What the Sifted 100 Says About Europe’s AI Talent Race

The Sifted 100 AI company report dropped last week, and it’s one of the most interesting snapshots of the AI landscape I’ve seen this year!

A short summary from a Talent perspective.

1️⃣ What stood out first is how many are brand-new companies (under 3 years) and all still in early experimentation mode.

Almost every company has fewer than 100 employees, and 18 have fewer than 20.

That’s lean even by early-stage standards, which makes me wonder how these teams will evolve over the next 12 months, do they keep it mostly software engineers with limited commercial teams?

2️⃣ As long as you're involved with AI it's still very much a growth story for 2026: “Raise, hire engineers, raise again”... That’s the playbook.

Teams are closing rounds at extraordinary speed - pre-seeds wrapped up in 72 hours.

3️⃣ Salary inflation is pushing engineering comp up 20-30%.

And, according to the Sifted report, three-quarters of this talent still earns under £150k, so still great value v hiring in the US.

4️⃣ What’s really interesting is that companies are prioritising generalist software engineers who have recent experimental AI skills, not deep AI engineers as it’s impossible to compete with the top 1% like Anthropic, etc.

It leaves me with a few questions:

🤔 Are we over-optimising technical build at the expense of everything else? What about marketing, revenue, ops, GTM, HR or is this the new norm?

I know a lot of experienced scale-up executives are left scratching their heads, asking about revenue and robust operations.

Or maybe this is simply what AI requires as its a winner takes all game right now.

Click here to access the full report.

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