Headline is a venture capital firm that invests in early and growth-stage companies, often taking leading roles in funding rounds.

Headline

Headline is a Venture Capital firm actively on the ground in 7 cities around the world. We invest across geographies, leading rounds at every stage. Once we commit to a team, we go to the ends of the earth to make their success global.

Our Early Stage Funds are based in the US, Europe, Asia, and Brazil, and invest locally. Our San Francisco-based Growth Fund invests globally from Series B and beyond, working in collaboration with our Early Stage Teams. The sizes and locations of these funds make it possible for us to see local trends up close, identify winning founders, and lead rounds at every stage. Sonos, The RealReal, Creditas, Sorare, Pismo, AppFolio, goPuff, Acorns, Farfetch, Segment, Bumble and Yeahka are among the stars in Headline’s world.

NGINX

Nom Nom

Coya

Deposit Solutions

Farfetch

Global Savings Group

Recurly

Freee

Acorns

Axios Media

Azimo

MADE

Sono Motors

Sonos

The RealReal

Streamlabs

Verse

Segment

SEMrush

Bird

Bright Health Group

brumbrum

Bumble

Clyde

Shipt

Can you challenge the duopoly of Mastercard and Visa? Lena's company is profitable, fresh of $60M in funding, and it leverages Open Banking. But what's the bigger trend? Why now? 

When Headline considers a new investment, this question is always at the core of our decision.

Nelson Casata and Jonathan Userovici gathered some of their thoughts on the bigger picture in a blog post on why open banking is at an inflection point, what makes the opportunity so exciting, and why Lena is the right person to interpret it. Link in comments.

Lena Hackelöer and her team at Brite Payments have quietly built one of Europe’s fastest-growing (and profitable) fintech startups- and today we’re celebrating their $60M Series A as they take on the likes of Visa and Mastercard!

Brite leverages open banking standards, with a focus on Account-to-Account (A2A) Payment technologies, one of the biggest opportunities for open banking. 

A2A Payments lets transactions flow directly from customer to merchant accounts, bypassing credit card schemes and fees. It's faster, smoother, more secure.

Based in Stockholm, Brite is laser-focused on developing a superior merchant and consumer product that is now connected to 3,800 banks in 25 countries across Europe.

Their proprietary payment rails can be plugged into any checkout process, and it's so good that it allowed them to reach profitability in 2022 without sacrificing growth. 🚀

Lena experienced the payment needs of merchants and consumers first-hand after leading Klarna's marketing efforts in the DACH region and as CEO of a publicly traded BNPL platform. Since founding Brite 5 years ago, she has assembled a team nearly 100 people strong.

We are excited to join today's $60M Series A round with Josh Bell and Dan Chaplin of Dawn Capital and Nicolai Chamizo of Incore Invest and believe that Lena and her team have all it takes to achieve in open banking what Headline portfolio companies like Pismo have achieved in the payment infrastructure space.

Story in comments:

Three months ago, Mistral AI broke records with the then-largest European Seed round of all time at $113M, despite having no product and being recently formed. Where are they now, three months later?

Arthur, Guillaume, and Timothee, along with their small but expert team, released their first model yesterday: the Mistral 7B. Trained on 7B parameters, they claim it outperforms all currently available open models with up to 13B parameters on both English and code benchmarks.

More importantly, it's open source under the Apache 2.0 license, making it usable without restrictions anywhere.

"Our ambition is to become the leading supporter of the open generative AI community and bring open models to state-of-the-art performance. We will make them the go-to solutions," they say. We can't wait to try the much larger models on novel architectures that they plan for this fall!

numa just raised $59M! Growth equity rounds of this size are increasingly rare in Europe, but Christian, Inga, Gerhard, and Dimitri are product-obsessed in a segment that grows at 2X the speed of the rest of the market: short-term rentals.

Christian has it in his genes: he grew up in the family hotel in the Black Forest. His co-founders come from finance and fintech. In 2019, they set themselves on building a digital hospitality platform to run both serviced apartments and hotels.

numa combines the quality standards and 24-hour service of traditional hotels with the convenience and flexibility of short-term rentals à la AirBnB. Their locations are central, have a kitchen, can be checked in and out with a mobile click, and run on proprietary technology that optimizes it all.

They started with Berlin shortly before the pandemic hit, adapted, and continued their growth regardless of it. They are now in 28 major cities across Europe. That's 4,500 units, or €1.5bn in real estate assets under management.

As early backers, we welcome new investors Verlinvest - the investment company backed by the families behind AB InBev - and Cape Capital and can't wait to check in at the many new locations they'll offer across Europe, Venice included!

You don't need a "trendy" topic to build a great company. Join us in celebrating Julian Lindinger and Konrad Geiger who just raised €24M for their career platform for electricians and blue-collar workers.

PowerUs addresses problems that are as important as they are overlooked: the shortage of craftsmen in Europe in general, and the lack of qualified personnel in the energy transition towards wind and solar sources.

In Germany alone, according to the main trade association, there currently is a shortage of around 40,000 trainees (most of them in climate-related roles) with over 150,000 total job vacancies in 2022.

With the platform, already utilized by 850 companies and 80,000 users, not only do jobs get fulfilled faster, but more fulfilling careers are started. The workers can access job opportunities, better understand their worth, and continue specializing in their craft where it matters.

We are happy to double down with this Series B round with General Catalyst, Eurazeo, and HV to continue backing these two founders who met at university and immediately started building after graduating!

For Thomas Gieselmann, Headline Co-Founder and General Partner, data "truly does remove bias in that it allows us to talk to companies that have traction but otherwise don't have access to traditional VC networks." 

More than 12 years ago, we started leveraging data and ML to build Searchlight, a platform used by our investment team to identify the fastest growing companies as potential investments, anywhere in the world. It also helps us identify the right time to invest in a company, like when they start to show signs of breakout growth and early product market fit. Today, Searchlight has become an integral part of our global strategy - leading to early investments in companies like Bitwarden, Segment and Semrush.

For more, check out this interview with Thomas in the Venture Capital Journal by David Bogoslaw.
https://lnkd.in/gu52ye9v

Time for a recap of this month’s top five #SeedstoTrack! Each month, Headline VP Nicolas von Blottnitz cross-references the latest Seed rounds with data from our proprietary sourcing technology, Searchlight, to bring you five interesting and fast-growing startups to watch. 

ScribeUp - a Chrome plugin that allows people to sign up for free subscription trials without using a credit card

Lex - a collaborative AI writing tool that brings the power of LLMs into the writing process founded by Nathan Baschez

Toothio- an on-demand talent marketplace for the dental industry

Polars- a Rust-based DataFrame library that’s making it easier for developers to query large amounts of data compatible with Python and JavaScript. 

highlight.io- an open-source application monitoring solution to help teams get insights into product usage and uptime

Are we missing anyone? Let us know what companies you’re following in the comments below 👇

"Branding is this interesting combination of clearly identifying who you are and who you want to be." - Mort Fertel, CEO of Poplin.

After going through a transformative rebrand ourselves in 2021, Headline now helps our portfolio companies rebrand at pivotal moments in their business journey.  In this new blog series, we share a behind-the-scenes look at how our brand studio, led by Molly Martell, helps portfolio companies find their voice. 

First up- how Sudshare became Poplin and its mission to make laundry a chore of the past.

https://lnkd.in/guAy6rW2

Time for a recap of this month's top five #SeedstoTrack! Each month, Headline VP Nicolas von Blottnitz cross-references the latest Seed rounds with data from our proprietary sourcing technology, Searchlight, to bring you the top five most interesting startups to watch. This month, AI, LLMs and open-source technology are what we're tracking:

⭐️ Reworkd AI (YC S23)- a browser-based autonomous AI agent that learns and adapts to new situations without human intervention.

⭐️ Dashworks - a corporate knowledge management platform powered by LLM to help democratize access to institutional knowledge and resources across a company.

⭐️ Cleanlab - a no-code LLM training and deployment solution that can help solve data tagging issues and other anomalies while also making it easy to deploy new models.

⭐️ Bluesky PBLLC - the open source protocol setting the standard for creating and managing decentralized social networks.

⭐️ SPIRITT- a service that enables anyone to create full-scale software apps without coding or design skills, using a hybrid AI and human app development service.

Are we missing anyone? Let us know what companies you’re following in the comments below 👇

“The Brazilian health market is fragmented and difficult for most people to access”. As a doctor and former CEO of two health insurance companies, Ítalo Martins has experienced the inefficiencies of the system first-hand.

Now, Ítalo is creating transparency with Fiibo, which we’re backing with a $3.7M Seed investment from Headline Brazil.

Fiibo brings health & wellness service providers, insurance companies, employers, and consumers on a single platform, turning a previously disjointed process into a seamless experience. Today it serves 60,000 consumers but plans to reach over a million users within the next two years. 

Fiibo isn’t just about streamlining, but also about giving people greater autonomy and choice. Whether you're a corporate benefits team, an employee, an insurance broker, or a provider, Fiibo’s marketplace empowers you to manage your health and wellness benefits effectively. 

In Ítalo’s words, "Fiibo isn't competing with existing market players, but innovating by offering them a digital platform to market their products and services with broader reach, simplicity, security, and visibility for consumers."

With two of our last three investments in Brazil being in the health sector, we're not just confident in the potential of Brazilian startups but also committed to backing innovations that will improve the lives of millions across the region. Congrats to Ítalo and team Fiibo!

#venturecapital #healthtech

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