AI everywhere

Good morning, welcome to Sunday CET.

Let’s get right at it.

Ecosystem pointers

The EV startups from Europe - the grid upgrades market is expected to be 41.2 billion by 2030 link

Payment orchestration platforms in Europe - the sector is set to grow to $2.5 trillion by 2027 link 

The heat pumps startups in Europe - Euro market projected to grow to €13.6 billion by 2027 link

More cheat sheets
- notable American investments in Europe in H1 2023 - link
- the most expensive series A in Europe Q1 2023 - link
- 50 SAAS deals made in Europe by the angel investors in Q1
- early stage Euro startup lists - AI, climate-tech, marketplaces

American startups taking a stab at the EU market: London, Dublin and Amsterdam have always been the most popular first landing locations for US startups,

Make no mistake though, the UK is the first choice because of the barrier language in all the other European countries. 👇

The whole report is worth having a look.

Contextual add ons:
- An interview with Marc Andreessen about AI
- Blackrock’s midyear outlook report - TL;DR: AI may be big
- Coatue view on the state of the markets 
- generative tools for sales pros

ICYMI - thoughts on Mistral's investment memo, the French counter to ChatGPT that raised 100M+ pre-product.

Euro intel This week’s intel include:
→ American AI startups with London offices
→ up and coming AI startups in Europe
→ Europeans investing in the US
→ 40 most interesting early stage Euro deals
→ … and a whole lot more. High signal, zero noise - get it too.

Briefs

EU

🇪🇺 Major tech founders, CEOs, VCs and industry giants across Europe have signed an open letter to the EU Commission, warning that Europe could miss out on the generative AI revolution if the EU passes laws stifling innovation.

Related: A Stanford study ranked 10 AI models against the EU’s draft rules on describing data sources and summarising copyrighted data, disclosure of the technology’s energy consumption and computing requirements, and reports of evaluations, testing and foreseeable risks associated with it. Each model fell short in a number of key areas, with six of 10 providers scoring less than 50 per cent.

🇪🇺 Meta plans to start letting EU users download mobile apps directly from Facebook ads thanks to the Digital Markets Act, which will force Apple and Google to allow alternative download methods. Meanwhile, Apple says it doesn’t need to make any more changes to its App Store as Spotify says Apple’s ‘supposed changes’ are ‘just for show’.

🇪🇺 Bulgaria's Ivanova named next EU research commissioner.

🇮🇹 Italy is going after Pornhub, as the porn site fails to follow basic data-collection policies under GDPR.

🇩🇪 Germany is making a lot of changes to their immigration policies in 2023 as they ran out of people to put to work - on top of that, the interest in investing in Germany is also quite low: last year €135bn of foreign direct investment flowed out of the country and only €10.5bn came in.

Related: same for Canada

🇬🇧 UK mining venture targets enough lithium to power 500,000 electric cars annually.

🇸🇪 Spotify is in talks with partners to add full-length music videos to its app, as part of growing efforts to establish video as a core part of its app.

🇸🇪 H&M's shares jumped more than 17% after its second-quarter profit beat estimates as cost-cutting measures started to bear fruit and its summer collection benefited from warmer weather in Europe.

🇮🇸 Carbfix takes the greenhouse emissions from industrial plants and dissolves them in water, which is then injected deep underground into porous rock formations such as volcanic basalt, where it mineralises, filling the voids. link

🇪🇺 The European Commission designated a total of 19 platforms with special obligations under the law as they reach at least 45 million MAUs. Following their designation, they will have to comply with a set of under the DSA aiming at protecting users online, by requiring the designated services to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools. Two of the 19 are European - Zalando and Booking. full list

🇪🇺 Sequoia has done the best job spelling it out. There are global category [VC] winners emerging with increasing frequency from Europe. American VCs can come in and win because the market has been poorly served by local venture firms, which are largely dependent on state aid. link

Elsewhere

⚔️ Microsoft sought to paint rival Sony as the main agitator behind regulatory moves to block its $75bn purchase of gaming company Activision Blizzard.

👀 Goldman in talks to transfer Apple partnership to Amex, offload Apple credit card, savings account.

🛎️ Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino’s vision for advertising on Twitter includes full-screen video ads inside a TikTok-like feed and courting more media organisations and celebrities. Tech-enabled interruption marketing.

🤘 Snapchat’s $3.99 a month subscription offering access to experimental new features has attracted more than 4 million subscribers in its first year.

👜 Google announced virtual try-on for apparel, a new feature that shows you what clothes look like on real models with different body shapes and sizes.

🤚 South African internet group Naspers and its investment arm Prosus, which owns 26 per cent of China’s Tencent, will unwind a complex set of shareholdings in each other that had threatened to impede stock buybacks funded by sales of the Chinese tech group’s shares.

💲 Tiger Global Management turned down hundreds of bids for its private assets in recent months because it felt the offers were too low.

🤔 Sequoia made a fortune investing in the U.S. and China; then it had to pick one. Scrutiny from Washington aggravated tensions within the venture-capital firm, fuelling its decision to break up.

AI stuff

• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born.

• Robots can spot buying signals in fund documents that human investors ignore.

• The ad industry is going all-in on AI - at Cannes Lions, the year’s biggest ad event, you couldn’t escape talk of ChatGPT or Midjourney, even at the yacht parties.

• Software that you can't shut down.

• Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve

• How existential risk became the biggest meme in AI.

• AI in the post-ChatGPT era - 4x4 Virtual Salon by aperture

2023 be like

Closing notes 

🤭 How America’s new favorite beer hammered the competition.

👁️‍🗨️ Real talk: everyone in Silicon Valley is on drugs. You’re not born extraordinary, but if you take enough drugs you will think you are extraordinary, and if they take enough drugs they’ll agree.

🇰🇷 South Korea, a country with the world’s lowest fertility rate, has had “no-kids zones“ and “no-middle-aged zones” remarkably popular:

One restaurant in Seoul rose to notoriety after “politely declining” people over 49 on the basis men of that age might harass female staff.

🇯🇵 The Japanese stock market history.

🇸🇪 Sweden is building the world’s largest wooden city - located in the capital city of Stockholm, the timber metropolis will offer 7,000 office spaces and 2,000 homes.

🚗 FT editor freaks out on a driverless taxi test in San Francisco.

🇮🇹 Italian teacher sacked for 20 years of absence vows to defend herself.

🥷 I train every day not to improve my best, but to make sure my average game is better than most players. link

🍺 Just when you think it cannot get more ridiculous than this - Italy’s ministry of culture reached out to Twitter and Tesla head Elon Musk and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg to coordinate a fight at the historic Colosseum in Rome. Them boys are just petty.

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