Head & Heart Capital

Head & Heart Capital

Head & Heart Capital launched in New York with a mandate shaped by co-founders Mathias Schilling and Thomas Varkey, both of whom cut their teeth at prominent European venture platforms. Schilling spent years at Atomico, the London-based fund built on Niklas Zennström's Skype exit, where he developed a pattern-recognition muscle for technical founders expanding beyond European borders. Varkey's tenure at EQT Ventures layered on exposure to the Nordic ecosystem's data-driven sourcing model. The firm imports that dual lens — European analytical rigor applied to US market opportunity — into a concentrated early-stage portfolio. The firm operates across pre-seed and seed stages, with select follow-on into Series A rounds when portfolio companies demonstrate clear product-market fit. Sector coverage leans heavily into enterprise software, artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital health, and fintech infrastructure. Head & Heart has developed a posture around what it calls 'founder empathy' — a diligence framework that weights psychological resilience and team dynamics alongside technical moat assessment. The firm sources through a curated network of repeat founders, university spinout programs, and operator syndicates, often co-investing alongside other seed-stage generalists and specialist funds. Head & Heart maintains a lean structure typical of emerging managers deploying from early fund vintages. The firm operates from a single New York office, with neither disclosed AUM nor publicly available team headcount figures. The co-founders remain the visible investment decision-makers, a structure that constrains pace but maximizes founder continuity through the earliest board cycles. The firm's geographic focus centers on North America, with particular density in New York, Boston, and San Francisco — hubs that map to its technical talent thesis. Structurally, Head & Heart occupies the emerging-manager lane at a moment when some institutional allocators are stepping back from first-time funds. Its structural differentiator rests in the European institutional lineage of its founders — Atomico and EQT Ventures are both known for systematic sourcing engines — applied to US seed-stage markets where that type of process discipline remains less common. The firm's survival and growth will depend on whether its early portfolio companies generate sufficient markups to attract re-ups from limited partners who increasingly prioritize realized distributions over paper returns.