‘Built in Europe’: Can Balderton’s new campaign spark Europe’s vibe shift?

0:01Hello, this is the Sifted Podcast and I'm your host, Freya Pratty. It's been a curious fortnight in European tech. On one side, there's a fresh bout of anxiety after USAI company Anthropic announced a huge new funding round, which almost matches the amount raised by the entire European ecosystem last year. On the other side, there's a growing pushback against that doom and gloom. This week, VC firm Boulderton launched a campaign called Built in Europe, aimed at celebrating the continent's successes and reshaping that narrative. Joining me to talk about European tech's new narrative are Martin Coulter, news editor.

0:37Good morning. And senior reporter Daphne Le Prince-Ringay. Hello. So Martin, you were at a party at Boulderton HQ last night to celebrate this new Built in Europe campaign. First off, tell us how the party was. It was wild, Fred. I had the time of my life. What happened? I bumped into a former colleague of ours, Kai Nichol-Schwartz, who recently defected to CNBC. He seems to be doing very well. Our founder and other podcast host, John Thornhill, was also kicking around. The Balderton team, James Wise, Seranga, various characters. Then talk us through this campaign they've launched. What was the impetus for it?

1:17So, Baldurton Camps has recruited founders from some of Europe's biggest companies for this new campaign that launched this week called Built in Europe. It's got backing from more than 100 founders and CEOs across the region, including Revolut, Mistral, Wave. And the idea is to shine a spotlight on the successful companies we've already built. They've got big advertising campaign posters up all around London. And they've also launched this new jobs platform, which they want to use to kind of turbocharge the ecosystem and get more people involved in building the future of European tech. What did people at the party have to say about the campaign?

2:03Was it a positive go Europe mood? Very much so. So yeah, I spoke to a few founders who said they were very pleased to see a campaign like this get off the ground. Talking to Saranga, actually, at one point, he said there was this moment before they launched. It was kind of like, I think he made an analogy with how a comedian never knows if a set is going to work on stage before they actually get up and find out if everyone or no one is going to laugh. And he was saying, we didn't know if this was going to be a hit or if it wasn't going to look fantastic. But yeah, the vibe of the party was really great.

2:36Everyone was very enthusiastic. And there was a huge amount of merch on a very long table. What have you got? A couple of hats, a t-shirt or two for the whole team, not just for myself, obviously. Great. We're looking forward to it. So this campaign was released the week after, as I said, US model maker Anthropic announced its huge round,$65 billion in funding. You were also talking to founders and investors about that round of what it means for Europe and perhaps the positioning of that within this very pro-Europe push we have at the moment. Yeah, so Anthropic, the American AI giant that everyone knows about, just filed for an IPO and raised$65 billion.

3:22I think it was announced last week, which is all well and good, but obviously presents a problem to the extent that all of Europe's startups raised a similar amount taken together last year. And it kind of just highlights this enormous difference in funding scale between the US and Europe, particularly in AI. Did you get a sense that stuff like the Boulder Tank campaign is actively trying to push back against those large rounds in America? Was there much talk at the event about what we're up against geographically in terms of other regions? Yeah, I think so. So there was a lot of positivity about the campaign in the sense that startups here really want to sort of stand proud and say, we are European, rather than there's often been this framing of like, you know, we are the European version of this American thing.

4:11Or, you know, we are the European version of Anthropik, you know, rather than sort of standing on their own two feet. Yeah, I was at Panathinae, a relatively new event in Greece last week, and it was this odd sort of juxtaposition of the event was a big celebration of Europe, but everyone was talking about Anthropic, which I feel like happens quite a lot at tech events at the moment. So Daphne, within the kind of wider Euromaxing efforts, there are individual countries aiming to drive inbound investment and push their specific narratives. Choose France is one of those drives. Explain to us about that one.

4:44Yeah, sure. So Choose France is actually not a completely new event. There's already been, so this, the Choose France 2026 happened this week. It started in 2018. It's an annual event that's hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron. The objective is to gather CEOs and industrial players to encourage foreign investment into France. What was particular about this year's edition was that Macron announced€93 billion of investments committed by foreign investors, which is more than all of the investments announced over all of the previous eight editions, which amount in total to€87 billion. euros almost half of these investments came from Japanese tech giant SoftBank which committed to invest an initial 45 billion into French AI data centers with plans to then top this up to reach a total project of 75 billion euros so that's obviously loads and loads of money and I think it does reflect quite well how France has tried to position itself in the race to build our AI infrastructure.

5:56This is something that Macron has been carrying for a few years now, with one of the top kind of factors being France's carbon-free electricity, which there is plenty of carbon-free electricity in France. So that's obviously quite attractive for building out data centers for AI. So yeah, I do think this positions France quite advantageously in terms of securing these investments and building out this AI infrastructure. It's almost a direct kind of response to what's going on in the US, where at the start of 2025, the Stargate project was announced by the Trump administration together with OpenAI.

6:33It's a$500 billion plan to build out data centers for OpenAI's compute needs. Anthropic as well at the end of 2025 announced it was investing 50 billion euros into infrastructure. So obviously it's not exactly the same scale, but it's getting there. and is potentially quite aligned with that Euromaxing narrative that you were mentioning, Freya. I'm interested in the individual drives by specific countries and how they sit in relation to a Europe together driving investment as a continent. Is France competing against the UK, for example, and how does that sit at odds with this kind of drive to be Europe together as a tech hub?

7:19I think all of the individual European nations are definitely, to an extent, pushing their own national interests. But the overarching narrative is that we can't compete if this is not a pan-European thing. Macron, I think, is quite vocal about this and needing to play as a united Europe, rather. Otherwise, there's no competing against how big the US is. So I don't know exactly the details of how this plays out in Brussels. I'm sure every individual nation is pushing for its own interests at that level, and then also pushing for the narrative that we should act as one Europe. But certainly I think everyone would agree on the fact that being united is the only way to compete.

8:06Yeah, I felt in the UK there have been stuff like the sovereign AI units pushing a very individual sovereign tech drive. But within that, it felt like it feels like individual VC firms and companies are trying to push a kind of Europe together. The UK is obviously interestingly positioned because we've had Brexit. But I think governments, it feels like they're after a specific UK angle, but stuff like Boulderton, which sits in London, wants to be part of the European narrative, which I've noticed a bit of a splintering in that way recently. Within this, there are also individual companies working to push a narrative or change a narrative.

8:44Mistral, the French AI company, is often cited as an example of that. Yeah, definitely. So Mistral, from the start, kind of positioned themselves as a European alternative to big US technology. And I think they have been driving that narrative of, I mean, sorry, Mistral launched in 2023 with that pitch of offering an alternative to US-based big tech giants. And I think in the three years since they launched, the kind of geopolitics have played in their favour in the sense that the need to have European alternatives has never been so proeminent. And in that sense, I think they've kind of been carried by that as well because they represent that, at least in France.

9:35And what they've done in the last three years for a European company is, I'd say, objectively quite impressive. They've grown to a thousand employees. They've raised around three and a half billion euros in debt and equity. They've reached a nearly 12 billion euro valuation. They are saying that they are going to be making one billion euros in revenue in 2026. So all of this happened in three years. I think it's given people a lot of enthusiasm and definitely here in Paris, it feels like people talk about a before and an after Mistral. something that I found quite interesting with Mistral is they've recently been positioning themselves as an acquirer in Europe as well so they've done two acquisitions since the start of the year one was Coyeb which is a French startup that specializes in cloud services and then more recently they acquired another startup called EMI an Austrian startup that does foundational AI models for industrial engineering and the approach to this acquisition strategy has been quite

10:37I mean quite it's been it's been compared to how things would happen in Silicon Valley to me by some investors in the sense that they are acquiring fast the financial details of the transactions weren't disclosed but they're acquiring for you know significant sums of money companies that are still in early in early stages so I think this is more reflective of a style that would be happening in Silicon Valley and is kind of giving people hopes that Mistral will deliver on its promise to become a European big tech. I think today they're definitely one of the only candidates in Europe that could potentially become a European big tech.

11:13So in that sense, yeah, I'd say they are contributing or at least trying to contribute to changing that narrative. You've both been reporting on European tech for a good few years. Martin, what's particular about the narrative the ecosystem is pushing in 2026 at this moment? So I think it's funny, as I was speaking to people at the party last night, it kind of drove home again how much European tech can help but kind of inevitably compare itself to Silicon Valley. You want to stand on your own two feet, you want to say we are this and we are not just a European version of this American company, but with the way that geopolitics have unfolded, with strained relations between Trump, White House and Europe kind of changing nature of business between the two continents, that's actually becoming more and more of an asset to say, actually, we are the European version of this.

12:13Actually, you can get this capability or this software or this service in Europe and it will be sovereign. And you've seen more and more of that, I think, in the UK, but also in France with Mistral, as Daphne was saying, And then also with Lovable in Sweden, Anton Ezeka has been posting more and more about sovereignty and having European solutions. So it's kind of a mix between wanting to stand up proud and be European and not just define yourself as being the opposite of whatever the Americans are doing, but that's kind of becoming more and more an important piece of the puzzle. I think what I find most striking about what's going on at the moment is going back to the geopolitics that you mentioned, Martin.

13:01So obviously, I feel like a lot of this Euromaxing and need to change the narrative is linked to geopolitics, is linked to the fact that the Trump administration has created kind of a new climate and a new relationship between Europe and the US where we never really know what's going to happen. and the risk of being too dependent on the US is now too high. And I think that's really been a wake-up call. And in my head, it's kind of resulted in an imperative to have a European narrative. We don't really have a choice anymore. We need to have our own economy, our own technologies, our own giants, our own successful startups.

13:45um so I think the two are really linked it's in the last two years it's become kind of something we report on every day um and so yeah I think that kind of yeah rise in awareness and lack of choice really but to have a European version whatever it looks like have been what what I found most interesting yeah and I guess the realization that America has been pushing its narrative for a long time tech what I think perhaps culturally it's more of a feature right to push the ecosystem forward. I think there's been an unease in doing it in Europe, but we've realized we've got to join the party. So we are nearly out of time, but what are you both working on at the moment?

14:25What can we look forward to from you both? I am writing up an interview with the founders of Dwelly, the prop tech startup based here in the UK, which was recently reported to be in talks to raise$200 million. dollars so that will be live by the time this podcast is out so please go and read it and i and this kind of ties into what we have been discussing i'll be looking at the tech sovereignty package that the european commission is expected to be publishing today so looking at the impact of that and whether it's got any chance of um of uh helping europe to achieve sovereignty another topic that i have been looking into or thinking about rather for the past few months it's quite focused on France, but I'm interested in finding out how political change that is expected to come in France in 2027 might change the way France positions itself in this, you know, pro-tech, hero-maxing narrative, how companies are preparing for that, how startups are preparing for that, how investors are preparing for that.

15:26So always keen to hear anyone's thought. Please do feel free to get in touch with me if you have an opinion on that. How can people do that? You can email me at daphne, D-A-P-H-N-E, at sifted.eu. Great. Thank you, Daphne. Thank you, Martin, for joining the show. If you're interested in following this discussion, which I'm sure we'll be reporting on as we go forward, you can sign up to our daily newsletter. We'll drop a link in the episode description. As always, please rate, review and share the pod. This episode was expertly produced by Maya Durampo-Hornby.