Founded in 2022, Elevenlabs is an AI -based generation startup based in London. He competes with tastes of speechmatics and Hume ai.
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Artificial intelligence companies are the hottest ticket items in today’s start -up ecosystem, but the rate of change is dominated by developments in Openai and Anthropique. For startups that are built above their models, it is a sink or swimming.
With the United States is currently in advance in the breed of the large language model (LLM), which requires enormous checks, the opportunity of Europe lies in the construction of tools that make AI useful, which is known as the application layer.
“This is also where we think that most profits will be made in the future,” said Robert Lacher, a founding partner of the Visionarries Club, in CNBC “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this year.
AI-generating companies won $ 49.2 billion in venture capital investment (VC) in the first half of 2025, exceeding $ 44.2 billion of 2024 throughout the year, according to Council EY. The United States is responsible for the majority of this, representing 97% of the value of the agreement and 62% of the volume; Europe represented only 2% of the value, but 23% of the volume.
Appétit of risks among venture capital investors on the continent is generally lower than in the United States, while market fragmentation has long caused challenges to startups that seek to evolve quickly. The hangover from the technological boom of 2021 and in the midst of an economic slowdown, regular growth and solid commercial metrics also returned to the point in Europe. AI still draws eyeballs but it turns pale compared to the United States
From now on, frequent updates of AI models such as Openai Chatgpt and the Claude d’Anthropic pushes businesses built on them to iterate more quickly or are likely to delay.
Europe has its own company LLM – Mistral, the French startup which has raised 1.7 billion euros (2 billion dollars) in capital so far, including the Dutch chip manufacturer ASML – which is positioned as an open -source competitor of Openai, but there is still a lot of ground to cover.
“The speed of innovation, the speed of product speed, the distribution speed, ends up winning everything else,” said Bryan Kim, partner of VC Andreessen Horowitz, Bryan Kim, “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.
Adorable Sweden, an “room coding” platform that allows others to create applications and websites with AI, and AI Sana startups are examples of these companies that use AI. Meanwhile, the AI ​​Videos Generation Startup of London Synthia and the Synthetic Audio Society Elevenlabs, also have specific AI applications. However, the latter later built his own LLM.
But “What does this mean when the product and technology on which you really count on changes every month. How do you move slower than that and you expect to win the game?” Said Kim.
“What I came from is, in fact, the dynamic is the gap at this current stage of the development of the AI. Perhaps we will arrive at a point where the model layer stabilizes it a little, and then we could speak of other things, but, at the moment, the momentum is the only Moat that I see,” he added.
Build the next Spotify
The momentum – and the capacity to constantly – is often limited to the packaging of money on a scale.
“If you look at the Europeans, we are revolutionary, we are romantic, we are ingenious,” Jean La Rochebrochard, director general of Kima Ventures said on Thursday to “Squawk Box Europe”. However, “it is difficult to compete with a country where the appetite for risk is much higher, where the quantity of capital is also much higher, and the talent,” he said, referring to the United States and speaking of AI in general.
La Rochebrochard is still optimistic that Europe can house the next big winner. For him, the founders who have built outside Europe and come back to start another business are to be monitored.
“We all hope that Mistral will become one of these giants, one of these 100 billion dollars in Europe, just as Revolut did in the United Kingdom. If Revolut, Mistral and Spotify do it, why not yet 10, 20, 50 others?” The investor added.
Indeed, the British company AI Cloud NSCALE has only managed $ 433 million in new funding, hot on the heels of a B series of $ 1.1 billion – the largest in Europe – announced just a few days ago. However, like Mistral, NSCALE is an AI infrastructure game rather than the application layer – a timely development while AI sovereignty continues to attract political attention and investors.
For the adorable CEO Anton Osika, it’s much simpler. “The only thing we have to do in Europe is to change our state of mind that it is possible,” he said on Tuesday “Squawk Box Europe”.
“Traditionally, this has been more a constraint with access to the quantity of technical talents, access to capital, which is no longer the bottleneck,” he said.
Osika’s own company, for example, can act as a technical co -founder of a CEO if it needs it. Meanwhile, Lovable also attracts the best talents in the United States to Sweden to work on the startup, Osika said.
He added: “It is much faster for us to hire in Europe than to do it for American counterparts, where there are 1,000 more companies like Lovable, it is therefore a competitive advantage of building Europe.”
