AI 

When Anne met Tom

Ever wondered what Starling founder Boden and Monzo founder Blomfield would say to each other if they met now? 

Or what SoftBank's Masayoshi Son would say to WeWork's Adam Neumann? Or Google's Sundar Pichai to the EU's Margrethe Vestager?

We asked GPT-3, OpenAI's powerful new language generator, to imagine a conversation between 10 startup and tech luminaries.

This is what it came up with.

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 Investment 

These footballers are investing in startups

The average annual salary of a Premier League footballer is around £3m, with top-flight players like Lionel Messi earning nearly £100m in 2020.

But which players are ploughing that money back into startup investing? Turns out, there are a lot more than you might think.

Who are they?

 Startup Life 

How to build a top tech team — tips from the people who've done it

All of Europe's most successful scaleups were once tiny startups without much to show for themselves.

So how did they attract great tech talent? And what did they learn about holding onto and developing that talent over time as the business grew?

We asked leaders from Alan, Voi, Checkout.com and more to share their learnings.

Unsurprisingly, they came up with some pretty good tips.

👌 Startups staying positive 👌

Sifted partnered with Google for Startups to pen a chapter in their annual Yearbook all about adapting to the unexpected.

Read six stories from startup founders on how they adapted their businesses in response to the global pandemic… and what the outcomes were.

 Healthtech 

New symptom tracker comparison puts Ada ahead of competitors

Digital symptom trackers have been under a lot of scrutiny the last few years — criticised for not being accurate enough and for claiming to be more effective than they are.

But according to a new study, there is one which is better than the rest: Ada Health.

Why? And who came out the worst?

News that matters

🎈 French fintech Lydia has secured an additional $86m as part of its Series B, taking the total fundraise to $131m and making it the largest fintech round in the country’s history. Yes, that's the largest in French history. Launched in 2013, Lydia is now a household name in France, with 30% of all under-30s signed up, according to the company. Read more about it here. 

💳 British payments company GoCardless has secured $95m in new funding, bringing the company to near unicorn status with a $970m valuation. The latest funding will be used to expand the platform, which allows customers to set up direct debits to businesses using their bank account details rather than through credit cards or bank transfers. To find out more about the company's much-admired CEO Hiroki Takeuchi, read our profile here.

🏫 Brainly, the Polish homework help platform, has raised an $80m Series D funding round to capitalise on the home-learning trend that has seen its user numbers increase by 75% since April. “Over the past six months, we have achieved growth milestones that we had projected to hit over the next few years,” said Michał Borkowski, the company’s CEO and cofounder.

✈️ Cargo.one, the digital booking platform for air cargo, has raised $42m amid a surge in demand from ecommerce — and a pressing need for temperature-controlled cargo to deliver coronavirus vaccines. Cargo.one’s latest round, at Series B, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included participation from Index Ventures, amongst others. The round comes just six months after cargo.one’s Series A, which closed at $18m.

🚗 Cazoo, an insanely well-financed and fast-growing online used car retailer, announced that it will acquire Drover, a UK car subscription platform, for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2016, Drover has a team of over 100 across London, Lisbon, Paris and Bucharest — and raised £22.8m in July this year. Freya Pratty and Amy Lewin look into what the acquisition means for Cazoo, Drover and Drover's investors here.

🧀 Better Dairy, a UK startup developing animal-free dairy products that was founded out of Entrepreneur First (EF), has picked up £1.6m in seed funding. The London-based company is currently in the R&D stages of developing products that are “molecularly identical” to traditional dairy without using animals as part of the production process.

👩‍⚕️ Babylon Health, the digital health giant, has raised another $100m (primarily via convertibles) led by VNV Global. This comes a year after it closed a $550m round of funding which valued the company at around $2bn and comes amid a spike of interest in telehealth startups during the coronavirus pandemic. 

💰 The latest data is out from the UK government's Future Fund, set up to support startups during the pandemic. The body has now approved £975.5m worth of convertible loan notes to 971 startups affected by Covid-19. The sum was originally going to be £250m!

💸 ABN Amro is increasing the size of its venture fund from €100m to €150m to give it more firepower to add to its fintech portfolio. This is the third time that the Dutch bank has increased the size of the fund since it was set up in 2015, and a clear sign that it is accelerating the pace of digital transformation.

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🇪🇺 How has the European investment landscape changed in 2020? We tell you here.