European startups that became unicorns in 2024
sifted.eu
sifted.eu
I check what products offer bending spoon, that's a tech company that, according to its director, creates nothing but buy already existing companies and improve them.
That's how they make money. Great plan if you know what you're doing and have smart people with lots of skills in various fields.
So I check what they have done recently.
They bought Evernote, ramped up the paid tier price, decreased the amount of features in the free tier, lost a lot of customer in the process but because they also fired all of the development team in the US and Chile, they now made Evernote profitable!
They basically killed the app futur development, killed any interest for futur user (free tier), and makes money from the few people that have too many notes to consider switching to a cheaper and better alternative.
In my book, they made a not so great company that could success with the right approach into a zombie company just waiting to die.
Also they made the immuni app.
Immuni was an open-source COVID-19 contact tracing app used for digital contact tracing in Italy, dismissed on 31 December 2022, after a long and debated criticism for having been a failure due to the lack of trust placed by citizens
And so this is a unicorn :)
Where are those people with money looking to invest in 'successful' projects ? I got a bridge to sell to them !
I was both invited and also not picked, I had to do an assessment but also I failed it in the first 5 mins (we got 5 days) and it felt like a huge messy dream. They were looking for juniors but I was also underqualified with 3 yrs of experience
That of course doesn't say anything about the company's products, but it left a weird taste in my mouth when I saw them.
How can Europe continue to exist like this.
By continuing its place as an economic zone for tourism and refugee resettlement.
What does an 101 year old pharmacy business and an 80 year old furniture store have to do with current EU innovation?
Europe has many large and successful companies, the one you mentioned are even somewhat small compared to the large German/French/Italian industrial corporations.
>Almost all lists of new start ups look stupid, in the US as well as Europe.
But this isn't a list of random start-ups. It is the list of the best start ups Europe has to offer, their unicorns.
Where the US has OpenAI, SpaceX, Uber and so many more, the EU has a startup which "offers health and fitness institutions access to software and machines".
Going back through the last decades, there have been multiple US start ups which effected billions of people. I can't even name a single European startup with any relevancy whatsoever. I can name half a dozen US AI startups, all with decent products, I can name one from Europe.