Hey there,

Welcome to Sunday CET - let’s get right at it.

Dragos

Signals

Market talk

In Europe there’s very little talk about Stripe, the lil’ Irish company that’s been valued at more than 90B earlier this winter and which this week had a bunch of interesting product announcements, which provide incredible growth avenues.

I am guessing this is because Stripe had zero VC backing from European investors, in spite of being Irish - went to YC in summer of 2010, raised seed the following winter with Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and a bunch of angels such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and series A with Sequoia in the lead again just a mere couple of months afterwards.

It’s also true that the Collison brothers (the founders) spent the early part of building the company in the US - and Europe had little to do with those formative years, for both getting the right PMF as well as for laying out the foundation for what today is one of the most interesting companies in the world tackling the financial service business.

They keep a dual HQ now - Dublin/San Francisco. In a nutshell, Stripe is a software-first company selling modern financial products, which is a competitive advantage vs any big traditional incumbent. And that’s evident from the specifics announced this week - the roadmap makes clear that its strategy is to turn payments and financial infrastructure into an AI‑powered, programmable platform that scales with its network of millions of businesses.

At a high level, Stripe is building some sort of a financial operating system powered at core by AI and internet native finance i.e. stablecoins across its four core pillars - Payments, Connect, Revenue, and Money Management - to boost conversion, reduce costs, and open new markets by automating everything from checkout personalization to cross‑border payouts. And this push turns a commodity (payments) into a strategic moat - driving higher take‑rates, deeper customer lock‑in, and new revenue streams - all this while AI has the potential to provide significant upside on every little part of the value chain creation.

Not least, important to note that execution while challenging to the bones a hundred years old financial system is not exactly trivial. Regulation is a pain in the ass, both for money transfer services and for crypto - btw, EU is still rather opaque at best when it comes to crypto, as opposed to the current American administration which seems to be favourable to create a better business environment. Otoh, competition is fierce as well, traditional banks, or the likes of PayPal or Adyen, as well as new gen emerging fintechs are all racing to embed financial services, putting constant pressure on pricing, margins, and new tech development. Finally, everything requires a high level of complexity - stitching together dozens of global payment methods, local rails, and fast‑evolving AI models at scale creates immense engineering and operational challenges i.e. any outage or security lapse risks undermining the very trust Stripe seeks to build.

Alas those problems are opportunities in disguise which Stripe has turned into moats - they have built a solid brand, the tech-first approach lets them charge lower fees while maintaining margins, strategy-wise they augment moats with network effects and they move super fast. Stripe is basically a fully-fledged bank without a banking license (yet), and a textbook example of a solid business sitting on a foundation of reinforcing competitive advantages. Especially traditional banks struggle to match that experience, making customer acquisition more challenging at the end of the day - and the very reasons for which I am super bullish on Stripe, which is probably one of the more valuable European financial institutions of the 21st century.

Interesting deals

🇸🇪 Aris Machina (AI-enhanced SAAS for industrial manufacturers) - seed
🇨🇭 Scalera (AI for construction procurement) - seed
🇬🇧 Wonderskin (D2C beauty) - series A
🇬🇧 ​Recraft (gen AI design tool) - series B
🇪🇸 Luzia (GPT AI in WhatsApp) - series B extension

PS. I am thinking of doing a Sunday CET lite version, with a daily selection of Euro deals, five days a week. Aye or nay, what say you?

Signals

• Liquidity Uber paid $700 million for a 85% stake in Turkey’s Trendyol for launching Uber Eats in the country. Softbank and General Atlantic took a big haircut here - they’d bought 1.5B at 16.5B back in 2021. Btw, Trendyol has done some $2B GMV in 2024.
  + DoorDash closed the Deliveroo deal at £2.9 billion.

• French wood on the fire Mistral is getting step by step into the big boys game - better late than never, right? - and now launched Le Chat Enterprise. The French problem is GTM not product, as they need to make some serious dinero on top of 30M-ish ARR, which is a margin error for the aforementioned big boys.

• The Brits are at it again OnlyFans father and son founders Guy and Tim Stokely launched a rival subscription platform called Subs - they started the platform Onlyfans in 2016 and sold it in 2018 to Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky. Stokely, who formerly served as OnlyFans' CEO, stepped down in 2021.

• Pin Greece on the map While the startup dealflow in the country is not something to write home about, the risk capital in Greece is seemingly not a problem, neither is the political support - keep an eye on defence, Greece is a NATO hub in Southern Europe and there’s massive related infra investments in the whole region. Besides, fwiw, the country rebounded after the 2008 financial crisis and people are super nice.

• More earned media for Klarna Gotta give it to Klarna how they come up with stories to feed the media for clicks - now that they officially pushed the IPO date, they switched the narrative from the ‘what you can do with AI’ discoveries (which the Linkedin crowd digs) to replacing AI customer service with an Uber-type setup in remote places.

• Competing for talent While the EU allocated a €500m funding package to attract foreign researchers to the EU because Trump, a VC raised a $100m fund to support American scientists facing funding cuts - the ones that don’t get lured by Euro lower salaries and heavy bureaucracy that is.

• Europe’s tech is a relic museum Skype shuts down after 23 years.

• Black money Spain will introduce a €150K penalty for failing to report cash withdrawals of over €3,000 with 24h notice - kind of drastic, they likely do it for better tracking of the cash transactions done for avoiding tax payments. The Spanish black market is roughly 20% of GDP, meaning some €320 billion a year coming mainly from tax and labor‑law evasion in construction, real estate, and professional services. Here’s a interesting stat: in 2024, 34% of property purchases in Spain were made entirely in cash, bypassing traditional financing channels - in a €100M+ real estate market, this translates into a whopping €34 billion cash transactions, 20% of which is bypassing the systems.

👇 You may also be interested in:

• dealflow’s been on the roll this week, which is refreshing in a sea of local startups struggling or closing down - but is this effervescent trend to stay?

• a few billion dollar valuations announcements + the most important growth transactions and late stage dealers in Europe this year

• American investors keep coming to Europe (but open offices in London).

All this and much more - in the best coverage of the startup market in Europe you will find. Sign up to get it in the inbox, it’s a must-read.

Presented by

Come for the news, stay for the laughs

Morning Brew isn’t just any newsletter—it’s your free shortcut to business news that actually matters. Fast, fun, and—dare we say—enjoyable.

No fluff, no jargon, and it takes less time to read than it does to brew your coffee (unless you’ve got a Keurig—then you might get to enjoy your Morning Brew with your actual brew).

Join over 4 million professionals who read it daily. Delivered bright and early, it’s news on your time—whether you read it when you wake up, over lunch, or before bed.

Try Morning Brew for free

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.

🇫🇷 OpenAI poached Instacart’s CEO to be the company’s head of applications - notable not only because she is French but also because her experience involves setting up ad systems at scale previously for eBay and Facebook, which can only mean ads are coming to the OpenAI. Btw, Fidji is not the only French working for OpenAI, there’s many more - we’ve gotten a few names on our directory.

🙈 Whoop launched a new line of hardware and services and, with it, changed their commercial policy saying that subscribers would receive new hardware for free after being members for 6 months - when new models launched this week, users were told they’d have to pay. They’re upset.

🚗 Uber partners with China's Pony AI to deploy self-driving taxis in key Middle East market.

🙉 Insight Partners was stolen personal data about its current and former employees, and information relating to its LPs, about certain funds, management companies, and portfolio companies, including banking and tax information.

₿ You know what’s hot these days? Crypto:

• Stripe launched stablecoins in 100+ countries.

• Ramp launched stablecoin cards.

• Superstate launched onchain equities.

• Robinhood is building their own crypto platform, brings it to Europe.

• Coinbase pays $2.9B for Deribit, in biggest deal in crypto history.

• Meta wants to introduce stablecoins as a means to manage payouts.

• Bitcoin jumped above $100,000 for the first time since February.

🤑 Netflix is turning into TikTok.

💪 Albanian government invests $10 million in Mira Murati's new startup, Thinking Machines, at a valuation close to $10 billion. The Albanian GDP is $23 billion.

🤖 Geeking out - Satya vs Mark, Jony vs Patrick.

🇬🇧 The British version of the UK/US tariffs agreement concluded this week.

🇫🇷 The French are on a crisis mode - Fnac has permanently shut down its escalators because they consume too much electricity.

🇨🇿 Czech Republic’s wealthiest person tripled his money from selling arms in the past couple of years.

🇺🇸 US embassies and the State Department have pushed countries negotiating tariff deals to approve US satellite companies including Starlink, documents show.

🇨🇦 Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seems like a nice guy who is also super competent - he is a former Governor of the Bank of England, btw.

🖖🏻 Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum sued Google over 'Gulf of America' name change.

😱 Geopolitics in 500 characters or less → this week Trump predictably took down the 145% China duty to only 80%. While everybody is expecting for the mercurials to further go down as Trump is running out of time and options, the American administration is declaring a weird appreciation to Europe, in what seems a re-closing approach to Europe after the winter adversity, a pivot which, again, is not really surprising since Putin and Xi seemingly ignore the US while they met this week to plan their next steps against the Western world.

I asked ChatGPT what it’s likely to happen next, here’s what the bot’s gotten to say:

💲 Another interesting puzzle piece of geopolitics from over the ocean - president Trump said he’d be OK with a tax increase for the wealthy Americans.

🛬 New Jersey's Newark Airport, which serves NYC and the surrounding areas, is a mess, avoid if you can.

👀 Ingrid Lunden, one of the better journos covering Europe, is out looking for a new gig. Mike Butcher, the other TC veteran in London, is also not listed on TC’s team any longer, btw.

🤡 Drone carrying pipe bomb crashes in the wrong house in botched Dublin feud attack.

🇬🇧 Two Brits face 10 years in prison for taking down England’s oldest and tallest sycamore tree.

☮️ Chances of a nuclear weapon being used in 2025 are at 19% per Polymarket.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

Did you find this email useful?

Great, will forward • Good • Meh

Thanks for reading! Please send me feedback by hitting reply.

To support my work, upgrade to one of the subscription options.

If this email was forwarded to you, please subscribe, it’s free!

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

You have received this email as you signed up at Sunday CET or are a Nordic 9 registered user.