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Since launching our Early Stage and Growth Funds in San Francisco, we’ve established Early Stage funds in Asia, Europe, and South America. We created these funds to lead rounds at every stage, in every geography.

We are actively on the ground across continents, seeing local trends up close, searching for top founders, and bringing them our world of resources. Once we commit to a team, we go to the ends of the earth – connecting entrepreneurs to each other, to customers, and to insights from distant markets – to help them become a global success.

Investing globally

has always been our instinct.

Meet the Headline team! We are actively on the ground across continents, seeing local trends up close, searching for top founders, and bringing them our world of resources. Once we commit to a team, we go to the ends of the earth to help them become a global success.

Team | Headline

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Our Team

“So diverse in terms of the characters—there’s a German word, paradiesvögel.”—Christian Gaiser, Numa, Germany

“If I was kidnapped...he’d fly out and try to save the situation. He’s like an investing superhero.” —Noah Kerner, Acorns, US

“It feels like we are in control, and that’s how it should feel.” —Holger Seim, Blinkist, Germany

“I actually feel motivated to share candidly with them.” —Ashot Iskandarian, Shopmonkey, US

“I was flying home…so they met me at the Starbucks outside of security.” —Bianca Padilla, Carewell, US

“Other funds get panicky...they have a mentality of 'ah we'll fix it'.”  —Hjalmar Ståhlberg Nordegren, Karma, Sweden

"Still plenty of white space": Fintech Trends

Last year, Headline marked 25 years of partnering with generation-defining companies like Pismo, Raisin, Appfolio, Acorns, Defacto, Swile, and Zeller. After witnessing numerous market cycles, we’ve solidified our firm’s winning formula. Headline combines an acquired wisdom working alongside the best and brightest founders with real-time data to map trends and inform our future investments, so we can confidently say, “We know what’s next.” In this week’s Lookahead series, we share what to watch in 2024 across the firm’s Fintech pod, on both sides of the Atlantic. 

While the headlines may have suggested that “fintech is dead,” at Headline we believe that innovation in financial services has just scratched the surface. In the U.S. fintech companies have captured ~10% of the market opportunity. In Europe, progressive regulatory tailwinds and a breadth of talent graduating from the first iteration of unicorns serve to further our view that the local fintech ecosystem is maturing. Headline’s unique local-to-global strategy positions the fintech team to identify and compare emerging business models and innovations across Europe, the U.S., LatAm, and Asia. In 2024, we are focused on a few key sectors:

Wealth Management: The great wealth transfer is already starting, with an estimated $68T being passed on to younger generations who are looking for tech-first ways to manage their money, necessitating new applications in wealth and asset management. Our investment in Acorns was an early leader in this category, making personal finance more accessible to all income levels. From Europe, Raisin, with €55B in AuA (2024) is democratizing access to deposits, investments, and pension markets. 



B2B Payments/Innovation within Payments: In Europe, we are excited about the possibilities and adoption of account-to-account payments, while in the U.S. we are closely monitoring how real-time payments will develop. In both geographies, the majority of B2B payments occur on antiquated rails and merchants are dissatisfied with the traditional bank/card model. These inefficiencies provide a significant opportunity for payment startups to move volume online in a more efficient way through novel platforms and proprietary infrastructure. Our investments in iink, a payments network that helps restoration professionals get paid more efficiently after an insured property loss, and Brite Payments, an account-to-account payments platform based in Sweden, are working to do just that.

 

AI Applications: Some of AI’s early applications were in fintech–i.e. fraud detection/prevention models and underwriting models–and we are bullish on how AI will be further leveraged to improve bookkeeping, payment reconciliation, and fraud detection. For example, Our investment in Defacto, a France-based company that offers short-term financing for SMBs through an embedded API-first approach. The company is using AI to streamline the loan application process to deliver results in seconds and to proactively advise customers on the optimal timing to initiate a loan based on real-time cash flows. 



Intersection of Climate x Fintech: In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act is spurring innovation and demand for solutions to monitor, report, and reduce carbon emissions and maximize tax credits. Europe is much farther ahead, with the adoption of these platforms at the consumer, government, and corporate levels already making an impact. Furthermore, the continued transition of the grid towards renewable energy will provide new opportunities in areas such as energy pricing, lending, and infrastructure. Our investment in Monta, A Danish operating platform powering the EV charging ecosystem reflects these tailwinds.

We believe that the fintech market has recovered from recent market adjustments and that 2024 will see the re-emergence of fintech headlines. The last 12-18 months have represented a readjustment of the investor mix as “tourist” investors have largely backed off fintech. With their absence, fintech multiples have mostly normalized lower than their recent comps in the private markets. The confluence of this price reset and resurgence in the funding market combined with massive tailwinds across fintech subsectors, make us excited to see what 2024 brings. Given our historic experience investing in payments as well as balance sheet businesses, Headline is well placed to engage with the fintech ecosystem of tomorrow.

Are you building a fintech company that maps to these themes? Pitch us here.

Written by King Goh, in collaboration with Sophia Samutin and Yusuf Janahi.

From A2A payments to AI-enabled bookkeeping, payment reconciliation, and fraud detection: Fintech trends

Headline Lookahead: Fintech

From A2A payments to AI-enabled bookkeeping, payment reconciliation, and fraud detection.

We at Headline are beyond excited to announce our lead investment in Heidi Health's Series A funding round. Like many in the VC industry evaluating the increasingly crowded medical scribe market, my initial reaction was skepticism: How does this market continue to differentiate? But I’ve learned to spend time peeling back the onion whenever customers are demanding something so fervently.

The Burden Behind Healthcare's Innovation Challenge

We often underestimate the immense burden doctors carry—the emotional toll of patient care combined with mountains of administrative work that leads to stress, burnout, and ultimately, lower-quality care. What stood out about Heidi wasn't just their approach to documentation, but their bold, contrarian choices that resonated with clinicians worldwide.

At Headline, we're deeply aligned with Heidi's philosophy: take a global, customer-first approach, prove value before focusing on monetization, and make contrarian bets that others overlook. Their approach is more than paying off—it's revolutionizing how doctors interact with technology.

A few data points really jumped off the page for us:

Cohort usage expansion: Each new cohort of users engages with the product more intensively than the previous cohort—a clear signal of improving product-market fit over time.

Cross-specialty penetration: About 50% of usage comes from outside their top 5 medical practice groups—a breadth of adoption we haven't seen from anyone else in healthcare scribes.

Unprecedented scale: In just over a year, Heidi is facilitating 1 million patient consultations weekly—20 million in their first 12 months—overtaking far more established players across the USA, UK, and Australia.

Explosive growth trajectory: In the six months since we first evaluated the deal, they've more than tripled both users and revenue.

The Contrarian Choices That Set Heidi Apart

What truly differentiates Heidi is their willingness to challenge conventional wisdom:

Customization focus over EHR integrations: While competitors raced to build clunky EHR integrations, Heidi prioritized templates and customization—giving doctors exactly what they want: notes that match their personal style.

Global from day one: Building an international solution from the start that works across diverse healthcare systems rather than conquering one market at a time.

Product-led out of Australia: Creating a PLG motion on par with, if not better than, the likes of Canva and Atlassian—proving exceptional consumer-grade software can emerge from anywhere.

Customer obsession at scale: Fostering an obsessive level of customer engagement that we had truly never seen before in healthcare technology.

The World Health Organization projects a shortfall of 10 million healthcare workers by 2030. By automating documentation—which consumes over two hours of a doctor's day—Heidi isn't just building a productivity tool; they're addressing a global healthcare capacity crisis.

The Heidi team has proven they can execute product-led distribution from free to paid, paid to enterprise, faster than any company I've seen, let alone in healthcare. They've achieved this not in one country, but five, demonstrating that their solution transcends the peculiarities of individual healthcare systems.

The Heidi team will continue to drive innovation through product-led delivery and customer obsession to make clinicians' lives better everyday. We know they will continue to deliver on this promise as they expand beyond scribing to become an essential partner for healthcare professionals worldwide. The Heidi team’s relentless focus on product excellence, customer experience, and sustainable growth made this an easy investment decision. We couldn't be more excited for what's ahead.

Our Investment in Heidi Health’s Series A: An AI Scribe to Relieve Doctors' Admin Stress

Learn how Headline led a follow‑on Series A to supercharge Heidi Health’s AI‑powered medical scribe platform, enabling over 1M weekly consultations across five countries and reshaping clinical documentation for greater clinician well‑being and global scalability.

Heidi Health’s Series A: An AI Scribe to Relieve Doctors' Admin Stress | Headline

Headline's Investment in Heidi Health’s Series A: An AI Scribe to Relieve Doctors' Admin Stress

This is part 5 of a 6-part series on the trends that are changing Software-As-A-Service (Saas) for Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs):

🛒Trend #1: Shopify’s growth creates new markets
🍉Trend #2: Restaurants fight for independence from delivery and discovery platforms
👋 Trend #3: Work, reinvented
👔 Trend #4: The rise of vertical biz management software
🤴 Trend #5: HR made simple(r)! - Below
👹 Trend #6: Bookkeeping becomes understandable

If you'd like to have your company featured in this article, feel free to reach out! We would love to hear from you.


As of today, two-thirds of small and medium-sized businesses (“SMBs”) still rely on pen and paper to manage payroll, time off, and absences.


Most of the remaining third run these processes on Excel and email. As a result, major inaccuracies take place and expensive mistakes are made.

On average, SMBs spend 5 hours calculating, filing, and paying payrolls for each pay period (ref). The rise of remote-first policies compounded the issue with the emerging need to handle relocations, visa changes, and office transfers. It is estimated that in a post-Covid world, 50% of the global skilled workforce, comprising around 140M individuals will be interested in relocating internationally. The resulting paperwork is currently outsourced to specialized HR agencies: Helping companies offer more flexible work arrangements while reducing the HR workload is the opportunity.

And of course, there is a massive talent crunch affecting all industries and technology in particular. These falling unemployment rates have led companies to double down on international hiring. Yet, navigating local labor laws in 150+ countries is a major challenge for HR departments and the relevant processes can be a pain for employees and employers alike.

Increasingly, SMBs are forced to adopt more modern human resource management solutions, employers of record platforms, and global mobility software to tackle the above-mentioned challenges. This entry focuses on these.

These platforms often begin as payroll automation services. Automating payroll is a great entry point, as this is one of the most painful processes for SMBs. For example, Pento (Denmark) has grown by offering a solution where users can import employee data, manage absences, and automate payments platforms.

The “more complete” solutions include the likes of Zenefits (US, raised $584M), Gusto (US, raised 516M$), Personio (Germany, raised $254M), PayFit (France, raised $208M), Rippling (US, raised $197M), HiBob (Israel, raised $124M), Bamboo HR (US), Factorial (Spain), and Kenjo (Germany), Humaans.io (UK), CharlieHR(UK), Humi (Canada), EddyHR (US), CharlieHR (UK). They all aim to simplify payroll management but also support other tasks such as hiring, onboarding, time and performance tracking, absence management, and benefits administration. Their goal is to become a complete human resources hub, tackling any tasks related to HR.

In order to create a complete HRIS hub, these companies have to overcome two major challenges:

1/ First, providers need to bundle different features without turning their platforms into clunky software. The HR hubs can rely on API integrations and possible revenue share partnerships with some dedicated software (like well-being or training management solutions). The European leader in this space, Personio (Germany) recently opened an app marketplace to facilitate the integration of third-party applications within its software. Similarly, People Spheres (France) built an HRIS platform "a la carte" by building a core HR platform and relying on integrations with third-party software to provide different modules (planning, expense, performance management, etc). 

2/ Secondly, geographic expansion is complex. The US and European markets are very segmented when it comes to specific regulations, labor laws, healthcare, insurance, and retirement plans. This means that many of these players are very localized.



⭐ Remote-first HR platforms & employers of record:  57% of SMBs in the US said that they will maintain remote working as an option following the pandemic (ref). The future of work, at least in the majority of desk-bound industries, seems to be a hybrid mix of office and remote work. Yet:

1/ Administrating remote employees and freelancers is tricky. Employers need to adapt contracts to match local labor laws, adjust benefits, onboard remotely, and manage payments for over 150+ countries. Moreover, most companies do not have the legal infrastructure, expertise, or resources required to support a global workforce.  

2/ Traditional HR platforms were not architected to specifically manage a remote workforce.  A new set of players now focus on remote workforce management. There are two categories of these platforms: 

⭐ Technology-first HR management platforms, include the likes of PapayaGlobal (US, raised $195M), Deel (US, raised $425), Rippling (US, raised $197M) RemoteTeam (US), Remote (US), Oyster (US), Boundless (US), Lano (Germany), Goco.io (US), WorkMotion (Germany), that have built dashboards and processes to manage contractors and employees worldwide. SMBs are able to generate local law-compliant contracts and manage payroll in 100+ currencies. Moreover, they offer their own managed companies to hire employees via their network of local employers of record. This simplifies hiring employees worldwide by removing the need to set up local entities.

Similarly, legacy companies and agencies such as Globalization Partners (US, raised $150M), Velocity Global (US, raised $100M), Elements Global Services (US), or Safeguard Global (US) have developed their own legal infrastructure for managing employees. They are international employers of record themselves, meaning they incorporate their own entities worldwide, and can hire their clients' employees on their behalf.



For example, Globalization Partners currently supports 2000 clients via 50+ incorporated entities. These companies only started developing their own HR management SaaS platforms recently, in reaction to recent market developments and emerging competition by tech-enabled players. 



⭐ Outsourced contractors: There is a growing need for virtual assistants across HR, accounting, or daily assistance to executives. 70% of SMBs were already working with freelancers in the last 3 months and 81% of them want to hire more freelancers in the future (ref). For SMBs, it is often a simple way to leverage the skills of an expert during a few hours per week, at an accessible price, without any legal and regulatory concerns.  

To hire and manage remote contractors, dedicated platforms offer to handle the full process, from selection to hiring. Bambee (US) allows their users to get a dedicated HR person for 99$/month. Double (US) and Inv.tech (US) offer an executive assistant on-demand at an hourly rate. Pilot (US, raised $161M), Bench (US), Xendoo (US), Zeni (US), Taxfyle (US) are able to match their users with a dedicated bookkeeping team. OnePilot (France) can handle all support tasks, even outside of business hours. 

⭐ Employee engagement and wellbeing: In a remote environment, it is key for SMBs to constantly assess the well-being of employees. Swile (France, our portfolio company) Peakon (France), Lattice (US, raised $154M) CultureAmp (Australia, raised $151M), Reflektive (US) 15Five (US), Jubiwee (France), Glintinc (US), Performetry (France), Windoo (France), Supermood (France), capture insights about employee's wellbeing.

⭐ Mental support: Lyra (US, raised $475M), Modern Health (US, raised $167M), Mindstrong (US, raised $160M), Ginger (US, raised $221M), Spring Health (US, raised $106M), Spill (UK), Teale (France), Holivia (France), Moka Care (France) Unmind (UK), FrankieHealth (Ireland), or PeppyHealth (UK) measure employee well-being and provide proactive and reactive mental support, with the help of therapists and interactive content.



⭐ OKR reporting: Lattice (US, raised $154M), GTMHub (Bulgaria), Perdoo (Germany), Ally (US), Workboard (US), Koan (US), Leapsome (Germany),  OkayHQ (US), Pathlight (US) collect key metrics from various sources (CRM, support solutions, product metrics via Segment (💛) and help businesses to conceive, display, and follow objective and key results (OKR). To bridge the gap between planning and executing, they also integrate with major project management software.  

These companies benefit from two tailwinds. First, SMBs have been accelerating their digital transformations over the last few years. Secondly, there is a rise in the popularity of OKR models  OKR-management software is aiming for a broad market that is composed of SMBs, SMEs, start-ups, scale-ups, and enterprises.

⭐ Culture building, Goal celebration: Building a culture of recognition helps companies to retain their employees, and align people behind the same goals. Employees feel like  their company values them and the impact of their contributions This is particularly important when companies grow or transition to new processes over time (such as when switching to a remote-work model).  

PerkBox (UK), Bonusly (US), and KazooHR (US) all built gamified platforms, where the most engaged employees are recognized by their colleagues. It's a peer-to-peer recognition scheme, which encourages engagement and celebration of small improvements. The most recognized colleagues can get small rewards like bonuses or day-offs. SetSail (US) integrates with CRM data, offers OKR management features, and rewards best-sales practices.  

Droyd (France), Disco (US), and HeyTaco (US) help to celebrate team achievements on Slack. They integrate with major data sources to share milestones publicly.

⭐ Sales commission management: Building a sales commission system is complex. It requires designing commission rules, extracting sales data that is often siloed, computing compensation, reporting the data in accounting solutions, and processing the payments. 75% of businesses are relying on spreadsheets to process commission calculations and each business has its own way of designing its commission plan, which is often more complex than payroll math.

CaptiveIQ (US) Spiff (US), QuotaPath (US), Sales Vista (US), Qobra (France), Equalto (Germany), Amalia.io (France) conceived no-code, excel-like, collaboration dashboards to design commission plans and execute them in a few clicks. They fetch sales data and calculate the compensation automatically to provide a flexible editor to adapt to any commission plan.

⭐ Employee equity management software: Ledgy(Switzerland), Capdesk(UK) offer a user interface for employees to follow the evolution of their equity pool. Employees can follow their ownership, and automatically vest stocks. These tools are used to keep company stakeholders and employees aligned.

Many thanks to Ilan Nabeth for the invaluable research that made this series possible, and to Yusuf Janahi and Anna-Stella Fetha for your contributions!


Next: Trend #6: Bookkeeping becomes understandable

Mapping SMEs SaaS #5: HR Made Simpler. Jonathan Userovici from Headline is mapping 90+ companies challenging how hiring and retaining talent happen.

Landscape Map: HR Made Simpler | Headline

We have long been searching for a winner in the open banking category. This is why we believe we have found it. Brite is not only one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech companies but also one of its few profitable ones.

Additional credits in Brite's due diligence and in this blog post go to Yusuf Janahi, Nelson Casata, and the Headline FinTech team.

Today’s $60M Series A follows a breakout year for Brite Payments. Founded in Stockholm by Lena Hackelöer, an experienced payments executive, Brite is on a mission to equip businesses with instant payments and payouts. Brite is not only one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech companies but also one of its few profitable ones.

Laser-focused on execution and operating away from the spotlight, Lena and her team more than doubled transaction volume and revenue in 2022, achieving profitability in less than five years from their founding. They accomplished this by offering a superior merchant and consumer product in a space that experiences double-digit growth each year: open banking.

Headline has long had its eye on this category, searching for a company that can achieve in open banking what Pismo (recently acquired by Visa for $1B in cash) achieved in the payment infrastructure space.

Open Banking is enabled by PSD2, the European Union directive that regulates payment services and payment service providers in Europe. Its primary goal is to create an integrated European payments market with more secure, fast, and efficient payment standards.

The most significant application of Open Banking comes from Account-to-Account Payments (A2A) technologies. These enable transactions to flow directly from a customer's account to a service provider's account (and vice versa), bypassing credit card schemes like Visa and Mastercard, along with the associated fees they charge.

The benefits of PSD2 are clear. However, it's worth noting that PSD2 has been in existence since 2015! So, what makes it worth talking about now, nine years later?

Timing is one of the main factors when Headline considers a new investment. And based on our analysis, Brite has it. The product features developed by Brite and their approach perfectly fit the timing of several tailwinds:

Real-Time Payments (RTP) are on the rise. The UK has FPS, Europe got Instant SEPA, and the U.S. recently embraced FedNow (more in this post from our colleague Sophia). Now that the rails are built, bank adoption is trickling in at a global level. 


Digital Banking is universal. Today, most people have at least one banking app on their phone (61% of Europeans, 93% in Britain), allowing them to authenticate Open Banking payments. As the user experience and interface improves, consumer adoption grows. 


Vendors are increasingly exposed to bank fraud and are actively trying to mitigate it, especially in today's uncertain macroeconomic environment.


Open Banking players that focus on infrastructure will be increasingly commoditized as the tech debt of incumbent banks decreases. The product depth of pure-play payment initiators (vs. full-blown instant settlement) limits the value proposition for merchants. 


The underlying figures speak for themselves: The average annual growth of Open Banking users was +50% between 2020 and 2024. This steady increase meant going from 25M to 130M users globally. Half of them are located in Europe.

Today, card payments account for 50% of all transactions in Europe. Yet, they still present severe challenges to businesses and consumers alike. Deep A2A product offerings like Brite’s solve a lot of them:

A2A use cases are increasingly mature, which leads to increased unit economics for businesses and higher customer satisfaction for users. For example:

Businesses with high Average Transaction Values (ATVs) like airlines or car dealerships see noticeable margin improvements by saving on card fees and experiencing less fraud.

Life gets far easier for all the participants of marketplaces and gig economy platforms. Funds become available immediately without having to wait 2-3 days like with card payments or wires.

Subscription economies no longer face card expiration issues thanks to automatic renewals.

Companies like Brite are rare in their approach and their capital efficiency. Until now, companies in this space focused more on building a superior product for both merchants and consumers rather than advertising tremendous growth. Brite achieved both. Plus, today’s very substantial funding comes on top of a €5.5M Seed round in 2020.

Since then, they have also developed an offering that is available in 25 countries across Europe and connects with 3,800+ banks. Their customer base includes fintechs, marketplaces, and e-commerce platforms.

Lena, the founder of Brite, led Klarna’s DACH growth efforts (including those of Sofort, a German Open Banking business that Klarna acquired) and was CEO of a publicly traded BNPL platform before setting out to build Brite. We’re incredibly impressed by her deep understanding of the payments space in all its forms, and no less by her obsession with building customer-centric products. Since founding Brite, she has assembled an all-star roster of nearly 100 people. 

In less than 5 years, the Brite team has developed a superior product offering that runs on payment rails that were built in-house. These include:

Instant Payment Network (IPN): Funds are settled in 15 seconds across Europe, even in markets without instant schemes, heavily bolstering defensibility

Instant Payins: This enables open banking payments, giving merchants immediate access to liquidity without the risk of fraud and chargebacks

Instant Payouts: Running 24/7/365, this API-based payout ensures a superior customer experience with instant access to refunds.  Brite is the exclusive provider of Klarna’s A2A solution, Sofort 

Recurring Payments: Subscriptions powered by open banking reduce card churn

Brite Play: Allows merchants to sign up users in ways that are easy and standardized - including e.g. Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance processes, reducing drop-offs

Brite exemplifies our local-to-global approach, driven by our on-the-ground presence in seven world capitals across four continents. We firmly believe that Europe is the ideal place to cultivate the world’s Open Banking champion. Why? Because:

50% of global A2A payment volumes are European

Established infrastructure frameworks like PSD2 (and soon PSD3) and anti-fraud legislation provide clarity, minimizing the regulatory uncertainties that often affect FinTech businesses 

A2A payments can truly challenge the American card duopoly of Mastercard and Visa - creating a European payment method. This is in the best interest of all players involved - regulators, banks, and merchants alike. 

Merchants are increasingly demanding more efficient payment rails that traditional card networks are ill-prepared to provide. 

The opportunity, however, couldn’t be more global. Open banking legislation has also been enacted in disparate markets like Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia, with Canada and Australia soon to follow.

Brite is well-positioned to become the leading provider of global instant payments and payouts. We can’t wait to work alongside Lena and her team as they create an alternative payment network that rivals the likes of Visa and Mastercard.

Why Is Open Banking at The Inflection Point? Investing in Brite

Headline has long been searching for a winner in the open banking category. This is why we believe we have found it in Brite, not only one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech companies but also one of its few profitable ones.

Lighting-up Open Banking | Headline

Why Is Open Banking at The Inflection Point?

In early 2020, we met a tiny French team building the new Panini, digitally. 

A fantasy football game where players could own and trade the cards in their collection, courtesy of the Ethereum blockchain. It would be our last in-person meeting before the COVID-19 lockdowns. The timing couldn’t have been worse as all football leagues were shutting down. The tiny team was Sorare, who just closed Europe’s largest-ever Series B - $680 million at a $4.3 billion valuation. This is the story of what set them apart and ultimately made us lead that early round.

At Headline we have always been fascinated by blockchain technologies and the markets forming around them. We invested in a Bitcoin-Ripple exchange more than 15 years ago. Spoiler: It didn’t work out. We were surprised and equally worried about the early ICO craze in 2016, back when even Steven Seagal had one.

It was then that we got excited about a new segment, Non-Fungible Tokens. NFTs prove ownership of a digital item - image, sound file, tweet - in the same way, people own crypto coins like Bitcoin. But unlike cryptos that are identical and worth the same (1 BTC = 1 BTC, duh), NFTs are indivisible and strangely unique. They are more akin to artwork.

Early projects like Crypto Punks made big waves at launch that today echo in the proud owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club snobby primates avatars. We chalked most off as speculative hype, but the idea stayed in our heads.

It wasn’t until early 2020 that we spotted a truly intriguing NFT concept. Through the grapevine of football nerds, we heard of a couple of French entrepreneurs building the new Panini, digitally. We loved the sound of it.

Our good friends at Seedcamp made the connection (forever grateful, Sia!). Back then, Sorare’s Discord only had a handful of members. We joined the Discord and saw they truly believed in the community and the sport. NFTs felt special and personal.

When we spoke with Sorare’s CEO and co-founder Nicolas Julia, we found him both precise and structured, and highly passionate. He had a staggering clear vision despite the early stage BTW: here’s the funding deck he approached Headline with.

He envisioned a scenario greater than “just” a fantasy football game. His was a platform for fans from all over the world to meet, own their games, track up-and-coming players. An entirely new kind of media platform.

Early traction was impressive. Three months in, their user retention was  >60%, with an incredibly high average revenue per user. 50+ football clubs had already been onboarded.

“It’s a brand new market for the clubs and leagues. It’s not competing with video games or existing media. We are expanding their reach to new audiences and geographies. And it’s a way to consolidate the digital leadership of their brands” says founder Nicolas Julia.

All of this with a tiny pre-seed round, no paid marketing, and only 5 members in the team. This was unique. What were they “doing right”? We recently spoke with some of the early users, to recount what stopped us in our tracks during our research:

“Two things made Sorare stand out: Their capacity of consistently onboard official clubs to the platform and how, from Day 1, they made any new iteration of the platform a joint effort between the community and the development team” says Mark Sharman, one of the original Sorare beta testers who now earns from professionally trading Sorare cards and other NFT assets.

“In 2018, I was playing an NFT baseball game. I liked the sport, the design of the cards, and the official license. But I felt the owners weren’t listening to the community. They made mistakes on the card's rarity that turned users off. Nicolas from Sorare found me on that game’s Discord’s channel and asked me how I would feel around a collectible game around football. Others had tried before, but they held no official rights and relied on cartoon characters or infringing copyright licenses.”

“They didn’t build Sorare in a vacuum and then try to market it. They were never too proud to keep pushing in the wrong direction. When they made mistakes, they were always open to admit them. They’d take that back, and rebuild the product. What they built is a community. There is no space for sunken-cost fallacies in that.”

“Nicolas started a new Discord with me, his co-founder, and a handful of soccer and crypto enthusiasts that are still involved to this day. 30 beta testers were trying the platform in late February 2019. They took the time to try over and over until they got the formula right. It got competitive from the beginning, even if the first cards were from the Belgian league and most of us didn’t know much about it”.

Another user who prefers to stay as a background source echoes these thoughts:

“Other companies go wrong because they are building the game they want while pretending it’s the game you want. Sorare got a bunch of people that really liked football together and kept asking relevant questions. They kept working with them and it eventually became a collective achievement. They didn’t build Sorare in a vacuum and then try to market it. They were never too proud to keep pushing in the wrong direction. When they made mistakes, they were always open to admit them. They’d take that back, and rebuild the product. What they built is a community. There is no space for sunken-cost fallacies in that.”

Like every company, Sorare had its fair share of faux pas in the early days. But it was always quick to address them, as explains founder Nicolas Julia himself: 

“Something we did wrong, in the beginning, was thinking we could just move from the early adopters to a mainstream audience. Nobody can. The product takeaway is constantly moving from a niche audience to a slightly larger niche over and over.”

"Sorare is built around three core principles that reflect this”, continues the Paris-based entrepreneur. “The first is empathy towards the community. I know everyone says this and it might come across as bullshit, but we truly stick to it. Everyone in the company talks daily with our users and listens. Building in the open is a key part of Sorare’s success”.

“The second is velocity. We can make mistakes along the way, but we need to keep the agility to fix them fast and move on. It’s about having a mentality where every team moves fast, not just product design or engineering”. 

“Finally, there’s ambition: We are creating something entirely new. How can we achieve it if we limit ourselves to the goals we had set? We could have never raised this kind of Series without this mindset.”

So far, Nicolas’s mental framework is reflected in the tremendous growth of Sorare: The number of monthly active paying Sorare users continued growing by 34X between Q2 2020 and Q2 2021, with quarterly sales increasing by 51X.

180 professional football clubs have now adopted the platform and granted their licensing rights, with world stars like Barcelona’s Gerard Piqué and Atlético Madrid’s Antoine Griezmann involved both as investors and Sorare players. 

“Antonie wants to compete” continues Mark Sharman, “He fights for the leaderboards. He makes some great purchases, but he’s fighting for the leaderboards. And he’s winning prizes.” 

“You know how at the start of the season players proudly compare their own FIFA cards and ratings? Many professional football players reach out to us to check how their Sorare cards are doing after their last played game. This kind of special relationship with all users is one of the strengths of our company” tells us Brian O’Hagan, an early team member of the company who leads the Growth team.

“There are three kinds of Sorare users: Casual football fans can seek their own players and compete in fantasy tournaments. Professional traders are after a return on their investments. Crypto enthusiasts collect and hold. They all get something out of the platform”.

This diverse community is super active in building all kinds of third-party applications. SorareData, a platform that uses the Sorare API to provide market data, player stats, and scouting features even bagged a $700K funding round of its own.

Of course, we couldn’t know Sorare would go on redefining best-in-class metrics for consumer business and building an ecosystem when we first invested in 2019, but the mindset was already clear back then: Where others focused on the collectibles, Sorare used the technology to give fans new ways to connect with one another and football.

At the core, we saw three key advantages in Sorare:

1) It’s truly a community product, and our thesis is that it will be successful as long as it stays one. 

2) Utility is a core feature of any successful NFT. If your NFT is just beautiful, it might not be enough. But if it has certain perks to it, NFTs unleash their power. Sorare's cards can be used on any given match day. That’s a retention driver.

3) Europe: There is no better place on earth to start a soccer-focused company, build relationships with clubs and leagues. Europe is the cradle of soccer and this plays to the strengths of the business.

It’s mind-boggling what Sorare can achieve when they leave the beta and focus on consumer acquisition and/ or to more verticals. One could easily imagine a media arm spinning from the main game alone to be worth €1bn+. 

As Nicolas Julia himself puts it:

“Every time we close a funding round, I come back to the team and explain it’s a milestone towards the next step. But that we need to keep focusing on what has been important for us since Day 1: sticking to the values we share with our users and continue growing. What has been working the past six months might not work for the following six.”

With its passionate community, long-term utility, and deep relationships in the European soccer universe, Sorare built three defensible moats that will be very hard to compete against. To the entire Sorare team: this is your day, you deserve this!

Congratulations to Softbank (SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and the SoftBank Latin America Fund), Bessemer Ventures, IVP, Hillhouse, Atomico, Blisce, D1 Capital, and Eurazeo. Great to have you alongside Headline, Benchmark, Accel, Partech, Futury Capital, business angels like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and football players Gerard Piqué, Rio Ferdinand, and Antoine Griezmann.

Europe’s Largest B Round: Why We Invested in Sorare

Christian Miele and Dominic Wilhelm on why Headline invested in the fantasy sports video game Sorare. When we first invested in 2019, the mindset was already clear back then: Where others focused on the collectibles, Sorare used the technology to give fans new ways to connect with one another and football.

Europe’s Largest B Round: Why We Invested in Sorare | Headline

This is part 2 of a 6 part series on the trends that are changing Software-As-A-Service (Saas) for Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs):

🛒Trend #1: Shopify’s growth creates new markets
🍉Trend #2: Restaurants fight for independence from delivery and discovery platforms - Below :)
👋 Trend #3: Work, reinvented
👔 Trend #4: The rise of vertical biz management software
🤴 Trend #5: HR made simple(r)!
👹 Trend #6: Bookkeeping becomes understandable

If you'd like to have your company featured in this article, feel free to reach out! We would love to hear from you.

Intro: Restaurants want to avoid third-party apps

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants were some of the first businesses to undergo (read: be forced into) large-scale digitization. Online delivery platforms such as Doordash, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Delivery Hero (amongst others) have been some of the largest beneficiaries of the pandemic by allowing restaurants to continue serving customers during the lockdowns.

As online food delivery becomes more prevalent, a dichotomy between the interest of restaurants and digital platforms emerges. Food delivery platforms (Uber Eats, Deliveroo, JustEat, Doordash...) and discovery platforms (Trip Advisor, Yelp, Zomato...) have now assumed a more dominant position in their relationship with the restaurants using their platforms. 

Restaurants have become dependent on them to access their customers and to generate traffic for their services. These third-party platforms cannibalize their own traffic by charging restaurants a 20 to 30% commission for directing customers to them. 

Recognizing the increasingly dominant position of food delivery and discovery platforms, a number of companies focusing on developing alternative third-party software for restaurants have emerged. 

These companies offer software that recreates many of the experiences provided by traditional food delivery aggregators while providing a greater degree of independence and customization to restaurants themselves.

Services offered by these companies include processing online orders, allowing restaurants to develop their own brands online, and fostering word of mouth through marketing campaigns.  

Some of these solutions are looking to go even deeper into a restaurant's technology stack and allow them to reassess long-accepted offline operations. These include processes like food production and supply management, personalizing the client service experience, and accelerating table turnover in physical dining areas.

In order to simplify the presentation of these various solutions, we have categorized them below.

Restaurants are seeking new ways of managing their online operations while also creating new sources of revenue.


⭐  Website Builders: ChowNow (US), BentoBox (US), PopMenu (US), Lunchbox (US), Flipdish (Dublin), Slerp (UK), Orderyoyo (Denmark),

Onvi (UK), ZenChef (France), PepperHQ (UK) help brick-and-mortar restaurants to build their own ordering website using low code solutions.


Compared to classic horizontal website builders (like Wix), these solutions are specifically designed to display an online menu in an appealing way.  The idea behind these software solutions is to keep customers on a restaurant’s own website by incorporating third-party reviews, images, recommendations, and menu descriptions on the web page.


Customers are then driven to spend more time on a restaurant’s website allowing for greater conversion and an increased amount of data points to assess future interactions.  At scale, these businesses aim to allow businesses to control their own end-to-end online experience with their customers.

Ultimately, these solutions intend to have customers order and pay directly for their meals from a restaurant’s website.
(unsurprisingly, BentBox has recently been acquired by payment giant Fiserv)

⭐  Marketing Solutions. These tend to be industry-agnostic, but over the last few years, there have been a number of businesses that have been developing dedicated marketing tech for the restaurant industry. As they process customers' orders through their platform-generated websites, companies such as Lunchbox, ZenChef, and BentoBox also capture specific customer data. This can then be leveraged to collect feedback, target customers via email, create personalized loyalty programs and/or gift services. 

⭐  Last-mile delivery: It is more accessible and cost-efficient for most restaurants to offer online ordering through a third-party fleet than to build their own delivery and driver infrastructure. Once restaurants receive an online order, they can rely on flexible delivery fleets like Kitch (Portugal),Quiqup (UK), Stuart (France), Shipday (US), Grupomox (Spain), Bosta (Egypt), or Olo (US, IPO). These platforms charge a flat fee or a commission fee that is significantly cheaper than the 30% fee on delivery that marketplaces such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo charge currently.

⭐ Online order management: Restaurants tend to use multiple food delivery platforms at any given time. This means they can receive orders from various platforms at the same time. To manage order flows, restaurants can use platforms such as Deliverect (Belgium), Simply Delivery (Germany), Innovorder (France), RushHour (France), Ordatic (Spain), Sinqro (Spain) getpacked (Germany) to centralize their orders in a single interface. To avoid order dispersion, these platforms are connected to food delivery platforms. They work by collecting orders, aggregating them in a POS or in their own interface.


Increasing table turnover, helping waiters and cooking staff to become more efficient, or managing orders digitally are examples of existing offline practices that restaurants are looking to digitize. 

⭐ Offline order and payment solutions (QR codes): Taking orders, serving food, and printing receipts are examples of low-value and repetitive work for wait staff.  Sunday (France), Skeat (France), and Crave (US) are self-service menu, ordering, and payment platforms.

Customers can flash a QR code on the table ray and access all the relevant information regarding the space in which they are dining. Customers can view the restaurant’s menu, order, and pay from their phones. These apps are also connected to popular points of sales.

These solutions allow for a higher turnover per table, less human interaction in a single dining space, and more efficient dining processes within a restaurant.

⭐  Point of Sales (POS). Restaurant POS terminals like Toast (US, $902M), Lightspeed (Canada, IPO), Revel System (US, raised $189M), Touch Bistro (US, $209M), Micros (US, acquired by Oracle), Tiller (France), SumUp (UK, raised $1.4B), Onslip (Sweden),  L'addition (France), Last (Spain) simplify a number of aspects within a restaurants existing payments and finance stack including billing, payroll management, and inventory management.

As these POS businesses scale, they tend to move towards allowing restaurants to monitor customer engagement and are provide further restaurant operation features. For example, TouchBistro has built a platform that gives its client gift cards, loyalty systems, digital menus, and online payment features. Toast allows restaurant owners to manage employee schedules and organize relevant shifts. 

⭐ Sourcing and procurement: The ordering process between food buyers (restaurants) and food producers (farms, big corporations, and agri-combines) is currently conducted via outdated manual processes (paper notes, voice calls, handwritten invoices, and emails). Furthermore, these processes have been traditionally dominated by localized relationships and paper-run processes. 

Platforms like Choco (Germany), Rekki (UK), Heqtor (France), Butterapp.io (US), ShelfNow (UK), Katoo (Spain), Silo (US), or Tinvio (Singapore) connect restaurants, food producers, and logistic companies in a single centralized marketplace. Catalogs can be easily checked, orders can be made in a few clicks, and conversations between buyers and suppliers are now more direct and transparent. These companies intend to monetize their offerings in the long run by charging a take rate on transactions that occur over their marketplaces. In order to grow their respective ecosystems, most of them are however currently allowing buyers and sellers to transact for free.

The main challenge for these businesses is to effectively monetize their marketplaces without causing their buyers and sellers to churn. In the interim, these companies are developing  B2B supply chain and logistics management software, for wholesale suppliers and/or restaurants.

Coming next on Nov 2: Internal Comms Go Remote-First.

Many thanks to Ilan Nabeth for the invaluable research that made this series possible, and to Yusuf Janahi and Anna-Stella Fetha for your contributions!

Landscape Map: Restaurants Fight for Independence

Mapping SMEs SaaS #2: Restaurants fight for independence. Jonathan Userovici from Headline provides an overview of companies offering software that recreates many of the experiences traditional food delivery aggregators provide while ensuring a greater degree of independence and customization to restaurants themselves.

Landscape Map: Restaurants Fight for Independence | Headline

We’re excited to take the wraps off our Seed investment in Fancy, the UK’s fastest-growing, on-demand convenience app, and to also announce that Fancy is being acquired by our portfolio company Gopuff, the leader in instant needs.

This transaction represents a terrific win-win-win for Fancy, Gopuff, and all shareholders. Most importantly, this inaugurates Gopuff’s entry into Europe  —  where we are fully confident that together with Fancy, it will continue to delight millions of customers.

Last year, our global team studied the up-and-coming “Gopuff clones” emerging in Europe. As one of the earliest backers of Gopuff in 2016, we knew that the business model had the potential to be hugely successful in Europe and we were eager to identify the best emerging companies on the continent.

With Gopuff nearing 600 markets in the US, we turned our sights to the UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and other European countries for its next expansion effort. Over the years we have helped a number of our portfolio companies expand internationally (Farfetch, Groupon, and The RealReal) by leveraging the Headline team and network across Europe, Brazil, and Asia.

Over the course of a couple weeks, our team scanned the landscape and ultimately we landed on one shining example of a company that had the characteristics we were looking for: strong traction in several markets in the UK, hungry founders laser-focused on execution (not PR), and genuine customer obsession.

Armed with conviction in our new friends at Fancy, we led the Seed round in 2020 and I joined the board.

Congratulations, Fancy! And welcome to Europe, Gopuff!

It has been a distinct pleasure to partner with Co-Founders Arnie Englander and Jack Wilson. When we first introduced Arnie and Jack to Rafael and Yakir, Gopuff’s Co-Founders and Co-CEOs, they exclaimed that the Fancy founders “are just like us!” We are thrilled that these two amazing teams are joining forces to dominate the UK’s instant needs category. 

A huge congratulations to everyone involved, and welcome to Europe, Gopuff!

A Match Made in Delivery Heaven: Fancy + Gopuff

Headline is excited to take the wraps off the Seed investment in Fancy, the UK’s fastest-growing, on-demand convenience app, and to also announce that Fancy is being acquired by Headline's portfolio company Gopuff, the leader in instant needs. This represents a terrific win-win-win and most importantly, this inaugurates Gopuff’s entry into Europe.

A Match Made in Delivery Heaven: Fancy + Gopuff | Headline

The small Italian restaurant next to your parent’s place? That Dutch sneaker brand you like?

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make for 99% of EU businesses (source: European Commission): It’s safe to say we spend a lot of time thinking about them in the intelligence briefings that guide Headline’s investment decisions.

For the first time, we compile some of these thoughts and share them. This series is part landscape mapping (let us know about your startup here, if you’d like to see it included!) and part sharing some of our investment theses.

Unlike with most consumer and enterprise software, where the winner takes all or most, SMEs software is so fragmented that there is always a time and place for new players.

We break these downs into six macro-trends that we will share over six weeks, starting today:

🛒Trend #1: Shopify’s growth creates new markets - Below :)
🍉Trend #2: Restaurants fight for independence from delivery and discovery platforms
👋 Trend #3: Work, reinvented
👔 Trend #4: The rise of vertical biz management software
🤴 Trend #5: HR made simple(r)!
👹 Trend #6: Bookkeeping becomes understandable

Hope you enjoy these ponderings. Let us know how can we improve on them!

🛒Trend #1: Shopify’s growth creates new markets

Shopify is a platform that allows anyone to develop and run an e-commerce business. 

The company's user base is made of two different types of customers: (i) local shop owners who want to digitize their offline activities and develop an e-commerce offering; and (ii) the new generation of founders and entrepreneurs who wish to develop direct-to-consumer brands (D2C) with a core online presence.

Overall, Shopify empowers more than 1.5 million business owners globally, generating over $100B in GMV in 2020. To give some sense of scale: The largest direct-to-consumer (D2C) shops on the Shopify platform generated up to $1B in 2020. These D2C businesses include the likes of FashionNova, AllBirds,Steve Madden, and BlackRifle Coffee.

2020 has been an exceptional year for Shopify. As shown in the diagram below, the company’s annual revenue growth rate has historically increased progressively over time. Shopify’s  accelerated growth in the last two years is a byproduct of two major developments:

(i) COVID-19 has forced many offline stores to digitize their offerings, due to lockdown and quarantine regulations; and (ii) creating a Shopify store became a popular side hustle as the number of self-employed US citizens reached a record high of 30 million people in 2021 (+22% YoY). 

So far, so good. But Shopify does not cover the entirety of the online e-commerce experience. Until recently, SMBs lacked the resources to manage various additional aspects of their e-commerce infrastructure. These areas include optimizing the customer acquisition process, the storage and visualization of data, product sourcing, delivery, and workflow automation.

As a result of the above, Shopify opened its ecosystem to external app developers. App developers can now create and provide online sellers with new features in the Shopify App Store. Given its established ecosystem of e-commerce businesses, the Shopify App Store provides businesses with an opportunity to reach a greater market of online business owners. New ventures have emerged over the last few years in the following categories:


Today, SMBs rely on intuitive low-code/no-code analytics solutions that are easy to set up and provide their customers with template dashboards:

⭐  Data warehouse, visualization, and analytic solutions: Glew.io (US), Daasity (US), Polar Analytics (France), Peel (US), Tresl (US), Lifetimely (Finland), Conversific (Hungary), RetentionX (Germany), or Tydo (US) are examples of analytics software that aggregate data from multiple sources (generally ad campaigns and transactions) and display key metrics in visually appealing pre-built dashboards.

The e-commerce customer journey has to be built to maximize the buying experience. Customers are driven through simplified user flows with minimal human interactions.  Yet, e-commerce businesses have realized that their customers will be more willing to shop online if they can experience a more pleasing and humanized purchasing journey.

This trend has taken flight in China, where businesses such as Pinduoduo have created a differentiated online shopping experience, mixing social interactions and e-commerce buying. Pinduoduo has deployed multiple features to encourage user engagement within their platform. These include peer-to-peer buying and invitations to access discounts, gamification (to replicate the experience of novel discovery that occurs in offline shopping), and live sales (for authentic sale and purchase interactions). 

Mapping SMEs SaaS #1: Jonathan Userovici from Headline provides an overview of the e-commerce experience. Given Shopify's established ecosystem, the Shopify App Store provides businesses with an opportunity to reach a greater market of online business owners.