The Sifted Summit 2026: AI, liquidity and the next phase of European growth

Several of us from Bristows were at the Sifted Summit 2026 in Shoreditch last week. The debate was less about whether Europe can start great companies and more about whether it can scale them and keep the value at home. Our key takeaways are:

1. The US remains alluring, but attitudes and cultural practices are changing. Access to deeper pools of capital and lighter regulation remains attractive for start-ups and scale-ups, and represents a significant impediment to Europe and the UK becoming viable competitors to the US and China. Achieving wider opportunities for domestic investment, including through initiatives such as the Scaleup Europe Fund and by leveraging pension funds and Europe’s significant untapped private wealth, is hoped to stimulate a ‘talent flywheel’ that could spur greater interest in developing nascent technologies domestically. 

2. Secondaries are becoming mainstream. Secondaries have often been seen as affecting a company’s image and causing conflict between shareholders. Increasingly, they are becoming a popular non-dilutive route to provide liquidity for founders, employees and early investors when an exit route is not yet available or a company chooses to stay private for longer. Secondaries come in a variety of structures, including tender offers, sales to existing shareholders and buybacks. PISCES, the UK's regulated sandbox market launched in 2025, also presents an exciting new opportunity for the UK's maturing secondaries market. ElevenLabs’ recent $300 million employee tender offer, which allowed employees and existing investors to sell shares to institutional investors at a $22 billion valuation, illustrates how a structured secondary can provide liquidity and attract new investors without raising primary capital.

3. Sovereignty. The AI tech stack sovereignty debate is commercial as much as political: Europe needs enough control over compute, cloud, data and critical infrastructure (including space launch capability). The widely discussed suspension of access to certain leading AI models for some foreign nationals illustrated Europe’s exposure to decisions taken elsewhere. Panellists also focused on a growing tension between disruptors’ desire for a truly single market, with more frictionless regulation and transactions, the campaign for EU Inc. and the increasingly protectionist outlooks of the 27 EU member states.

4. Talent remains central, but the model is changing. Hiring and incentivising senior operators remain important. Matters of judgement and taste are, for the time being, still considered to be heavily influenced by humans rather than autonomous agents. At the same time, well-deployed AI agents may allow leaner teams, and investors are increasingly factoring an “ARR per employee” metric into their analysis. EMI options, growth shares, leaver provisions, non-competes and restrictive covenants need to support the scale-up plan.

5. Turning academic knowledge into commercial opportunity. The potential of UK IP in today’s market was likened by one panellist to “North Sea oil in the 1980s”, with much of that opportunity concentrated in the UK’s research institutions. Although there is now a well-established pathway from academia to commercial success in cutting-edge technologies, structural barriers continue to prevent the sector from realising its full potential. There remains a perception among some academics that participating in a spin-out amounts to “selling out” or marks the end of an academic career; this needs to be challenged. Innovation beyond a small group of prestigious institutions also needs greater recognition – for example, Innovate UK’s programmes draw participants from across the UK, rather than from specific institutions.

Overall, the summit underscored consistent themes that we’ve seen reiterated across similar conferences and keynotes, including OxTech Week and Cam Tech Week earlier this year (and indeed Sifted Summit 2025): the UK and Europe have a strong pool of talent with the potential to meet the challenges presented by the US and China, but structural, economic and political impediments to scaling up remain. We look forward to seeing how these themes develop for VC and growth companies over the coming months.