Mistral and Black Forest Labs backer Headline closes $400M European fund

Global VC Headline today announced the close of Headline EU VIII, its 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.

Active over the last two decades, Headline manages more than $5 billion and partners with founders from Seed through Growth across the globe, with investors and operators in Berlin, Hamburg, Luxembourg, Paris, London, San Francisco, São Paulo, Taipei, and Tokyo all working as a team. 

Headline's early-stage European investments include Mistral, Black Forest Labs, Fundamental Technologies, Attio, Bioptimus, AMI Labs, Recursive Superintelligence, Farfetch, Raisin, Natural Cycles, Staffbase, DeepIP, Payflows, Primo, Searchable, Notch, and Procure AI. 

Headline first partnered with Mistral founders Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix at the Seed stage in 2023, weeks after the company was founded, and has invested in every round since, most recently in the 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.” 

“The founders we meet today assume global scale from the first conversation and hire across borders from year one. We have been partnering with founders in Europe for more than twenty years, and the case for doing so has become clearer with each fund. EU VIII lets us keep doing that work,” said Christian Miele, Partner at Headline. 

Headline has 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. 

“The next generation of great AI companies is being founded in Europe right now, and we want to be their first call,” said Jon Userovici, Partner at Headline. “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.”