August in Europe is typically the month when startups slow down their news announcements, offices empty out and investors disappear to the beach. But for large portions of European tech this summer, out-of-office season hasn’t started.
Companies are still announcing new products and shipping features; fundraises and acquisitions are still going strong; and investor bidding wars are continuing to take place behind closed doors. When Sifted’s Daphné Leprince-Ringuet wrote two weeks ago that the famous “European Summer slowdown” can be bad for business, readers responded, as if personally affronted, to say they are still working hard. And with AI speeding everything up, how could they not?
It seems some European founders are trying to match the tempo of Silicon Valley, where the pace is breakneck and the competition rarely slows down. It’s especially visible in the AI sector. Swedish AI app builder Lovable and Project Europe, a €10m accelerator backed by top European tech founders to invest in entrepreneurs under 25, hosted a 20-hour hackathon this week in Sweden, a country that entitles its workers to four weeks of consecutive holiday between June and August. “The work-life balance brigade are going to have a meltdown,” Alex Macdonald, cofounder and CEO of investment platform for athletes Sequel, quipped on LinkedIn.
Fred Bardolle, head of AI product at cloud service provider Scalesway says his team can’t afford to switch off this summer, especially with new AI models, like OpenAI’s GPT-5, being regularly released from the US. “If you want to be in the race, you have to put the model on your platform within days. You have to put it in the hand of your user or you will lose them. You cannot wait for the summer to be over,” he says. “We have to keep the pace because if you don’t, another company will.”
Evoléna de Wilde d’Estmael, cofounder and CEO of Faircado, a second-hand shopping app, says the speed of AI innovation is forcing European founders to work to keep pace with the US. “When you see how fast these AI wrappers are becoming obsolete, these companies cannot afford to take any time off. They really do not have a minute to lose.”
Conventional wisdom tells founders to close fundraising deals before the summer, given many VCs log off for the majority of July and August (though some say they’ll still be reachable, even from the beach). Now, many AI founders can raise year-round. “Capital is scarce, and access is now the new alpha, so no investor dares to go dark. AI founders are shipping weekly and deals move just as fast,” says Jag Singh, managing partner at Angel Invest in Berlin. “I’ve noticed that especially in AI, hot rounds close in a day, so if you’re offline for more than a week, you basically lose deal access, which anyway seems to matter more than valuation finesse.”
Competition is also intensifying for AI deals, as US VCs step up their dealmaking in Europe. In the first six months of this year, the number of US VCs making at least two AI investments in Europe rose by 73% compared to the same period last year, according to Sifted data.
The energy isn’t restricted to founders building AI companies. Petr Sima, founder of Prague-based investment platform Depo Ventures, says his inbox is full with conference and event invitations, and VCs are more engaged than in previous summers. “It used to be a proof of status: I’m gone for two months, don’t bother me. I don’t see that anymore,” he tells Sifted, adding that there seems to be more deal flow at the moment and the pressure to invest is higher. “I have hopes that finally Europe will stop being lazy and will now understand we need to do something.”
Some VCs bristle at this idea. “The calendar’s lighter without event overload, but lazy? Not even close,” says Iulia Tudor, partner at Ascension VC. “I’m still waiting for that mythical ‘summer off’ everyone talks about.”
Still, the question remains: is this a lasting shift in European work culture or just a temporary spurt of AI-fuelled adrenaline? The recent ‘996 debate’, where investors like 20VC’s Harry Stebbings and Index Ventures’s Martin Mignot pushed the 72-hour work week as the only way to build a successful company, could be nudging European founders to embrace US-style hustle culture, and publicly. In a sector obsessed with building at all hours of the day, showcasing how much you’ve worked this week on LinkedIn is good marketing, if not slightly performative. Does anyone really work all the time?
Some European founders are trying to find balance. Bardolle says some of his team will take long holidays this summer, but he’ll ensure there are enough hands on deck to maintain a high level of speed. He argues France’s generous holiday policy granting workers at least 30 days annual leave per year attracts non-EU workers (the average American gets between seven and ten), and is the reason why he and many of his colleagues choose to stay in Europe.
Langdock, an AI adoption platform for mid-market and enterprise customers, has continued to ship new products over the summer and announced last week it had crossed over the $7m ARR mark with its team of just twenty staff. Its cofounder and CEO Lennard Schmidt calls his team’s approach “calm urgency” — moving fast and getting stuff done, without stressing. Taking the odd morning off is okay if you’ve worked late. “There’s no doubt that everybody who joins us wants to work really hard, but it has to be sustainable,” says Schmidt. “If you serve more customers with fewer people, what you really pay for is decision quality. And the input of decision quality is sleep and health.”
Other founders are using the summer to focus on strategy. De Wilde d’Estmael says she and her cofounder dedicate August to “things that take a bit more concentration and deep focus” like growth strategy, finances and legal admin in preparation for a busy autumn.
Founders scared to take their foot off the gas should remember the US is heading for its own quiet period soon. “I still expect a slowdown at the end of August when many US fund investment committees pause in the run-up to Labor Day,” says Singh. “If half of Sand Hill Road is at Burning Man while the rest are ‘remote’ from Ibiza or Tuscany, I guess it’s an opportunity to show Europe’s hustling while America’s in the desert.”
What do you think, reader? Has Europe unearthed a new sense of “hustle” — and will it survive beyond the AI goldrush? Does Europe have to work more to keep up? Get in touch.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/european-tech-us-summer/
