Today, we’re announcing Headline EU VIII, our eighth early-stage fund dedicated to European founders. The $400 million fund will back Seed and Series A companies across Europe, with a focus on AI.1
Alongside Headline’s $900 million Global Growth Fund, which backs leading companies at Series B and beyond, EU VIII strengthens our ability to support European founders from their earliest stages through global scale.
“Headline has been much more than a Seed investor in Mistral. They believed in our ambition from day one, helped us think bigger at every stage, and consistently opened doors.” – Arthur, CEO of Mistral
Then and now
We started investing in Europe in the early 2000s, when the continent had engineering talent and a handful of promising companies. Back then, a founder with global ambition usually had to leave to realize it, and the path to a large outcome often ran through San Francisco.
That’s changed. The founders we meet today assume global scale from the first conversation and are hiring across borders from year one. Many have already worked at a company that scaled and are building on strengths Europe has had for decades in robotics, industrial software, healthcare, defense, and AI research from its universities and labs.
World-class and built here
We first partnered with Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix in 2023, just a few weeks after they founded Mistral. We have supported them ever since, most recently as an investor in their Series D through Headline’s Global Growth Fund.
“Headline has been much more than a Seed investor in Mistral,” says CEO Arthur Mensch. “They believed in our ambition from day one, helped us think bigger at every stage, and consistently opened doors. They were at their best during the moments that mattered most: playing a key role in Mistral’s $415 million Series A – the largest Series A ever raised in Europe – and at the defining inflection points of our journey.”
Mistral is part of a broader early-stage AI portfolio. On the foundational side, we’ve partnered with Black Forest Labs, Bioptimus, Fundamental Technologies, AMI Labs, and Recursive Superintelligence. At the application layer, we have backed Attio, DeepIP, Payflows, Primo, Searchable, Notch, and Procure AI. Each year, we publish the AI Europe 100, our list of the most promising AI-native startups on the continent. The list comes from the work we do all year, meeting and tracking founders building global AI companies out of Europe.
EU VIII is how we keep showing up for founders like these, at the earliest moment, when belief is just as important as funding.
A local partner with global reach
Headline is a global firm with deep European roots. Our investors and operators in Berlin, Hamburg, Luxembourg, Paris, London, San Francisco, São Paulo, Taipei, and Tokyo work as a team.
For founders in Europe, this means a partner in your city and colleagues in the markets you will grow into. We have helped dozens of European companies expand to the US, including Farfetch, NGINX, and Semrush, from setting up a first entity and making the first senior hires to introducing customers and preparing for a cross-border listing. We can lead a first round and, through Headline’s Global Growth Fund, a round of $100 million or more. The partner who wrote the first memo is still at the table.
Back to work
Thank you to the limited partners who have backed our team, many of whom have been with us across every fund. If you are building a company in Europe with global ambition, we want to meet you.
– Team Headline
€350 million raised converted to US dollars at an exchange rate of 1.14.