medium sized businesses obtain smartphones and laptops for their teams, raised €1.2m in pre-seed funding. Pitchdrive led the round and was joined by investors including IBB Ventures, FvS Investments and allygatr.

London-based Sentify, which is building a platform that helps users extract real-time insights from large language models, raised $1.1m in pre-seed funding. Episode 1 led the round and was joined by investors including 500 Emerging Europe.

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

• Sign up to our specialist newsletters if you want more on fintech, climate tech, startup life and VC.
• Tune in to Sifted’s podcast, Startup Europe.
• Join Sifted’s journalists for live Sifted Talks with industry experts, diving into the biggest questions facing startup Europe.
• Access investment-grade research on the hottest sectors, rising stars and success stories from across European tech by subscribing to Sifted Pro.
• Follow us on LinkedIn and X.