At last week’s Sifted Summit, we brought the Startup Life newsletter to life on stage for the third year running.
Over two days, we heard from a range of experts growing startups in 2025: from early founders who’ve just figured out product-market fit to Series C CFOs focused on extending runway.
Here are our key takeaways.
Automating our jobs
It goes without saying that many of the conversations across the two days covered AI in some way. Many agreed that AI will make many of our current tasks obsolete.
Amy Rushby, cofounder and director of product and operations at car finance fintech Carmoola, told me that one of her company’s values is “Always be automating”. Carmoola over indexes in its hiring processes for people who are constantly thinking about how to simplify or make their tasks entirely obsolete to enable them to work on bigger things.
One of Amy’s top tips was that if you don’t know where to start with automation, start with automating customer support: “It’s quite a well-trodden path in terms of tools and adoption. We’ve found that our customers are impressed by the speed and accuracy that they’re getting, according to the reviews the company is receiving — even when they know it’s AI.”
Again and again, speakers told us that a human approach to problem-solving is going to be key when our grunt work disappears. “With agents taking over, humans need to move up to creative and management positions. Everyone is going to have to become entrepreneurial — whether to create a job opportunity or to move up in their career,” said Emma Obanye, cofounder and CEO of OneTech, a UK non-profit supporting underserved entrepreneurs.
Gautier Cloix, CEO of the mysterious Paris-based agentic AI startup H Company, is optimistic about this. His motivation for leaving Palantir after being there for over a decade is his belief that AI will take over our mundane tasks to make us more productive — and entirely change what we’re capable of doing.
According to Gautier, humans spend 70% of their time in front of different interfaces like phones, screens and different tabs which is destroying focus and attention spans due to context switching and products that are fighting for our attention.
AI in the hiring process
The changing job market is front of mind for many. From sourcing candidates to assessing their skills, AI is already being deployed across various HR processes.
Alessandro Bonatti, chief people officer at travel platform WeRoad, said CVs are no longer fit for purpose. In a fast changing world where people need to be constantly playing and upskilling with new tools and models, he said he prefers candidates to send over a tool or app they’re building. The hiring team can then chat with the candidate about how they built it and their decision-making process: “You can build with AI, but you can’t explain your thinking with it,” he said. “That’s where we find out who is a fit.”
Ben Blume, partner at VC fund Atomico, generally agreed, but added that high volume roles — jobs that attract many job applications — will always exist and hiring teams won’t have the time for the individual approach outlined by Alessandro. In those cases, Ben said: “There will be more AI and automations in the hiring funnel. For example, we will see more pre-screening calls done by AI. [Results have shown] that candidates can’t tell the difference between a person interviewer and AI.”
He emphasised the importance of ensuring that AI used in hiring is more skills-based and fair. “Removing unconscious bias needs to be built into [hiring] tools,” he said.
Emma Obanye added that everything you use in HR needs to be rigorously tested and the people team need to operate like QA testers. With new tools and models changing quickly, testing must be done regularly otherwise biases might creep in unnoticed, she said.
Raising a seed round
AI is also having an impact on the seed round. Maria Rotilu, founding GP of OpenseedVC, said: “Seed has changed dramatically in the last three years. It can now mean a multimillion-dollar first round that combines angel, pre-seed and seed capital, often led by a seed or early-growth investor funding up to 36 months of runway to reach Series A–level metrics.” Reasons for this change cited by the panel were:
- It’s getting cheaper to build things. Investors expect more product and market penetration before they invest (the exception is deeptech, where companies typically have longer R&D timelines and time to market, and are more capital intensive).
- AI companies are raising a lot early to be able to compete in a hot market. Speed of build is everything in the race to AGI.
- Talent is more expensive, especially when you’re trying to compete with the big dogs like Meta and OpenAI offering million-dollar bonuses for new starters.
- The European ecosystem has matured, with deeper pools of capital and more ambition.
With larger rounds comes higher valuations, but Maria said we shouldn’t be paying too much attention to that number as a marker of success: “Valuation, at the early stages of a company when there’s no cashflow or traction or revenue, has nothing to do with the value of your business. It’s a number all parties can agree on. For VCs, it has to make sense from a multiple perspective. For founders, it has to make sense from a dilution perspective. From market standards, it’s not too far off of the norm.”
AI or not, some things haven’t changed. Founders still need to articulate why investors should back them — and that focus needs to change based on the stage of the company. According to Barbod Namini, general Partner at HV Capital, at the early stages where there’s little to show, investors are mostly looking at the quality of the team. A bit further down the line or during bigger seed rounds, the focus is a hybrid of team and traction. At later rounds, investors are primarily looking at traction.
He added, though, that investors are also looking for founders who understand why they’re raising: “It’s not a vanity metric. You should raise to reach your next milestone.”
Royden Greaves, founder and CEO of fintech Jarvis, agreed: “If you don't have clarity of what you’re going to use cash for, then fundraising could actually destroy the motivation and hunger that a team needs at the early stages of company building to solve problems.”
Competing with the big dogs
Talent, of course, remains a key theme in 2025.
Beatriz Lourenço, head of people at AI platform Poolside, told me there is a shortage of AI engineering talent in the market because everyone wants senior talent with experience, but there aren't enough skilled people to hire: “There is a dichotomy. We all need more talent, but we are all doing this for the first time, so there are limited people who actually know what they're doing.” And, she added, Big Tech is on a hiring frenzy, offering “crazy salaries”.
One solution is to hire for potential, not for experience, in roles that don’t require deep domain expertise. “Hire engineers with the ability to think from first principles, who are good mathematicians and are actually highly intelligent,” Beatriz said. Once they’re in, you need internal education to ensure they’re meeting the company’s needs.
On the same panel, Luca Mezossy-Dona, cofounder and chief growth officer at deeptech Ionate said that education and upskilling often happens organically: “Many [deeptech engineers] come with a strong academic background and a peer to peer learning culture. They’ll say ‘Hey, let's teach each other the tools that are going to accelerate this thing we’re trying to build,’ and that goes a long way.”
Amy Rushby said that her team at Carmoola do monthly lunch and learns — peer to peer organised events to discuss people’s key learnings and takeaways from problems they’ve been working on, tools they’ve been playing with or models they’ve been studying.
But when you do need domain expertise, and can’t compete on salary, do you even have a chance at hiring talent?
Mariabrisa Olivares, chief people officer at healthtech Owkin, thinks so. “You have to index for purpose. People want to do good,” she said. “At Owkin, we have a noble purpose — to cure cancer — which gives people a reason to work for us, aside from money.”
Beatriz agreed: “There are lots of perks of being in smaller or earlier stage companies like impact, vision and wanting to build something from scratch. To do that, you need to get good at storytelling to attract the right people to you.” A few top tips on marketing to engineers we heard include:
- Sell them the benefits of working at a startup. “Working at a smaller company will do a lot for their career. The experience and exposure you get at a startup is very differentiated [from at a big tech or corporate] and accelerates you quickly,” said Mariabrisa. ”This will also make talent self-select — startup life isn’t for everyone.”
- Centre your value proposition. According to the panel, your company’s story and what you want to achieve in the world is one of the biggest things you can leverage.
- Highlight the autonomy they’ll get in the job. “You want them to feel like they have a real say in how the company is going to be built. That feeling should come across during every point of contact with potential talent — whether at a university or the middle of the hiring process,” said Luca.
Finally, be creative about compensation. Beatriz suggested looking at the wider package: “Offer cash, excellent equity packages and maybe even secondaries — something we’re considering doing very soon — which is going to become more and more popular as it is one of the only ways to compete with liquidity at other companies.”
