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Back2Back @ B2B Rocks

Suzanne Newman Suzanne Newman
September 11, 2023

Let’s start with a brief overview of B2B Rocks for those who might not be familiar with your annual event; what’s the story?

B2B Rocks’ is a SaaS centric B2B networking event. During Covid, the event
went purely digital. To celebrate B2B Rocks’ 10th anniversary last year, we
reimagined the entire event; holding it in Montpellier on a country estate. With well-over 2, 000 attendees from 30+ countries it was a smashing success encouraging us to continue building our community and holding events.

The irony is that in an era where digitization dominates almost every aspect of our
lives, from how we work and socialize, there is a real thirst for events and
human interaction.

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B2B Rocks

B2B Rocks has a reputation for focusing on actionable insights and practical knowledge. How does the conference ensure attendees walk away with valuable takeaways they can implement in their own ventures?

B2B Rocks is a platform. We want a world where anybody anywhere can
create a startup. Our raison d’être is to allow the different actors of the B2B
SaaS ecosystem to shine and inspire. If B2B rocks, then the different actors
are the rock stars and why people come to these events.

The event is human sized fomenting interaction between the speakers and
attendees. It is hard to scale personal human interaction.

Finally our platform helps attendees identify interests and interesting people
to optimize the opportunity–never go to an event without a detailed plan.

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The event features a diverse lineup of speakers and topics. Can you highlight a few of the key speakers or sessions that attendees should be especially excited about?

All our speakers are passionate and actual thought leaders. They’re
international, have been in leadership positions for years and/or are
co-founders and CEOs.

Given the importance of cloud computing, networking and working remotely
three speakers stand out. Particularly:

  • Xavier Perret, Managing Director Azure Cloud France at Microsoft
    France
  • Lisa Gunnarsson, VP LSS EMEAL at LinkedIn
  • Marcelo Lebre, Co-Founder & COO at Remote
  • See all other speakers here

As for topics a key focal point is sharing growth opportunities based on
successful companies’ and leaders’ experience. We want to inspire our
audience, but also give them actionable insights and practical knowledge as
mentioned before.

A few examples of topics addressed:

  • Revolutionizing SaaS Models with Generative AI  Daniela Burbano, Aive + Itxaso Araque Barriuso, AWS + Anais Monlong, IRIS + Philippe Guillaud, MatchTune
  • Lessons from $1 Billion in SaaS Acquisitions – Valuation and Process
    Insights Thomas Smale, FE International
  • Creating a Culture of Alignment: Operation’s Role in Fostering
    Sales-Marketing Unity Lorna Miller, Scaleway
  • How to Build AI Products that are More Than Just Wrappers ⚡ Aaron
    Goldsmid, Deel
  • Successful Funding Strategies for SaaSes in 2023 Matthieu
    Vaxelaire, Hexa + Adrien Chaltiel, Eldorado + Augustin Sayer, OVNI
    Capital + Chloe Allan, Octopus Ventures

Networking is a crucial aspect of any conference. How does B2B Rocks 2023 facilitate networking opportunities for attendees? Are there any unique networking formats or activities that participants can look forward to?

The B2B Rocks platform allows attendees to target networking opportunities
by interest, subject, job type, type of company (startup, scale up, VC, etc..) and verticals. Networking spaces at Station F specifically designed for these opportunities will also be available.

La French Tech put in place their “Je Choisis French Tech” matching system to put different SaaS and strategic corporate actors together. Finally, there is a closing social event allowing everybody a final opportunity to network in a fun, informal setting.

The startup and Tech events landscape can be quite competitive. What sets B2B Rocks apart from other conferences, and what value does it bring to both startups and established tech companies?

We prefer to believe these events are more complimentary than competitive. B2B Rocks while international with many American and international is
currently centered on France and southern Europe.

Startup culture is “same-same but different.” You cannot attend an event in
Scandinavia and expect to understand what is happening in France and
southern Europe.

Local startups get airtime and see what is happening internationally. Big companies get to spend quality time with the next generation of thought leaders. It is a perfect synergistic opportunity for both parties.

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B2B Rocks

B2B Rocks 2023 is set to take place in a unique venue. How will Station F complement the conference’s atmosphere and goals?

Internally-recognized Station F is the biggest startup campus in the world. It is also served by an international airport and Paris isn’t half bad as a city. Most importantly the facilities are excellent and varied allowing our speakers
to share there ideas and network with attendees in a setting designed for
those endeavors.

Startup founders, tech enthusiasts, and professionals attend conferences for various reasons. How does B2B Rocks cater to this diverse audience and ensure that each participant finds value in attending?

Mostly by getting out of the way and letting the attendees do their thing–We
live in a digital world. Ironically increasing thirst for authentic human
experiences.

Our job is to facilitate these opportunities and a great experience. We all win
when there is a minimum of disturbances and lots of attendees.

Last year after the show I had the opportunity to speak with founders who told
me they had a great show and added substantially to their networks.

Lastly, for those considering attending B2B Rocks 2023, what would be your key message to convey why this conference is a must-attend event on their calendars?

Saas and entrepreneurial culture continue to grow. Expanding from the
Silicon Valley to the four corners of the globe in just a few short decades. The
ecosystems continues to expand, enrich & diversify.

More specifically:

  • The French and southern Europe tech scene continues to boom
    supported by education and startup friendly ecosystems.
  • Investment in French startups bucked the downward trend in 2022
    and lead Europe.
  • Many companies from the French Tech two categories French tech
    next 40 and French Tech 120 will be there not to mention
    representatives from startups from Spain, Italy, Germany, and Austria
    to name just a few

Last year we had people from over 25 countries. If you are looking for investment opportunities or next-gen growth strategies then come be a part of B2B Rocks.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s our special code to get 20% off your pass to B2B Rocks 2023 so you can join us at Station F in Paris on September 19th PBKMF5Y

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Suzanne Newman

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Fundraising 5 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

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