Sifted - Crème de la LLM

Good morning there,

The UK is dusting itself off today after a gangbusters week of networking. It has featured Founders Forum, London Tech Week and — to round things off on Friday — the Research and Applied AI Summit, organised by AI investment firm Air Street Capital.

Sifted cofounder (and fellow AI geek) John Thornhill and I tag-teamed the event to allow for some busy diaries. In today’s newsletter we’re bringing you some choice wisdom from Wayve, InstaDeep and Air Street’s own Nathan Benaich.

The TLDR? Language models are finding their way into everything.

Elsewhere today:

— Tim Smith, news editor

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Crème de la LLM

London Tech Week ended in style on Friday, at an unofficial side event hosted by AI investor Nathan Benaich’s VC firm Air Street Capital.

The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS), now in its eighth edition, hosted founders and execs from some of the UK’s leading AI scaleups like self-driving car company Wayve, B2B video creation tool Synthesia and enterprise AI platform InstaDeep, which was acquired by BioNTech in 2023 for €500m.

Benaich told Sifted that, over 10 years of running the event, the scope of problems being solved with AI has widened dramatically.

“You have biotech, defence, enterprise automation, image, video — all the modalities,” he said. “The diversity of types of problems people are working on is way bigger.”

And, in a week where European tech was set abuzz by Paris-based GenAI startup Mistral raising €600m at a €5.8bn valuation, one big theme was the rollout of large language model (LLM) technology across other, more established forms of machine learning applications.

“What I think is pretty cool is all these companies that have worked on more ‘traditional’ machine learning systems are seeing very interesting ways to add LLMs to their stack,” said Benaich.

“Whether that's Wayve with interpreting driving scenes, or Synthesia with better adaptability of its [video] avatars… It’s juicing existing systems and making them more usable.”

InstaDeep cofounder and CEO Karim Begur described how his company had been applying open-source LLMs, such as Meta's Llama, to masses of biological data to create a ChatNT (nucleotide transformer) that could open up new avenues of research over the next 3-5 years.

"I believe we will see revolutionary results in the future," he said. "It's a very exciting time for AI in biology."

Wayve —which began life as a company largely focused on vision models — last year released a model called LINGO-1, which combines vision and language AI technology to deliver enhanced learning abilities.

“Over the last five years, it's been all about language,” said cofounder and CEO Alex Kendall.

Another message that rang through loud and clear was the need for patience when building impactful AI companies.

“Now everybody's starting companies kind of hoping or expecting instant success,” said Benaich. “Many of the stories here, whether it's Wayve, or Synthesia, or the AlphaGo story — they took ages. The sort of meta-message is: be patient and persistent.”

— John Thornhill, editorial director & Tim Smith, news editor

💰 Paris-based AI visuals generation startup Omi has raised €13m to develop its product and go-to-market strategy, as interest in generative AI tools for business continues to boom.

The round was led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Founders Future and other angel investors, including Paul Robson, former international president at Adobe.
Omi has built a product that helps companies and brands create 3D visual assets using a mix of third-party GenAI models and its proprietary technology.

🙌 UK residential energy services company Hometree has raised £250m of debt financing from Barclays to help homeowners finance the installation of solar panels, battery storage systems and heat pumps through its lease and loan products.

🇸🇪 The understated Swedish fintech unicorn that’s Klarna’s quieter cousin.

👀 13 startups from London to watch, according to VCs from Seedcamp, Episode 1, Northzone, Creandum and Atomico.

👩‍🌾 Early-stage agritech and foodtech market map: 95 startups to watch. (Sifted Pro subscribers)

💪 Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed Ventures shifts focus to secondary markets. (Financial Times)

📣 Readers, we want to hear from you. What’s the best thing on European tech you’ve read recently? Drop us a line.

European foodtechs raised more VC capital than US and Asian startups in the sector in 2023, according to a new report by FoodLabs and data platform Dealroom. Last year foodtech startups based in Europe received 58% of the VC funding invested in the sector across Europe, North America and Asia. In 2022, the US led with 57%.

So far in 2024, Europe’s share has dipped to 44% — the US has taken 43%. Overall funding into European foodtech this year has taken a hit without the big funding rounds raised by speedy grocery and vertical farming startups propping up the total, according to Sifted's latest briefing on the sector; $598m has been raised in the first half of this year, which is 21% of the total across the whole of 2023.

The Greek startup ecosystem in 2024

Two years after our first report, we’re back with another deep dive into the Greek tech ecosystem. Since the downturn, Greece’s young companies have remained resilient, bringing more investor attention and inspiration for future founders. Read on for the success stories and predictions for the startup ecosystem.

Download it here

June 17-20 | Amsterdam. Reporter Kai Nicol-Schwarz is going to be at HLTH Europe this week. If you'll be joining him, reach out.

June 25 | Online. Join us for a showcase of the ultimate list of B2B SaaS startups featured on Sifted's upcoming Rising 100 report, sponsored by Sapphire Ventures, at our next Conference Call — exclusively for Pro subscribers. RSVP.

July 3 | Online. News editor Tim Smith will be moderating an upcoming Sifted Talks with industry experts to find out budding CTOs can effectively harness the power of AI and machine learning for better business results. RSVP.

Dublin-based CleverCards, a digital payments platform that specialises in business expense management, raised €8m in funding. Pluxee led the round.

London-based Rendesco, which instals heat pumps, raised £6m in funding. Clean Growth Fund, Eurazeo and Aviva Ventures led the round.

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

For more deals, analysis and M&A insight, become a Pro subscriber to receive our weekly Deals newsletter.

From our friends at Tortoise Media

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Sifted - Crème de la LLM

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