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Hi Reader,

Do you want to increase your life expectancy? Well, that’s exactly what a growing number of European startups are trying to achieve — and VCs are increasingly taking notice. 

Yesterday Korify Capital announced a $100m longevity fund to pump into companies tackling ageing. It joins a number of similar funds in Europe as investors bet on a future where humans live a whole lot longer. Plus…

• The inaugural Sifted Founders Rich List
• Europe's top deeptech VCs
• Why founders need to start calling out VC gatekeeping

Unicorns have been springing up all over the shop in European tech this year. With them emerge a very wealthy group of founders — assuming they've managed to hang onto their stakes.

Isabel Woodford dug into the data to find out who Europe's richest founders are.

Here's the Sifted Rich List.

Gong analysed hundreds of thousands of sales emails to uncover the copy secrets top sellers use. They distilled this data into seven laws of highly effective sales emails.

Find out what they are — and how you can use them — here.

Deeptech is booming in Europe right now. In the first nine months of 2021, the sector raised $20bn. That's more than double what it managed in the whole of 2020, and there are no signs of investor interest waning.

But which VCs have racked up the most deeptech rounds this year? 

Connor Bilboe finds out who's been busy.

If you're not yet a Sifted member, subscribe here for as little as £19 per month.

We're on the cusp of a 5G revolution. By 2025 20% of all comms will run through the network and by 2030 it will power more than 5bn devices.

Sweden has a long track record for all things internet and connectivity and Umeå in northern Sweden was chosen as the city to test the 5G network in 2018. Fast forward three years and the county's startups are leading the way with its rollout.

Here are the 5G startups you should keep an eye on.

Arbitrary rules are being used by VCs to exclude great startups from backing — but it will only come back to bite them, says Alfred Malmros, cofounder of advice platform Anyone.

There are certain unspoken rules startup founders have to follow when pitching, he writes, despite the tech sector's idolising of rule-breakers.

Here's why VCs need think again or risk missing out.

Yesterday, Korify Capital launched a $100m fund focused on startups tackling the ageing process. It joins several others in the field — among them Apollo Health Ventures, which closed a $180m fund in November — as investors increasingly bet big on longevity.

Mimi Billing found out what kind of startups these VCs are looking to back, and how they're going about curing old age.

Here's how the longevity sector is shaping up.

🛴 Micromobility startup Voi bags $115m. The Series D round was led by the Raine Group and VNV Global and is the second raise for the Swedish startup in just four months. It's the latest in a number of significant raises for micromobility startups around Europe, as scooters and ebikes become an increasingly important part of urban transport. 

🐼 Asian food delivery platform snaps up $130m. London-based HungryPanda has just announced its Series D — the company's third raise since March 2020 — in a round led by equity and growth capital investor Perwyn. The cash will be used grow HungryPanda's market share in the Asian food delivery space.

🛍️ Forget speedy grocery delivery. British startup Bother has just raised a $6m seed round led by Hoxton Ventures, as it looks to disrupt the grocery delivery sector with — wait for it — slow delivery. Bother offers next-day delivery (which isn't even that slow anyway) on things like laundry detergent, toilet paper and other non-perishables.

💸 10 things we learnt from Pro briefings. We launched our market insights platform Pro membership in 2021 — and have since published 16 in-depth (but easily digestible) sector briefings on topics from online grocery to biotech. Not yet a Pro member and need a little persuading? Here are the best bits. 

👋 Goodbye big tech. Hello, crypto startups! Tech execs and engineers are increasingly ditching major companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple for crypto, reports The New York Times, as cryptocurrency valuations soar and web3 starts to roll out. Could a new generation of billionaires be in the making? 

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