Is New York warming to European tech?

Freya Pratty (0:03)

Hello and welcome to the Sifted podcast. I'm your host Freya Pratty, Sifted's Associate Editor. Joining me today is Senior Reporter Anne Sraders.

Anne Sraders (0:13)

Hi Freya, nice to be back on the pod.

Freya Pratty (0:15)

So you are back in Berlin.

Anne Sraders (0:17)

I am, yes. It is nice and chilly here. It was actually quite warm when I was in New York, which I assume is the topic we'll be discussing today.

Freya Pratty (0:25)

Exactly, yes. I'm in my flat in London, as I usually am for the pod, but it's getting boring for listeners hearing that.

So you're back from a trip to New York. You were there for two weeks. You were a tech reporter in the US for quite a few years before you joined us at Sifted, based in Berlin. So now you've been back, but with this lens of what does the American ecosystem think about us over here in Europe. So I'm really excited to hear. I think there's a perception, particularly in London where I sit, that we're having our moment and everything is going great, we've got all these cool new Neo labs, etc. But I imagine from the American perspective, we are still obviously tiny. So I'm really interested in this perspective. How would you sum up the atmosphere there tech-wise, and then let's get into what they think about us?

Anne Sraders (1:12)

Yeah, I mean, I think it was quite interesting. It was sort of like a weird homecoming for me. As you said, I was a tech reporter in New York for a number of years with Fortune magazine before, and I actually went to an event called Primary VC Summit, which is like the big New York VC conference, I suppose. In September, I went there right before I moved to Berlin, and coming back this year, it was really interesting. It had changed a lot. It was much bigger than I remembered. And I think the biggest difference, which also sort of summed up my trip in a lot of ways was that pretty much every single panel, every conversation was purely about AI.

I think that's sort of the headline here for what my experience was in the US, is it's extremely singularly focused on AI. That is the big topic. And I think that's not totally dissimilar to Europe, but I think it's to an extent where it's really, it's everywhere. As I mentioned in my newsletter, there's tons of AI ads on the subway, which was a bit surprising to me because this isn't San Francisco, but it's certainly coming to the East Coast. It was definitely all that everyone was talking about in conversations and around water coolers.

I think the atmosphere is very buzzy. It's extremely focused on this new set of companies that are raising just unheard of amounts of venture capital money. Yeah, certainly a buzzing atmosphere, I would say.

Freya Pratty (2:38)

I see ads for AI companies around Old Street in London and a few other areas around King's Cross perhaps as well, but it's not capital wide. It sounds like a different level over there.

Within AI being the buzzy sector, it's not really a sector anymore, it's sort of everything. But which areas within that did you see most VC interest in and does that tally with what you see in Berlin at the moment?

Anne Sraders (3:03)

Yeah, so I think there's some crossover. I think, of course, everyone's talking about the NeoLabs, and that's definitely true. As you mentioned, in London, there's a lot of good examples. In Berlin, there's some companies like AI agent startup, N8N, which has raised a lot of money. I think certainly AI is the topic in the venture world at the moment, I would say. I would say the difference, and maybe this was also just based on who I was around and talking to, but I think Europe has a huge focus on deep tech at the moment, in particular things like defense.

And I think that makes sense because they've historically underspent on defense, and now there's a bunch of companies popping up to work on that. But that's something that I didn't really hear as much in the US. I think it is still a big trend, but certainly, I think things like personal agents was a huge topic that a lot of people brought up. Meta released theirs called Muse recently, which everyone was talking about and talking about kind of in scary ways about it kind of trying to make reservations for them. And if they couldn't get into some login, they would create a new password for you. And it's just all this kind of, to me, seemingly dystopian stuff that's happening in the US that I think isn't quite as big here yet, but maybe is coming. And as a brief shout out, I guess, if you're building a personal agents company, let me know. I'm curious to talk to you. But yeah, I think there was some crossover, some differences. And I think for the obvious reasons, I think the sort of bigger labs are really dominating the conversation. In the US, of course, like OpenAI and Anthropic are sort of the headline almost every other day, it seems like, in US media.