The price of money: how Nubank could acquire Monzo

Nubank grew rich on Brazil's high interest rates while Monzo grew slowly on Britain's low ones. That difference, more than anything the founders did, explains why the Brazilian lender is now weighing an £8-10 billion bid for its British rival, and why its own shareholders are hesitating on their options.

How VCs see healthcare becoming a subscription service

A new generation of startups are transforming how healthcare is delivered, and want it to look like a monthly gym membership. This week we take a look at Neko, a $7 billion startup founded by the founder of Spotify, and seeking to transform the diagnostic sector.

How Alan Chang and Fuse Energy reached a $5 billion valuation in three years

Fuse went from a single Scottish wind turbine to 300,000 households and a $550 million run rate in three years. We look at how it was built, what the valuation is priced on, and what it depends on from here.

How come the Nordics are so successful?

Sifted released its top 100 Nordic firms last week, which are among Europe’s top performing. We look at the underlying conditions that have made the region so successful at creating breakout founders and venture returns.

With summer over, here’s what to look out for this autumn

From Anthropic's $30 trillion market pitch to the off-balance-sheet debt funding the AI build-out, this autumn tests whether the bull case can outrun the bear case. We look at the Fed, the grid, the chips, and the upside stories that could define the markets this autumn.

The agility premium: finding venture returns in the shadow of AI giants

The industrial mobilisation for AI and its infrastructure has pulled the biggest venture funds upward into a handful of enormous deals and left the door wide open for more agile funds that are able to see through the noise of the megadeals. The investors moving into it are smaller, faster and a good deal sharper than the incumbents they are starting to replace.

Part 4: the new frontier

From scarcity to surplus: how the commoditisation of capital reshaped the venture model, opened the door to a new class of venture capitalist, and left the mega-funds fighting to build media empires and create sovereign scale infrastructure.

The Evolution of Venture Capital: Part 3 Era of disruption

In Part 3 of the Evolution of Venture Capital we explore the rise of mega-funds in an era of cheap money and near-zero interest rates, and how the abundance of capital started to change the power dynamics for founders and their investors.

The Evolution of Venture Capital: Part 1 The first fund

Over the next four episodes of The Unsophisticated Investor, we deconstruct the evolution of venture capital from an experiment in post-war America led by a handful of pioneers, to the boom and bust cycles of the dot-com era, and the return of multi-billion-dollar mega-funds and a rising counter-revolution of solo GPs and emerging managers. This is the evolution of the world's most successful asset class.

From the moon and back to earth. What happened to crypto markets?

For over a decade, the crypto industry had a single, unwavering defense for why it hadn't achieved mainstream adoption: it just needed to be taken seriously. Give us clear regulations, they said. Give us spot ETFs, institutional capital, and a friendly political administration, and the world will finally adopt the future of money. In the last eighteen months, crypto got every single item on its wishlist, and yet retail participation actually dropped. Bitcoin is now trading at half its peak of just 6 months ago. In this episode, we break down why the industry’s diagnosis was fundamentally wrong.

How AI is upending the financial advice market

We have a new investment drop coming tomorrow! In this week's edition we also cover how the FCA has conceded that AI will become the largest channel through which most people get help with their money. The models are proving good enough at certain levels, but providing them with reliable, personalised data remains a barrier. We look at the regulatory and technology changes that are paving the way for greater transparency, and potentially better advice, and the startups building the next generation of wealth and money-management in an era where every service is in some way tied to AI.

Can robots keep the AI boom alive?

The developed world is growing short of workers as demographics move towards an ageing population, and venture capital is short of obvious candidates for its next trillion-dollar company. Humanoid robots sit where those two shortages meet.

Too hot to compute?

Europe is enduring its second record-breaking heatwave in two months, with the heat pulling our attention this week back to the topic of climate change and how we generate and use energy. This edition looks at how capital drained out of ClimateTech and into the AI boom, why the recovery now under way is narrower as a result of changes in the market, and how AI’s own appetite for power is quietly deciding which green technologies get funded.

Permission to compute, Mr President?

In an ongoing and public battle between Anthropic and the White House, the latter shut down the world’s most capable AI model three days after it had been released to the world. This isn't the first, nor will it be the last instance of US Government interference in the AI arms race. As Europe absorbs being locked out to the latest release, we investigate the history of US interference on technical releases and the implications on Europe’s own progress, or lack of.

Anthropic and one of the greatest venture returns in history

Anthropic has filed to go public at close to a trillion dollars. For the investors who got in early, the listing will unlock one of the largest fortunes in venture history. This edition is about how that fortune was built, why almost none of it was reachable by the public, and why the investor who buys at the listing inherits a different and far less forgiving set of arithmetic.

Money's switchboard: why VCs are pouring money into payment orchestration

What Primer's $100M Series C says about the dozen-strong race to control payment routing.

The revolutions rewriting medicine, and the European companies building them

A panel at the Irish Embassy, the slow death of the blood-brain barrier, and a tour through the European biotechs taking on medicine's hardest problems.

The battle for AI in professional services

OpenAI, Anthropic, Harvey, Legora and a wave of vertical specialists are now openly fighting for the same prize: the multi-trillion-dollar spend that flows through legal, banking, accounting and consulting every year. Here is who is doing what, and where the trade is going.

The speculation shift from crypto to prediction markets

The same week Coinbase laid off seven hundred people, a Warsaw startup raised two million dollars to build AI agents for prediction markets. The migration from crypto to prediction markets is underway.

Y Combinator’s wishlist vs the Entrepreneurs First talent pool

What Y Combinator's latest Request for Startups says about where capital is moving, what previous lists have actually delivered, and why Europe’s answer to YC through Entrepreneurs First may have the more durable model.

Ignore the Chatbot Wars, AI is getting more physical than most think

The model wars between OpenAI and Anthropic are dominating the headlines, but the direction of capital and underlying innovation is telling a different story about where AI is being deployed.

Drop #5 now live, and it's rebuilding financial infrastructure for European startups

Neobanks solved consumer banking. The latest drop is solving what they left behind.

Finding moats in the AI age