Sweet Capital's Pippa Lamb on UK-US trade deal, European venture gaps, and the Nordics as a tech hub

Summary

Pippa Lamb, partner at Sweet Capital, sits between two worlds — a private investment fund founded by the creators of Candy Crush (King.com, sold to Activision and subsequently Microsoft), with roughly 70% of AUM allocated to the US despite its European roots. Her background spans UK government trade relations, five years covering large-cap China and US tech at JP Morgan, and the last five to six years in venture and private investing.

Sweet Capital and gaming

Of the five King co-founders, appetite for re-entering gaming varies. At least one — Sebastian Kitson — launched a new company almost immediately after his non-compete with Activision and Microsoft expired last year and is now operating in stealth. The fund does look at gaming deals but has broadly diversified away from pure-play publishing, partly because knowing the industry too well raised the bar, and partly because a long-running non-compete with Activision pushed them toward adjacent gamification plays rather than competing directly.

On the court-ordered changes to Apple's App Store payment policies, Lamb notes that King navigated a very different era — fighting for mobile distribution when Facebook and Apple were the gatekeepers — and that the landscape has changed enough that direct comparisons are difficult. Kitson, now launching his first title, is facing those dynamics in real time.

UK–US trade deal

Lamb sees the agreement announced last week as a meaningful step. The UK was already the only country among the US's top ten trading partners where the US runs a surplus rather than a deficit, which made the baseline position unusual. The deal aims to bring average tariffs down from roughly 10% to between 1 and 2%, covering steel and autos as headline wins. UK Ambassador Peter Mandelson has framed it as a movie, not a still picture — talks continue.

Lamb's view, formed partly from behind-the-scenes knowledge, is that the process accelerated after Prime Minister Starmer's meeting with Trump at the White House in late February. She reads steel and autos as a potential blueprint for how the US engages with other trade partners, and argues the more important next chapter is expanding the dialogue into formal UK–US tech partnerships across AI, defence, and robotics — sectors she frames as national security priorities.

European venture gaps

On whether the UK is a net importer or exporter of venture capital, Lamb is candid: she has personally allocated roughly 70% of her AUM to the US, which she describes as voting with her wallet. The structural problem in Europe has been a shortage of scaled, pre-IPO capital. Seed funding and early US crossover funds — Accel and Index found their footing in Europe; more recently Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz (via a crypto push), and NEA have moved in — but homegrown later-stage funds remain underdeveloped relative to the US. The industry is simply younger, she argues, and it takes time to build funds large enough to compete at growth stage.

The Nordics

Four of Sweet Capital's five founders are Swedish, so Lamb's enthusiasm for the Nordics as a tech cluster is not incidental. She points to Spotify, Skype, and King itself — headquartered in London but co-founded by Swedes, with a second office in Stockholm — as evidence that the region consistently produces breakout companies, particularly in gaming and consumer tech. She also highlights Eastern Europe as another pocket of outperformance, especially in gaming. Her broader point is that the Nordics challenge the narrative that Europe can't build generational companies.

The UK foundation model question

The UK has not produced a domestic foundation model equivalent to Mistral in France. Lamb notes that the UK has deep AI engineering talent — DeepMind was founded in London before Google acquired it, a point she treats as an ongoing sore spot — but converting that talent into sovereign AI infrastructure remains unresolved. The current Starmer government signed off on an AI action plan early in 2025 covering 20 initiatives to accelerate AI progress domestically, shaped in part by Matt Clifford, who has been advising Downing Street on AI and AI security. Whether that translates into a UK-backed foundation model is still an open question.

On the idea of backing European founders and sending them to San Francisco to build, Lamb is sympathetic but notes the line gets blurry fast — Stripe's Irish founders are the obvious example. Her priority, and what she sees as the UK government's real challenge, is retention: creating the conditions for multi-trillion-dollar-market-cap companies to be built and stay in the UK, rather than having talent exit to the US the way DeepMind effectively did.