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Isamu Nishijima is an investor at the global venture capital firm Headline based in Asia. He considers his focus areas to be: Internet, XR, blockchain, APIs, and SaaS.

Isamu Nishijima | Headline

Our Guiding Principles

Isamu Nishijima is an investor at the global venture capital firm Headline based in Asia. He considers his focus areas to be: Internet, XR, blockchain, APIs, and SaaS. Given a blank check, he'd build a product to allows people to have higher quality sleep in less time.

When you look at the healthcare landscape—especially for rare diseases—it’s easy to feel a sense of urgency and frustration. Over 30 million Americans live with a rare disease, navigating a maze of specialists, endless paperwork, and a constant search for answers. Shockingly and sadly, around 95% of these conditions have no approved treatments. 

That’s the world Citizen Health set out to change. 

Today, Headline joins a $30 million Series A round alongside 8VC and prior investors Transformation Capital, Wavemaker 360, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)—all of whom bring deep expertise and networks in healthcare and technology.

At its core, Citizen Health is building a beautiful consumer platform that brings together every piece of a patient’s health journey—clinical data, genetic information, imaging, patient-reported outcomes, and claims. They’re then using AI to make sense of all this data, turning a pile of disconnected records into a clear, actionable story for each patient. For families, this means having a digital interface where they can actually find and use their medical information, get matched to clinical trials, make sense of medications and treatments, and connect with others who understand what they’re going through. 

For healthy consumers, this interface may not sound very critical but for rare disease patients and their families, these records are typically inaccessible or scattered across numerous portals, screenshots, and printouts and can be the difference of understanding whether they qualify for a new treatment or will have an adverse reaction to a drug. On Citizen, all records can be transferred to a healthcare provider with the click of a button.

But the impact goes way beyond individual patients. By partnering with patient advocacy groups (PAGs), Citizen Health is also solving a massive data fragmentation problem. There are about 1,200 PAGs in the U.S., each with its own registry and approach, which unintentionally keeps valuable data siloed. Citizen Health’s platform acts as a universal connector, aggregating data across all these groups, making it far more useful—not just for patients, but for the researchers and companies racing to develop new therapies.

Citizen Health was spun out of Invitae, bringing a powerhouse team with deep roots in both technology and patient advocacy. CEO Farid Vij, who was previously COO at Ciitizen (acquired by Invitae for $325M), and Chief Business Officer Nasha Fitter, a widely respected rare disease advocate, helped Citizen Health to build early trust with patient advocacy groups and families. From a business perspective, Citizen’s approach is already paying off. Since its seed round, Citizen Health has brought on dozens of PAGs and thousands of patients. Nearly half of their customers have expanded their business with Citizen Health, either by adding new disease cohorts or new use cases. Big names like AstraZeneca, UCB, and Ionis are early customers.

In addition to the impact on patient lives, we are very excited about the flywheel that Citizen Health is starting to see. Historically, biotech and pharma companies have struggled to develop treatments for rare diseases because of the lack of available patient data. As more PAGs and patients join the platform, their data becomes richer and more valuable.  This attracts more enterprise customers and drives more revenue, enabling Citizen Health to invest further in their technology and outreach. This, in turn, draws in even more PAGs and patients, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and impact. 

Citizen Health’s growth has been organic, driven predominantly through word-of-mouth due to Nasha’s advocacy for FOXG1 and credibility in the rare disease space. As AI continues to drive down the data structuring costs, their B2B2C model keeps customer acquisition costs low. 

Unique in healthcare, the consensus among patients, advocacy leaders, and pharma clients was glowing and consistent during our diligence process. PAG leaders raved about how Citizen finally gave their communities a way to organize and use their health data. Pharma clients highlighted the unique value of Citizen’s data across their efforts in new drug development, trials, and even patient recruitment. And everyone—from customers to competitors—spoke highly of Farid, Nasha, and the entire Citizen Health team.

Through their own experiences, Citizen deeply understood that rare disease patients never have beautiful products built for them – constantly told that the market opportunity isn’t great enough for great innovation. We admire that the team sees patients as consumers, who deserve intuitive and modern interfaces to navigate a notoriously complex system. We hope that in the future, when anyone is sick, the first question their doctor asks is, “Are you on Citizen?”

Citizen Health is the perfect combination of the right team + right technology + right approach + right time, colliding to solve one of healthcare’s most challenging problems. Citizen Health isn’t just building a business, but creating a platform that could redefine how we think about managing rare diseases–and beyond.

For more information, visit citizen.health.

A Consumer Platform to Drive Better Rare Disease Prognoses for One and All; Our Investment in Citizen Health’s Series A

Discover why Headline backs Citizen Health, an AI-powered consumer platform that unifies clinical, genetic, imaging, and patient-reported data to help rare disease patients access treatments, clinical trials, and broader care—while solving fragmented data challenges across patient advocacy groups.

A Consumer Platform to Improve Rare Disease Outcomes | Headline Investment in Citizen Health Series A

In a new world of efficient execution fueled by AI, the push to operate leanly applies not only to headcount and applications but also to infrastructure software. The effort to rationalize spend has emerged as one of the most defining trends that we see across the infra stack today—second only to AI adoption and integration. Such a mindset reflects a clear shift from the “growth at all costs” philosophy of recent years. With budgets tightening and AI initiatives taking priority, buyers are increasingly focused on simplicity and cost control.

Part of this movement seems to stem from growing frustration with pre-COVID breakout vendors like Fivetran, Snowflake, Splunk, Auth0, Datadog, Confluent, and Snyk—many of which have since gone public, been acquired, or raised at premium late-stage valuations. As these companies shift focus toward their largest enterprise customers and profitability, many have raised prices while simultaneously slowing product velocity. Buyers, in turn, are pushing back against their high spend on these platforms, which is becoming increasingly hard to justify.

There is now a real opening for challengers offering simpler, leaner, and more cost-aligned alternatives. The 10 trends below explore where we see the infrastructure software market headed.

1. Market Preference Is Shifting Back to Best-of-Suite Platforms

Buyer sentiment is shifting back toward best-of-suite solutions, as teams grapple with tool sprawl and vendor fatigue following the era of best-of-breed adoption. The trend is especially evident in security, where Gartner found that 75% of organizations are actively pursuing vendor consolidation. Major M&A activity reflects this shift—two of the largest deals of 2025 are security consolidation plays: Google’s $32B acquisition of Wiz and Palo Alto’s $25B acquisition of CyberArk.

The same dynamic is playing out among startups, where several challengers are seeing early success by centering their value proposition around a best-of-suite approach.

Networking: NetBox Labs — Composable platform for managing network infrastructure, including operations, observability, automation, and security

Cybersecurity: Aikido Security — Comprehensive security platform spanning AppSec and cloud security

DevOps/SRE: Incident — All-in-one incident management platform covering alerting and incident response

2. Transparent Pricing Is Becoming a Differentiator

As incumbent pricing grows increasingly opaque, buyers are migrating to challengers with clearer, more predictable pricing models. In many cases, renewal shock—driven by quietly compounding usage or gated features—pushes teams to reevaluate long-standing vendors.

Observability: Datadog → Honeycomb — Honeycomb prices based on data ingest—but in atomic units which can contain an effectively unlimited number of key/value pairs (sometimes called "custom metrics") tied to a given timestamp. This allows Honeycomb pricing to be more predictable, as costs are simply based on request volumes rather than a mix (or layering) of per-host, per-product, or per-attribute costs.  

ETL/ELT: Fivetran → Estuary — Fivetran charges based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR)—the number of rows inserted, updated, or deleted each month—which can spike unpredictably in high-churn datasets. Estuary avoids this with transparent pricing based on data volume and connector count.

AppSec: Snyk → Aikido Security — Aikido charges a flat per-user rate that covers its full suite of modules across AppSec and cloud security—avoiding the per-seat plus per-feature escalation common with Snyk's licensing model.

Auth: Auth0 → Clerk — Clerk’s pay-as-you-grow model avoids Auth0’s MAU caps and tiered gating, keeping pricing predictable while advanced features remain add-ons rather than Enterprise-only.

Business Intelligence: Looker → Omni — Omni offers a single, predictable monthly rate with no hidden fees or per-role pricing. Looker, in contrast, frequently charges separately for dev, standard, and viewer licenses and ties costs to compute usage and feature access—resulting in higher and less predictable bills.

3. The Modern Data Stack Is Converging on a Leaner, Modular Core

As complexity and cost have accumulated in the modern data stack, many teams are converging on simpler, more modular foundations. Rather than over-centralizing around warehouses or over-engineering pipelines, teams are relying on relational databases and object storage to do more—each extended just enough to support evolving needs without bloating the stack.

Relational databases are becoming increasingly versatile. New vendors and extensions are enabling teams to extend their existing databases to support functionality that has historically required multiple systems. For example, PuppyGraph, pgvector, and ParadeDB minimize the need to run separate graph, vector, and search databases, respectively. Reducing the number of systems that teams need to purchase, operate, sync, monitor, and secure meaningfully lowers administrative overhead, cost, operational burden, potential downtime, and the surface area for security breaches. Postgres’s rich extension ecosystem has made it a prime beneficiary of this shift, fueling its continued rise in popularity.

Object storage is having a similar moment, becoming the foundation for a growing range of workloads in analytics, search, and data processing, where cost, scalability, simplicity, and durability take precedence over fully optimized performance. In analytics, engines like Trino and even ClickHouse can query object stores directly using open table formats such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake. In search, AWS recently introduced S3 Vectors as the first cloud object store with native vector storage and querying. turbopuffer extends this approach by enabling both vector and full-text search on object storage, supported by a caching layer to boost performance. Further upstream, Bauplan aligns with the trend by offering serverless abstractions for building data pipelines, often for AI/ML use cases, directly on top of object storage.

Together, these trends reflect a broader move toward leaner infrastructure: fewer systems to manage, fewer pipelines to maintain, and more leverage from modular, general-purpose, and cost-effective primitives that can flex to support modern operational, analytical, and AI workloads.

4. Cost Optimization Platforms Are Emerging Across the Stack

As infrastructure costs become a board-level concern, a new class of tooling is emerging to reduce spend across compute, storage, and software. While Kubernetes and cloud billing were early focus areas, nearly every major cost center now has dedicated solutions, including spaces like data warehousing and business intelligence. Some tools, such as Pump, take a fintech-style approach, leveraging group buying across customers to obtain volume discounts and unlock the benefits of reserved instances. Others, such as Espresso AI, focus on optimizing utilization and footprint—identifying overprovisioned workloads, inefficient queries, or unused assets to reduce waste at the source.

Cloud Billing: Pump — Aggregates usage, unlocks preferred pricing on reserved instances, and simplifies cloud cost visibility

Data Warehouses: Espresso AI — Surfaces inefficient queries, redundant schedules, and unused tables to shrink compute/storage spend

BI Tools: Datalogz — Detects stale dashboards, orphaned models, and unused reports to reduce unnecessary BI layer costs

5. A New Class of Vendors Is Winning on Cost-Aware Design

A new class of infrastructure vendors is emerging—distinct from traditional cost optimization platforms—that targets high-cost line items like CI compute and SIEM. Rather than positioning solely as cost cutters, these players offer optimized, drop-in components that improve performance and efficiency while reducing compute and storage overhead as a natural byproduct. In many cases, they are replacing brute-force, overprovisioned systems with leaner, AI-native primitives that become embedded parts of the modern stack. Cribl pioneered this positioning, and a new wave of entrants is now applying the same playbook across the infrastructure stack, often with AI-native positioning.

CI Compute: Namespace — Provides faster, lower-cost CI runners—combining proprietary hardware with intelligent caching to serve as a drop-in replacement for managed runners across platforms like GitHub Actions

Security Data: Realm Security — Lowers SIEM costs (e.g., from Splunk, Sumo Logic) by acting as an upstream telemetry broker—intelligently filtering and routing high-volume, low-signal data to cheaper destinations

6. Challengers Are Capturing the Underserved Mid-Market

While much of the narrative discussed in this piece thus far centers on migration from legacy platforms, a parallel trend is unfolding: emerging vendors are capturing greenfield adoption by targeting the historically underserved mid-market. Incumbent solutions are often prohibitively expensive, require significant customization, and demand heavy implementation and maintenance resources—creating friction for leaner teams with constrained budgets. In contrast, new entrants are prioritizing simplicity, accessibility, and rapid time-to-value, delivering solutions that "just work" for mid-market buyers without the overhead of enterprise tooling. As part of this shift, cloud-native vendors are also introducing low-friction, modern alternatives that replace the complexity of clunky on-prem incumbents.

Data Modeling: SqlDBM — A cloud-native alternative to Erwin

Cybersecurity: Aikido — For teams where managing the Snyk + Semgrep + Wiz stack is excessive

Artifact Repositories: Cloudsmith – A cloud-native alternative to JFrog Artifactory

7. AI-Native Service Delivery Is Transforming Outsourcing Models

Most companies—especially outside the Global 2000—lack a compelling reason to manage IT, security, or QA functions internally. While outsourcing has long been an option, AI is materially shifting the cost–quality frontier. Service providers can now deliver faster, more consistent, and more scalable outcomes at equal or lower price points. As a result, we expect a growing portion of these functions to be externalized over time. This shift is playing out through both AI-native service providers that deliver outcomes directly and AI-native software platforms that enable existing providers to automate more and operate at higher margins.

8. Open Source Alternatives Are Gaining Favor

Open source tools offer a practical alternative for teams with the capability to self-manage infrastructure. By avoiding the high costs of managed hosting and usage-based pricing, OSS provides greater cost control and data ownership while reducing vendor lock-in. As infrastructure costs rise and scrutiny around SaaS sprawl and data privacy intensifies, more teams with in-house expertise are expected to adopt open source as a preferred path. For example, as Postman has matured and raised pricing, many companies have found it difficult to justify the spend versus emerging OSS alternatives like Bruno. Even in more frontier areas, OpenAI’s release of GPT OSS—an open-weight model suite—signals the growing importance of openness in AI.

Observability: Datadog → Prometheus + Grafana

9. Vendor-Native Tooling Is Quietly Becoming the Default Path

In parallel with the shift back toward "best of suite," we are seeing increasing adoption of vendor-native tooling—particularly from hyperscalers. In security, the rapid growth of Google SecOps and Microsoft Defender underscores how bundling continues to gain traction. With executive teams under pressure to rein in budgets, many are steering functional groups toward platform-native solutions, especially when they have pre-committed platform spend. As owners of the underlying infrastructure, hyperscalers can squarely outcompete other vendors on cost

A similar dynamic is unfolding in AI, where OpenAI and Anthropic are actively moving up the value chain into the application layer. Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex are examples of this shift in software development, while OpenAI’s investment in Endex signals broader ambitions to expand into verticals such as financial services. Just as hyperscalers benefit from owning infrastructure, OpenAI and Anthropic enjoy a strategic advantage by owning the underlying models.

Security: Choosing Microsoft Sentinel, Google Chronicle over Splunk

DevOps: Choosing AWS CloudFormation over Terraform

10. There Is Still Appetite to Pay for Clean Abstractions of Hard Problems

Despite tighter budgets, teams remain willing to pay for clean, reliable abstractions of foundational but operationally complex problems—especially those at the intersection of application logic and infrastructure complexity. In many cases, the cost of replicating these capabilities internally exceeds the price of adoption when accounting for headcount, opportunity cost, and ongoing maintenance. Even in lean environments, the tradeoff often favors outsourcing over in-house build-and-maintain efforts. For example, replicating Recall’s functionality in-house could require a team of 5–6 engineers working for several months, followed by ongoing operational overhead—making its API abstraction a far more cost-effective path for teams looking to move quickly and leanly.

This dynamic—coupled with the rapid growth of agentic applications—is powering the rise of a new category of API-based, AI-native abstractions purpose-built to support these emerging systems. Just as Stripe abstracted payments and Twilio simplified messaging, platforms like Composio, Browserbase, Daytona, Tavily, and Zep offer simple, clean interfaces for handling auth, integrations, runtime environments, web search, and context management. These abstractions are becoming the default path for teams looking to offload complexity, maintain development velocity, and build reliable, production-grade agent workflows without reinventing core infrastructure.

The infrastructure software landscape is undergoing a meaningful reset. As AI-native solutions command attention, buyers are simultaneously reassessing the traditional infra stack—seeking solutions that are simpler, leaner, and more cost-effective. The trends we highlight reflect a broader shift in mindset: away from sprawling, over-engineered systems and toward software shaped by pragmatic design.

The bar for infrastructure products has never been higher. Buyers are increasingly discerning—ruthlessly evaluating tools based on performance, ROI, and total cost of ownership. We expect a range of models to win in this new era: from next-gen platforms and open core products to AI-enabled services, clean abstractions, and systems that meaningfully reduce operational burden or cost. The next generation of infrastructure will be defined by products that are pragmatic, performant, and deeply aligned with how modern teams build.

As always, if you're building anywhere in the infrastructure stack, please feel free to reach out to jacob@headline.com and ram@headline.com to connect.

The Infra Stack Reset: 10 Trends Reshaping Spend in 2025

Explore the 10 key infrastructure software trends transforming 2025, where simplicity, transparent pricing, modular data stacks, AI-native services, and pragmatic design are replacing bloat and vendor fatigue in favor of leaner, cost-effective infrastructure solutions.

The Infrastructure Stack Reset | Headline

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 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

Headline is hiring an Infrastructure Investor

High-level: Source and speak to the most exciting B2B software start-ups in the US and to find best market segments to deep dive into.

Headline is hiring an analyst for a 2 year program who will be supporting our early investment teams by sourcing and speaking to the most promising start-ups to help us determine their fit as an investment prospect for Headline and doing sector deep dives. Strong performers will have an opportunity to continue to develop within the organization. The individual we are looking for will specifically focus on B2B software focused around vertical software, commerce enablement, B2B marketplaces and go-to-market technologies.

Time Requirement: You will manage own schedule in East, Central or Pacific time zones.


- Speak to 20+ CEOs from exciting North American start-ups each week

- Source companies in the given verticals and identify categories and founders to build relationships with.

- Synthesize notes and key takeaways from conversations with founders.

- Summarize most compelling opportunities and report these to team members.

- Build a network in the start-up and venture capital ecosystem.

- Create market research for Headline investment areas.

- You have excellent conversation and people skills.

- You are deeply passionate and likely involved in tech communities already.

- Passion for B2B software and the behaviors they drive.

- Background in Business, Economics, Computer Science or other relevant majors.

- 0-3 years of experience across tech startups, banking, PE, consulting or other analytical roles (note: we will accept applicants straight out of college with a deep passion for technology and already involved in tech programs such as hackathons, college funds, etc.)

- This role will present you with unique opportunity to build extensive tacit knowledge and domain expertise in B2B software.

- Naturally build a network with up-and-coming entrepreneurs in the US.

- Jumpstart a career in start-ups, tech, or venture capital.

- Join an experienced team with a flat hierarchy.

We are hoping to get many applications from people with diverse backgrounds. In order to make the application process as inclusive as possible, we’re using an application form that will help us identify the best candidates.

To apply for this role, please fill out THIS LINK and submit your resume through Linkedin.

We are a Venture Capital firm actively on the ground in 8 cities around the world. We partner with exceptional entrepreneurs across geographies and as early as possible. Once we commit to a team, we go to the ends of the earth to make their success global. 

We’ve backed the founders behind category creators such as Segment, Sonos, Angie’s List, NGINX, Groupon, Data.ai (fka AppAnnie), Axios, Acorns, Shipt, Scopely, Farfetch, Sorare, Honeycomb, and Grin, among others. 

Our team is going fast, ambitious, international, and diverse. We are looking for new investors to join our team in the US (remote) to work side by side with us and fantastic entrepreneurs.

- We are different, together. We don’t fit in, and we’ve never wanted to. As individuals, we’re looking at the world through different eyes and from different cities and cultures. And as a group, we have a global perspective unlike any other.

- We lead with generosity. We don’t steal control – or the spotlight. We welcome everyone into our office. We are fair. We don’t just do these things to be nice; we also know that our attention, time, and trust always yield the most meaningful returns.

- We lift every low - and every high. When we commit, we commit to it all. We know how to keep the faith when it’s tough. And, we know how to celebrate the victories better than anyone else.

- We invest in the world. We search every corner of the globe for teams that can make the entire world better. To us, this is much more interesting and rewarding than simply investing in companies.

Headline is hiring an Analyst (m/f/d) to source and speak to the most exciting B2B software-focused start-ups across the globe.

Headline is hiring a B2B Investor

This number would’ve seemed far-fetched even 6 years ago: in 2015, there were just 9 companies valued at $10 billion or more. 

Today though, startup valuations are richer than ever, and what explains this, at least in part, is increasingly available access to capital. Barely two years ago, venture capital firms worldwide poured just under $80 billion into various companies in the opening quarter of 2020. Last year, the global venture funding available to eager founders jumped, surpassing $130 billion in the first quarter for the first time. 

For founders, it’s practically a feeding frenzy: there's greater amounts of excess cash and wealth in our society than ever. Of course, you’re not guaranteed it, but you have better odds than ever before. And with so much cash up for grabs, growth-minded companies can now reach Incredible-Hulk-levels of huge by flipping business orthodoxy on its head. We’re speaking about capital efficiency, or the ratio of how much money a start-up spends to grow versus how far they get with it (at Headline, we think about this in terms of cumulative cash burn versus annualized gross profit).

Capital Efficiency is No Longer the Must-Have Metric

These days, upsetting the capital efficient balance is in vogue: You don’t need to be as efficient as possible to achieve growth. Businesses can, in a sense, operate less capital-efficiently because they're valued more for the same traction. Greater valuations mean less dilution for founders–they can raise more and consequently burn more even as they keep the same ownership. Say businesses are able to raise at twice the valuations of a few years ago: A founder can raise and burn twice as much money to get to the same traction and hold the same amount of ownership compared to their peers in the past. In other words, with founders being able to raise at twice the valuation, today's founder could burn $200M to get to $100M of annualized gross profit, whereas the founder in the past could only burn a $100M to end up with the identical ownership.

As a ratio, it works out to a two-to-one margin of capital efficiency: You’re getting one dollar out for every two dollars put in. Over the last couple years, businesses that get huge are worth far more than a billion dollars, which means spending in the name of growth is a smart play—as long as, of course, the business manages to grow.

Not only does the business have to continue growing, but it has to sustain that growth through to the next influx of cash. And in the wake of the recent economic downturn and rising interest rates, getting the next influx will be a more challenging prospect for many — some might even say most — companies. Already, Q1 2022 has been the slowest first quarter for IPOs in the last six years according to a report from Renaissance Capital. To weather leaner times, companies will need to become more capital efficient to sustain their growth through longer periods between fundraises. While the slowdown hasn’t upended the industry just yet, it might only be a matter of time. One early sign is Instacart's valuation being slashed from $39 billion to $24 billion in its latest round.

Even in the best of times, not every startup is able to finance their way into growth.

For some founders, the metric to be concerned with over capital efficiency in today’s market is comparing the cost of acquiring a customer and the value of that customer over the course of a lifetime.

Think of any subscription-based business that offers monthly and annual sign-ups. For every person who chooses to pick an annual subscription, the company is getting 12 months of future gross profit right up front—money that’s more quickly returned in the form of higher valuations to investors who choose to jump into a financing round.

Blinkist is the perfect example. The company distills the key learnings from tome-like works of nonfiction into easily digestible snippets. And while Blinkist offers monthly subscriptions, its annual deal is priced much lower—enticing more people to sign-up for a year-long subscription. With this model, Blinkist is able to start paying back the money they spend to acquire customers. 

A quicker payback cycle means that the same dollars can be reused to acquire more new customers. Ultimately the most efficient businesses are the ones that can pay their customers back within the first month. For example, if a company has instant payback on its customer acquisition dollars and it has $10,000, it could recycle those $10,000 365 times to make an annual budget of $3.65 million. These businesses are able to grow incredibly fast and become, as a by-product, cash-efficient.

While the concept of cash efficiency hasn’t totally been tossed to the wayside, it’s much easier for the founders of today to get mega-growth at more inefficient margins. Just look at the decacorns—given the valuations of companies right now, that makes sense. But these times do come with risk: taking high valuations in a moment of unprecedented capital could lead to flat or down rounds in the future, even as businesses continue to execute. With a host of indicators around the economic downturn, moreover, now might be an even riskier time than ever.

Capital Efficiency in 2022: Rebalancing the Equation

Nicolas von Blottnitz from Headline writes about capital efficiency, or the ratio of how much money a start-up spends to grow versus how far they get with it. At Headline, we think about this in terms of cumulative cash burn versus annualized gross profit.

Isamu Nishijima

A Conversation with Isamu