View this email in your browser

Hi Reader,

All eyes have been on the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes this week, after she was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the company's investors. So what's it like for other blood testing startups in a post-Theranos world?

We take a look in today's newsletter, plus...

• The state of European unicorns
• Europe's fastest growing climate tech companies
• Quantum computing is hotting up

Unicorns aren’t the rare beast they once were in European tech — despite the long odds that companies shooting for that billion-dollar valuation still face.

Europe is now home to over 120 unicorns — with the latest, PayFit, announcing its new valuation yesterday.

Who are they, where are they, who backed them — and what's heading their way in 2022?

Buy now, pay later has tapped into changing consumer behaviour, but now the market is full of providers joining the party, how can merchants expand in the future?

Join our next Sifted Talks to find out.

European climate tech is taking off. Last year, investors poured $10bn into startups trying to tackle the climate crisis, up from $5.4bn the year before.

There’s a huge breadth of startups working in the area, from agritechs changing the way we eat to a fleet of electrical vehicle startups changing the way we move around.

But which startups are growing fastest? 

Madrid and Barcelona are most often associated with Spain’s startup scene. But the region of Valencia is quickly becoming a hotspot.

Valencia's home to around 900 startups, which is estimated to grow by 100 every year, making it the region with the most startups per capita in Spain.

Here's our founders guide to the region.

US blood testing startup Theranos saw a meteoric rise — and fall. The company, once valued at $9bn, shut down in 2018 and this week founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of investor fraud.

So how has the hugely publicised scandal impacted European blood testing startups, and what does the future hold for the sector? 

We spoke to blood testing founders about raising cash post-Theranos.

Not yet a subscriber?

The quantum computing race is hotting up. Big enterprises are upping their spend on emerging quantum computing tech, as the battle to secure talent and IP intensifies.

Now nearly a fifth of large companies are investing more than $1m on quantum computing as they race to take a lead in the emerging technology.

Maija Palmer runs through the data on the industry.

🖊️ Miro, the online collaborative whiteboard platform, has raised €353m in new funding from ICONIQ and Accel, giving the company a €15.4bn valuation. The startup says it's now used by 99% of the Fortune 100.

🩺 Northern Irish startup MedAll has raised a £2.5m seed round for its platform offering healthcare organisations virtual and hybrid training courses. You can hear from MedAll's founder, Phil McElnay, on this Sifted Talks we ran last year.

🏥 Babylon Health has completed its acquisition of Higi, which makes health-checking kiosks for supermarkets and pharmacies. Babylon became a strategic investor in Higi in 2020, and has just bought the remaining equity for $4.9m.

🍕 SoftBank has backed British meal-kit delivery startup Gousto, buying a $100m stake in the business. Gousto’s last raise was a Series F round in late 2020.

😑London's iProov, which provides face authentication and verification technology, has raised a $70m round. Its tech is used by Homeland Security in the US and the UK's NHS.

📱 New fintech unicorns have only 1.5m app downloads on average, a new study by App Radar has found. That's far lower than in the past — Revolut had 5m when it became a unicorn in 2018. So what's changed?

🤔 The 2022 challenges ahead for startup operators. Beyond the obvious — finding great talent — what have leading startup operators got on their minds for the year ahead? We asked a bunch of them to find out. 

💄Running a DTC business? A world free of middlemen can bring its own challenges. Here are the growing pains you need to plan for.

💰More and more VCs are using data analysis to find new companies to invest in. Casey Rovinelli from OMERS Ventures has written this guide on how to get on a VC's radar when that's their technique.

Copyright © 2021 SIFTED (EU) LTD, All rights reserved.

Want to tailor what you receive from us?
You can update your preferences to manage your newsletter subscriptions,
or you can unsubscribe from Sifted if you never want to hear from us again.