Hello,

Welcome to Sunday CET - a lighter one this week, as most folks in Europe are away enjoying sun and R&R, myself included.

Dragos

Signals

Interesting deals

🇩🇰 Pentimenti (AI for tender management) - 1M
🇩🇪 ​Grouphug (AI for Whatsapp memes) - 1.6M
🇨🇭 DePoly (plastic recycling alternative) - 23M

Trends

• Number crunching 
  Vinted - €813.4 in 2024 (+36% yoy)
  Doctolib - €348M in 2024 (+22.5% yoy),
  Swile - €204M in 2024 (+25% yoy)

• More juice Spotify added 5 million paid subscribers in the first three months of the year - revenue reached €4.2 billion and it has now 678 million MAUs, up 10% yoy, out of which 268 million are paid.

• Mega funds popping out of Europe Germany is putting €100B for growth deals, but is that enough?

• Nordic crypto The number of Nordic crypto owners is estimated to 2.18 million, Norway has the highest crypto ownership rate on the region, and Sweden has the most crypto owners - report.

• Is Europe a victim or just incompetent? Europe is entirely colonized by America and is now at crossfire with China, another colonizer looking to seize power from the USA - and both consider that Europe belongs to them ← that’s according to the French CEO running BPIFrance. Whiners are winners, they say.

• Counter The idea of trying to preserve or retake European tech sovereignty goes counter to the imperative for startups to aim for huge scale to win.

• What could be behind the Iberian power outage? They’re yet to figure it out - one theory says though that fifteen gigawatts were suddenly disconnected from the energy system because of an increase in the grid frequency resulting from too much energy generation from renewables. When generation exceeds consumption the frequency rises and in this case it exceeded the safety margin.

👇 You may also be interested in:

• the new European startups freshly incubated by YC these days - fifteen of them.

• three Euro deals (one of them quite pricey) announced just this week and re-inventing a super traditional vertical that’s estimated at 7B.

• some bold VC bets are being cashed out - 👀 did anybody say liquidity? 👀

• PE is the new VC - two new examples.

That’s from our European market coverage from tomorrow - sign up to get it in the inbox, it’s a must-read.

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Other notes

👉 What do tier 1 VCs in Europe have in common? They spend time every week reading our intel covering European startups and VC business - who invested in what, why, how much, inside stuff etc. Zero noise and essential if you’re a pro in this space, subscribe from here.

💲 Important read for founders looking to get financed by VCs ← what participating actually means and how you can get screwed.

• btw, VC sell money and network access - but what if you could buy your way in to quickly plug a VC network-like yourself?

• bonus link - reasons why you can’t score VC meetings.

💪 One of this week’s highlights was Apple being banned from collecting fees on purchases made outside apps and from restricting how developers can point users to where they can make purchases outside of apps - in US, that is.

• reminder: in Europe Apple was already forced to allow alternative app stores and allow users to install apps from other app stores besides its own App Store, and to allow developers to use alternative payment methods in their apps.

⚜️ Berkshire Hathaway had its annual meeting where Warren Buffet, who’s 94, announced he would step down at the end of the year. Legend - 5,502,284% for Berkshire vs 39,054% in the S&P 500.

💲 Mozilla earned $570 million in revenue last year, 85% of which came from Google.

🤖 Marc Andreessen says that VC might be one of the last remaining vocations after AI has replaced large swaths of the human labor force - whole pod makes for a good checking in with how a16z sees the world, now that they just bought a media VC the other week (20vc was unavailable).

• bonus pod for VC aficionados - Josh Kopelman.

🙉 Europe’s top court found that Malta's so-called golden passport scheme is contrary to European law.

• the scheme lets people become citizens through financial investment - in return for paying at least €600,000, buying or renting property of a certain value, and donating to charity.

• the scheme had generated more than €1.4 billion for Malta since 2015.

• fwiw, the new American administration pushed a similar program called the Trump card priced at $5 million a piece - i.e. a gold card visa that would grant residency and possible citizenship rights to individuals who pay $5 million.

👀 The CIA has released two new videos aimed at luring Chinese officials to spy for the United States.

🤡 Elon Musk is trying to turn a small South Texas town, which is home to his rocket company SpaceX, into his company municipality known as Starbase.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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Created every Sunday by @drnovac of Nordic 9 with weekly notes and observations from the European startup ecosystem.

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