Sifted - Scaling founder mode

Good morning there,

London HQ’d Atomico has raised $1.24bn in new funding split across two funds to invest in European startups. It follows hot on the heels of the $1.3bn raised by fellow London-based Balderton last month. Elsewhere, Swedish battery giant Northvolt has announced plans to cut jobs and sell some of its businesses. More details on both those stories below. 

Also today:

• ETH Zurich and Max Planck researchers announce robotics breakthrough using artificial muscles
• How to remain in Founder Mode as your company scales

— Tom Nugent, newsletter editor

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🇸🇪 Northvolt, the Swedish battery giant, has announced plans to cut jobs and sell some of its businesses. The company said it’ll pause its cathode production, selling a site in Sweden dedicated to it, and will also sell off its energy storage systems factory in Gdansk, Poland.

• Northvolt announced a strategic review in July after a series of setbacks, including a cancelled order from car manufacturer BMW, one of its shareholders, because of production delays. 
• Northvolt said yesterday that it’ll re-focus efforts on its original gigafactory, Northvolt Ett, in the north of Sweden, to “maintain its position as a leading cell manufacturer in the Western world”. 

🇬🇧 Atomico, the European VC founded in 2006 by Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström, has raised $1.24bn across two new funds to back startups in Europe.

• The capital is divided between a $485m early-stage fund that’ll focus on Series A, and a $754m growth fund targeting Series B to pre-IPO. 
• The two funds combined represent Atomico’s biggest fundraise to date. It’s also the first time the VC has formally dedicated separate teams to both early-stage and growth. 
• It falls just short of being the biggest VC fund focused solely on Europe; fellow London-based firm Balderton raised $1.3bn across two new funds last month. 

🇪🇺 Mario Draghi has called on the EU to increase investments by €800bn a year as part of a “new industrial strategy for Europe” to stop the bloc falling behind the US and China. The demands are part of the former prime minister of Italy's report on the future competitiveness of the EU, which was commissioned by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

• Recommendations include changing competition rules which could see some tech and defence deals get EU approval more easily; the integration of capital markets; and more joint procurement in defence. 

🦿 Researchers at ETH Zurich and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems say they’ve made a breakthrough in robotics by building a robotic leg powered by artificial muscles rather than the legacy way of using electronic motors.

• The research — authored by doctoral students Thomas Buchner and Toshihiko Fukushima and set to be published in scientific journal Nature Communications — could offer a more energy-efficient way of building humanoid robots.

We’ll do it live: Sifted Talks in-person at Riverstone Heights

After four years of storming the virtual stage, we’re preparing for the very first in-person Sifted Talks. Taking place at Riverstone Heights, Bromley-by-Bow, our panel of startup leaders will be talking about all things “work/life balance” on September 12.

💬 How to remain in Founder Mode as your company scales. Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham’s latest blog post, introducing the concept of ‘founder mode’ and ‘manager mode’, has set Silicon Valley alight. Do you need to switch to ‘manager mode’ to successfully scale a startup? Or can you make ‘founder mode’ work with hundreds, or thousands, of employees? Sifted columnist (and Olio cofounder) Tessa Clarke thinks there’s a way to do the latter. Here’s how.

Tessa will be speaking at the Sifted Summit on October 2.

📊 A new report by HSBC Innovation Banking and Dealroom on the Nordic tech ecosystem has found that energy is the region’s most funded sector so far in 2024 — helped by companies like H2 Green Steel and Heart Aerospace raising megarounds this year. Also in the report:

• Nordic startups have raised $3.8bn in VC investment in 2024 to date — down from 2021 but a figure set to surpass pre-pandemic levels.
• Nordic VCs have raised $1.6bn in new funds so far in 2024, and more than $10bn in the last five years. However, two-thirds of Nordic venture capital comes from non-Nordic investors.
• The Nordics have produced a total of 82 unicorns, with recent additions including Icelandic healthtech Kerecis and Swedish techbio Bonesupport. 
• Healthtech and fintech lead the way as the top industries for unicorn creation.

Manchester, UK-based MirrorWeb, a software startup which can monitor and archive company communications, raised $63m in funding from US-based growth equity firm Mainsail Partners, which focuses on funding bootstrapped software companies.

Stockholm-based Baseload Capital, a company developing geothermal energy, raised €53m in Series B funding. Infrastructure fund ENGF led the round and was joined by investors including US oil field services company Baker Hughes, Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Swedish family office Gullspång Invest. 

• Sifted spoke to Climeon — Baseload Capital’s parent company — way back in 2019, about how it got Breakthrough Energy Ventures on board as an investor.
• Baseload Capital is 1 of 10 companies that Breakthrough Energy Ventures has invested in in Europe. 

London-based the Bank of London, a clearing bank, raised £42m in funding. Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners led the round. 

• It’s been an eventful few days for the bank. On Thursday last week, it received a winding-up petition from UK tax authorities over unpaid debts. 
• The new investment is unrelated to the winding-up petition, a spokesperson for the bank said; the funding round was closed last month. 
• The Bank of London’s board of directors and new management team were unaware of its unpaid debts until last Thursday, three people familiar with the situation told the FT. 
• Earlier this month, the Bank of London announced that its founder Anthony Watson would step down as CEO. He’s been replaced by Stephen Bell, the bank’s former head of risk and compliance. 

Bournemouth, UK-based Twenty7tec, which streamlines the process of searching for, applying for and receiving a mortgage, raised £16.5m from the Business Growth Fund.

Stockholm-based Blykalla, which develops small modular reactors (SMRs), raised a €7m extension to its Series A, taking the total to €14m. Danish investment firm 92 Ventures and Swiss investment group Armada led the round.

• The startup is working on a similar technology to Europe's best-funded European nuclear startup Newcleo, which raised €87m in May. 

Cambridge, UK-based CardiaTec, a techbio startup using computational methods to decode the biology behind cardiovascular disease, raised €6.5m in seed funding. Palo Alto-based Montage Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Continuum Health Ventures, Laidlaw Ventures and APEX Ventures. CardiaTec was spun out of the University of Cambridge in 2021. 

Paris-based Korint, an insurtech startup founded in 2022, raised €5m in seed funding. Paris-based early-stage VC Ventech led the round and was joined by existing investor 360 Capital.

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