# Startup life

7 spots to meet founders and VCs in Paris

The bars, cafes, campuses and communities where the who’s who of French tech gathers regularly

Sweaty, insane, cracked: Decoding the language of founder praise

A field guide to the increasingly absurd language founders and investors use to praise one another

The 144 new funds this year and what they reveal about Europe's investment market

Europe's fund managers are raising again. Just not the ones you'd expect.

What the CEO of Irish unicorn Tines learned from its AI overhaul

Eoin Hinchy says his software company was “destined for the scrapheap” unless it made its platform "AI-native"

AI startup Corgi to open 24/7 cafe in London

The new Shoreditch venue comes after a bumper first half of 2026 for London

How to give your elevator pitch to a king

Founder Varun Bhanot found himself at St James's Palace recently with mere seconds to explain his AI product to King Charles

'I'd do things differently than Elon Musk': The free founder crash course teaching teenagers to break into tech

Fed up with the lack of opportunities for young people, two angel investors are running a week-long programme to introduce 16-18 year olds to startups

How an office makeover can boost productivity: ‘Your physical space conveys credibility’

Why founders should stop treating the office purely as a perk and use it to boost productivity, collaboration and investor credibility

The European startups offering the highest salaries

Sifted found 18 European startups advertising roles paying at least €200k

Mistral wanted to beat Anthropic. Now it’s becoming Palantir

Data exclusively seen by Sifted shows the company has made a rapid internal pivot

Meet the team helping Yann LeCun build AI startup AMI Labs

Dozens of Meta alumni have followed LeCun to join the buzzy world models startup

From pilot to production: How scaling companies are making AI work

Experts unpack how companies can deploy AI without destroying margins or losing team trust

Europe’s most valuable board members, according to founders

Founders name the most useful person on their board

Europe’s ‘real’ founder factories: Klarna and Improbable

Working at a growth-stage startup — rather than a unicorn or Big Tech firm — is the strongest predictor of a founder's future success, according to a new study of over 50k startups

It’s time to start paying all your staff like your sales team

Why everyone should get revenue-based bonuses

The incubator launching Scotland’s next generation of tech: ‘We need to pull the bigger players into the Scottish market’

The Venture Builder Incubator programme, in partnership with Techscaler, is working to turn Scotland’s world-class university research into scalable commercial businesses

Why late-stage secondary offerings are transforming private market access

‘When we see an opportunity, we’ll go for it’: Harvey’s VP of EMEA on M&A, hiring, and pushing beyond law

The US unicorn has launched in new European markets this year with plans to double its headcount in the region by the end of 2026

8 stealth founders using AI to take on the industries they used to work in

They include a former Amazon supply chain operator and an ex-McKinsey consultant taking on the space sector

The 50 fastest-growing European startup teams in H1 2026

Sifted ranks the top 50 fastest-growing startups by headcount growth across the first six months of 2026

Boredom is a business risk startups can’t afford to take

I’ve founded six startups and exited two: the slow draining of curiosity at companies is an underestimated problem

‘I want to be the MrBeast of tech’: Why Max Tkacz left n8n to become a Youtube gameshow host

Frustrated that even the biggest startups struggle to break through online, this former product designer thinks the answer is "token-maxxing ice bath challenge"

Meet 2026’s award-winning women building deeptech startups

Last month in Brussels, three founders were announced as winners of the European Prize for Women Innovators

An AI agent was named after this 57-year-old Belgian credit analyst. Is he philosophical about it?

One analyst reflects on what it means to share his identity with a machine built to do his job