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Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.

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Artificial intelligence companies are the hottest ticket items in today’s startup ecosystem but the pace of change is dominated by developments at OpenAI and Anthropic. For startups building on top of their models, it’s sink or swim. 

With the U.S. currently surging ahead in the large language model (LLM) race, which demands huge checks, Europe’s opportunity lies in building tools that make AI useful, which is known as the application layer.

“That’s also where we think most of the profit will be made in the future,” Robert Lacher, a founding partner of Visionaries Club, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this year

Generative AI companies clinched $49.2 billion in venture capital (VC) investment in the first half of 2025, surpassing 2024’s $44.2 billion across the whole year, according to consultancy EY. The U.S. is responsible for the majority of that, accounting for 97% of deal value and 62% of volume; Europe represented just 2% of value, but 23% of volume. 

Risk appetite among VC investors on the continent is typically lower than in the U.S., while market fragmentation has long caused challenges for startups looking to scale quickly. Hungover from the 2021 tech boom and amid an economic downturn, steady growth and sound business metrics have also come back into focus in Europe. AI is still drawing eyeballs but it pales in comparison to the U.S. 

Europe has 'huge opportunity' to focus on AI application layer, says European early-stage VC firm

Now, frequent updates of AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are pushing companies built on top of them to iterate faster or risk falling behind.

Europe does have its own LLM company – Mistral, the French startup that has raised 1.7 billion euros ($2 billion) in capital so far, including from Dutch chipmaker ASML – that is positioned as an open-source competitor to OpenAI, but there’s still a lot of ground to cover.

“The speed of innovation, speed of product velocity, speed of distribution, actually ends up winning over everything else,” Bryan Kim, a partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday from Italian Tech Week.

Sweden’s Lovable, a “vibe-coding” platform that enables others to build apps and websites with AI, and AI agent startup Sana are examples of such companies putting AI to use. Meanwhile, London’s AI video generation startup Synthesia and synthetic audio company ElevenLabs, also have specific AI applications. The latter did, however, later build its own LLM

Lovable CEO: Not entertaining any investments right now

But “what does it mean when the product and technology you’re actually relying on changes every month. How do you move any slower than that and expect to win the game?” Kim said.

“What I came around with is, actually, momentum is the moat at this current juncture of AI development. Maybe we’ll get to a point where the model layer stabilizes it a little bit, and then we could talk about other things, but, right now, momentum is the only moat that I see,” he added.

Building the next Spotify

Momentum – and the ability to constantly iterate – often comes down to bagging cash to scale.

“If you look at the Europeans, we are revolutionary, we are romantics, we are resourceful,” Jean La Rochebrochard, managing director at Kima Ventures, told “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday. However, “it’s hard to compete with a country where the appetite for risk is way higher, where the amount of capital is way higher as well, and the talent,” he said, referring to the US and speaking about AI generally.

La Rochebrochard is still optimistic that Europe can be home to the next big winner. For him, founders who have built outside of Europe and return to start up another venture are ones to watch. 

“We do all hope that Mistral will become one of these behemoths, one of these $100 billion companies in Europe, just like Revolut did in the UK. If Revolut, Mistral and Spotify are doing it, why not another 10, 20, 50 others?” the investor added.

Indeed, British AI cloud company Nscale just nabbed $433 million in new funding, hot on the heels of a $1.1 billion Series B – the largest in Europe – announced just days ago. However, like Mistral, Nscale is an AI infrastructure play rather than application layer – a timely development as AI sovereignty continues to grab political and investor attention. 

For Lovable CEO Anton Osika, it’s much more simple. “The only thing we need to do in Europe is change our mindset that it is possible,” he told “Squawk Box Europe” on Tuesday.

“Traditionally it has been more of a constraint with access to the amount of technical talent, of access to capital, that is not the bottleneck anymore,” he argued. 

Osika’s own company, for example, can act as a CEO’s technical cofounder if they need one. Meanwhile, Lovable is also luring top talent from the U.S. to Sweden to work at the startup, Osika said. 

He added: “It’s much faster for us to hire in Europe than it is to do so for U.S. counterparts, where there’s 1,000 more companies like Lovable, so it is a competitive advantage to be building from Europe.”

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

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AI chipmaker Cerebras withdraws IPO

AI chipmaker Cerebras pulls IPO after raising $1 billion

Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems said on Friday that it’s withdrawing plans for an IPO, days after announcing that it raised over $1 billion in a fundraising round.

In a filing with the SEC, Cerebras said it does not intend to conduct a proposed offering “at this time,” but didn’t provide a reason. A spokesperson told CNBC on Friday that the company still hopes to go public as soon as possible.

Cerebras filed for an IPO just over a year ago, as it was ramping up to take on Nvidia in an effort to create processors for running generative AI models. The filing revealed a heavy reliance on a single customer in the United Arab Emirates, Microsoft-backed G42, which is also a Cerebras investor.

In its prospectus, Cerebras said it had given voluntary notice to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about selling shares to G42. In March, the company announced that the committee had provided clearance.

Since its initial filing to go public on the Nasdaq, Cerebras has shifted its focus away from selling systems and more toward providing a cloud service for accepting incoming queries to models that use its chips underneath.

The announced withdrawal comes three days into a U.S. government shutdown that’s left agencies like the SEC operating with a small staff. In a plan for a shutdown published in August, the SEC said its electronic system EDGAR “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”

On Tuesday, Cerebras said it had raised $1.1 billion at a valuation of $8.1 billion in a private funding round. At the time, CEO Andrew Feldman said that the company still wanted to go public, rather than continue to raise venture capital.

“I don’t think this is an indication of a preference for one or the other,” he told CNBC in an interview. “I think we have tremendous opportunities in front of us, and I think it’s good practice, when you have enormous opportunities, not to let them fall by the wayside for lack of capital.”

Feldman thought the original prospectus from last year was out of date, especially considering developments in AI, the spokesperson said on Friday.

Well heeled technology companies have been quickly signing up for additional infrastructure to handle demand. On Tuesday CoreWeave, which rents out Nvidia chips through a cloud service, said it had signed a $14.2 billion agreement with Meta. ChatGPT operator OpenAI said last week that it had committed to spending $300 billion on cloud services from Oracle.

The government shutdown did not factor into Cerebras’ decision, the spokesperson said.

WATCH: Interview with Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman

Cerebras CEO: Here's why our chips are a more efficient alternative to Nvidia

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

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Amazon shutters 4 Fresh stores in Southern California as grocery strategy keeps shifting

An employee arranges a salad dressing display at an Amazon Fresh grocery store on December 12, 2024 in Federal Way, Washington.

David Ryder | Getty Images

Amazon is closing four more Fresh supermarkets in Southern California as the e-commerce giant continues to focus its grocery strategy around Whole Foods and delivery.

The closures will take place in the coming weeks, Amazon confirmed to CNBC. They follow the shuttering of four other U.S. locations in recent months, in Washington, Virginia, New York and a Los Angeles suburb.

“Certain locations work better than others, and after an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close these Amazon Fresh locations,” Amazon spokesperson Griffin Buch said in a statement. “We’re working closely with affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon wherever possible.”

At one Fresh supermarket in La Verne, California, employees were told to gather for an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, according to an internal message viewed by CNBC. They learned at the meeting that the store would close in mid-November, and that employees would receive a severance package, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details were confidential.

The other three stores that are closing are in cities of Mission Viejo, La Habra and Whittier.

Last week, Amazon said it intends to close 14 Fresh grocery stores in the U.K. and convert its five other locations there into Whole Foods markets.

Amazon said it regularly evaluates its store portfolio, which can lead to opening, reopening, relocating or closing certain locations. In the U.S., the company has more than 60 remaining Fresh stores. Last year, the company removed its “Just Walk Out” cashierless technology from the stores. It’s also been culling its footprint of Go cashierless convenience stores.

Amazon has been determined to become a major grocery player for nearly two decades. The company launched Amazon Fresh in 2007, then a pilot project for fresh food delivery, before acquiring upscale chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, its biggest purchase on record.

Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout has been turbulent since its early days.

The company opened a flurry of Fresh locations by 2022, but the expansion plans ran into CEO Andy Jassy’s widespread cost-cutting efforts as the company reckoned with the impact of rising interest rates and soaring inflation. In 2023, Amazon announced it would shut some Fresh stores and halt further openings temporarily as it evaluated how to make the chain stand out for shoppers.

While it’s closing Fresh stores, Amazon continues to “innovate and invest in making grocery shopping easier, faster, and more affordable,” Buch said. The company still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.

On Wednesday, Amazon also launched a new “price-conscious” grocery brand that will be offered online and in its physical stores. And last month, Amazon expanded same-day delivery of fresh foods to more pockets of the U.S.

Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items such as canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks. Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.

WATCH: Amazon grocery could be a trojan horse to more revenue

Amazon's grocery could be a trojan horse to move revenue higher, says Evercore ISI's Mark Mahaney

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here’s what’s driving the big move

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Quantum stocks Rigetti Computing and D-Wave surged double-digits this week. Here's what's driving the big move

Inside Google’s quantum computing lab in Santa Barbara, California.

CNBC

Quantum computing stocks are wrapping up a big week of double-digit gains.

Shares of Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum and Quantum Computing have surged more than 20%. Rigetti and D-Wave Quantum have more than doubled and tripled, respectively, since the start of the year. Arqit Quantum skyrocketed more than 32% this week.

The jump in shares followed a wave of positive news in the quantum space.

Rigetti said it had purchase orders totalling $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera quantum computing systems. The owner of drugmaker Novo Nordisk and the Danish government also invested 300 million euros in a quantum venture fund.

In a blog post earlier this week, Nvidia also highlighted accelerated computing, which it argues can make “quantum computing breakthroughs of today and tomorrow possible.”

Investors have piled into quantum computing technology this year, as tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon have embraced the technology with a wave of new chip announcements, multi-million dollar investments and research plans.

Read more CNBC tech news

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