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Hi Sifted Reader,

Yesterday was not a normal day at Sifted HQ. We played a giant fund manager simulation — a very complicated kind of VC Monopoly — and, I'm pleased to say, one of our teams clocked up 53x returns on a first time fund. If you have real returns like that, we want to hear from you... 

On the menu today:

• How Russian founders have been impacted by the war on Ukraine
• Women in the C-suite at the top European neobanks
• Sequoia's new accelerator programme

— Alex, writer & Amy, editor

Russian founders and startups are struggling to pay employees, finding themselves locked out of key software and considering leaving the country as a result of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. 

Tim Smith finds out how they're doing.

Join Activate's acceleration programme which will help you pull together a compelling pitch deck, engage investors with confidence — and raise money. Sifted readers can join at a discount using the code SIFTED0422.

Learn more here.

Banking has never been an industry at the forefront of gender equality, but the new breed of neobanks promised that they would breathe new life into the stuffy sector.

So how are they getting on? Sifted crunched the numbers on how many women sit on the C-suites and boards of Europe's top challengers. The results are not pretty.

Amy O'Brien and Steph Bailey break it down.

American universities are at the heart of some of the tech world's biggest successes — think Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard — and many founders celebrate their links to them for their whole lives.

In Europe, though... it's a very different story. When he got to Oxford, Jack Chong found that almost no one knew who its successful founders were.

So he put together a plan to fix it — read it here.

Splashing the cash can be tempting — but when building a brand, there’s safety in security. A well-planned marketing strategy could be the secret to your startup’s success.

Join us today!

🌲 Sequoia grows even taller in Europe. The US VC giant is launching an accelerator programme on the continent this year, with 15 seed-stage companies getting $1m and an eight-week training course. It's planning to do the same in the US later this year. The race to catch promising startups earlier than ever shows no signs of cooling down.

🛍️ Blidz gets €6m to import social shopping from China. The Finnish startup bagged money from General Catalyst to try and mimic Pinduoduo, the giant Chinese app that gamifies shopping by cutting prices if users share their purchases on social media. It's got 2m items on its marketplace for now — and plenty more to come.

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