There are a handful of red hot startups in Europe — Mistral, Neko Health, Black Forest Labs, Helsing — and US VC General Catalyst is in all of them.
The firm, which first opened an office in London in 2021 and now has a portfolio of about 90 companies in Europe, has become the continent’s kingmaker in recent years. It’s also doubled down on Europe: in the last year, the team has made 30 new investments.
General Catalyst has big ambitions for Europe: CEO Hemant Taneja and managing director and head of Europe Jeannette zu Fürstenberg — who also cofounded Berlin-based VC fund La Famigila, which merged with General Catalyst last year — tell Sifted the firm plans to invest $1bn per year in Europe.
“They are the big gorilla,” one lawyer who has worked on a handful of deals with General Catalyst told Sifted.
And the firm’s not stopping at equity investments. General Catalyst also has: a company builder; a go-to-market debt facility; a programme for funding capital-intensive climate and deeptech companies; a new wealth management business. The firm — and Fürstenberg in particular — is also taking an increasingly vocal and active role in influencing European policy and banging the “tech sovereignty” drum. In short, it wants to rethink what a venture capital firm can be and do.
“We’re a global company, and we want to do it as much in Europe, with the same sort of genuine desire to make the region successful, like we do in the US,” Taneja tells Sifted.
Signalling effect
One VC, who shares investments with General Catalyst, describes the firm in one word: “Aggressive.”
If General Catalyst is looking into a deal, other VCs know “it’s going to be tough, if not almost impossible, to win the deal,” they add.
“There’s an, ‘Oh my god’ thought, like, ‘am I going to be able to do anything with this deal if GC’s in the round?’” says Cyrus Hessabi, a London-based associate at deeptech VC OpenOcean, who’s competed with General Catalyst on deals.
With more than $33bn in assets under management, the 25-year-old firm’s capital dwarfs even the biggest homegrown European VC firms.
There’s an, ‘Oh my god’ thought, like, ‘am I going to be able to do anything with this deal if GC’s in the round?’
“They have so much money, they don’t look at valuation the way we look at it because they don’t have to,” says the VC with shared investments.
But one growth investor observed to Sifted that the valuations of GC deals are not abnormally high — and that their behaviour isn’t unique. “Yes, they have done very prominent deals in very hot sectors that have commanded high premiums, like Helsing or Mistral, but give me another investor who was able to invest in AI or defence tech in the last year and not pay a high price.”
Taneja says being characterised as aggressive is a compliment: “Yeah, we want to be aggressive, we want to win.” He says he encourages the whole General Catalyst team to preempt funding rounds more.
Eyeing resilience
But being a large VC is no longer enough for General Catalyst. I’m speaking with Taneja and Fürstenberg over video just before the pair head off to 10 Downing Street in London with their head of UK and global health, Chris Bischoff, to discuss the firm’s expanding investment plans. General Catalyst has been increasingly vocal in the political sphere, advocating for looser rules around AI regulation and a bigger focus on resilience.
“The intersection of global resilience and AI is ultimately where we think the opportunity is — and the opportunity is about transforming industries,” says Taneja. “It’s very different from the mandate” of traditional VC firms.
General Catalyst’s resilience strategy isn’t new — its first “resilience”-focused investment was 20 years ago, when it acquired defence contractor BBN. But last year the firm formally outlined its focus on bolstering Europe’s defence, climate and industrial capabilities.
So far in 2025 that thesis is being put to the test, with the US signalling it will be far less supportive of European defence than previous administrations and president Donald Trump’s tariffs sending public markets into a tailspin.
As a result of the growing geopolitical tensions, Europe is scrambling to up its defence spend — and local startups, like Helsing, are squarely in the spotlight. General Catalyst has amassed an approximate 12% stake in the defence startup, which was most recently valued at about €5bn, according to a January filing.
Europe is also increasingly focused on ensuring that critical technologies — from AI to quantum computing — are produced on the continent. “If you don’t have a mechanism to retain that productivity onshore, you’re going to have a hollowed out economy,” says Taneja. “The AI industry that powers this transformation, the existing businesses in Europe, has to be local. That was actually one of the big reasons why we made such a large investment in Mistral.”
“In Europe, we have a huge energy problem, we have a defence problem, we have a manufacturing issue that’s kind of combusted from [the fact that] we’ve outsourced so much of that to China,” says Fürstenberg. “For all of these, the answer probably is technology.”
If you don’t have a mechanism to retain that productivity onshore, you’re going to have a hollowed out economy.
The US firm has also taken a much more active role in speaking for the broader European investor landscape, spearheading a project dubbed the EU AI Champions Initiative — a collective of dozens of corporations, startups and 20 key investors that will deploy €150bn invested in European AI over the next five years.
The initiative is calling for simplified European regulation, more infrastructure investment and a campaign to improve the public’s understanding and trust in the technology. It comes as others are pushing for watered-down rules around AI use put forth in the EU AI Act.
“It’s not necessarily any specific act in isolation that’s a problem; it’s more the lack of clarity and the lack of guidance and some of the inherent, sometimes unintended consequences,” says Fürstenberg. The policy part of the equation is “where we really want to zoom in on: what does it take to create this functional flywheel between technology, capital, industry and policy? That’s where we’ve been investing a lot of muscle and time,” she tells Sifted.
It’s a message Fürstenberg is increasingly taking to the stage — and the screen — to share. So far this year, she’s spoken at the defence-focused Munich Security Conference and the World Economic Forum in Davos, announced General Catalyst’s EU AI Champions Initiative at the French AI Summit and appeared on Bloomberg TV. She’s also met with French president Emmanuel Macron multiple times.
Fürstenberg is described by some who know her as “visionary”, “definitely ambitious,” and someone who “wants to have an influence.”
When asked whether she has any future political ambitions, Fürstenberg forcefully dispels the idea: “Nothing is further from me. I would lack the patience to be in government.”
And despite appearances, Taneja is quick to make a distinction: “We stay away from politics; we focus on policy.”
In keeping with the firm’s ambitions to be more active on the policy side, last autumn it launched the General Catalyst Institute (GCI), a policy group that aims to build “global resilience by partnering with governments, public policy leaders, and entrepreneurs across AI, healthcare, defence and intelligence, manufacturing, and energy.”
Losing the family
General Catalyst opened its first European office in 2021 but its European strategy really kicked up a notch when it announced it was joining forces with Berlin-based early-stage firm La Famiglia in 2023. The merger — still quite an uncommon move in European venture — turned heads. But since the tie-up, the family hasn’t stayed together.
Last summer — shortly after the merger was completed — La Famiglia general partner Judith Dada announced she was leaving. She’s since joined Visionaries Club, an early-stage firm founded by Fürstenberg’s original cofounder Rob Lacher. Dada told Sifted that she left General Catalyst because she was “ultimately really looking for something that is more boutique [rather than] a really, really big firm.”
But it’s not just Dada: nearly the entire original investing team of La Famiglia is or has left. Former La Famiglia associate Philipp Handel, investor Reda Awad and advisor Carsten Thoma all left General Catalyst in 2024, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Sifted has also learnt from three sources familiar that former La Famiglia principals, now partners, Paula Wehmeyer and Viet Le are leaving General Catalyst.
A General Catalyst spokesperson told Sifted that they will “stay in the GC Famiglia” but declined to provide further details.
When asked about the high turnover, Taneja said that, amid the firm’s broader internal changes, it was necessary to “re-enlist people into believing in that strategy,” and that some team members left because they wanted to be pure seed investors.
To some observers, the recent talent churn seems to make the reason behind the merger clear: to get Fürstenberg, according to one VC who is close with General Catalyst. It “actually makes a ton of sense.”
“She has her own network and brand and publicist, and, you know, she’s building something around her, which I think is a very smart strategy because she’s a well known figure and deeply connected,” the VC who’s close to the firm added.
General Catalyst’s European investment team now consists of: healthcare-focused investor Bischoff; managing director Adam Valkin, who spends his time between London and the US; Berlin-based investors Gosia Majczak and Samuel Beyer; and London-based partners Juliet Bailin, Alexandre Momeni, Cecilia Zhao and Zeynep Yavuz.
The firm also added two new partners in Europe earlier this month: Friederike Reuter and Robin Dechant. Previously Dechant worked at Berlin-based VC Point Nine and sold a renewable energy installer platform, while Reuter worked at German bus and transportation scaleup Flix and automotive tech company Vay.
Rethinking VC
In its bid to become far more than a venture capital firm, General Catalyst is rethinking how best to fund — and build — companies.
Among the firm’s un-venture-like offerings is its customer value strategy, which provides debt investment to startups to fund customer acquisition costs like sales and marketing — which it says helps companies avoid raising money from selling dilutive equity to fund those expenses. General Catalyst recently re-upped its investment in Barcelona-based HR unicorn Factorial with this strategy, investing $120m on top of its earlier $80m for sales and marketing expenses.
The firm also has a new $1.5bn allocated for its creation strategy, which helps with company building for proven founders and acquiring companies. It’s what some have described as a private equity roll-up type of strategy — essentially buying up a bunch of companies, often in traditional services industries, and making them more efficient via AI.
“There’s a series of services businesses that can be transformed with AI all over the world — why don’t we team up AI experts and industry experts in those different areas to go drive that transformation? That’s a perfect area where creation focuses,” Taneja says, adding that supply chain and manufacturing are “an amazing place” for the creation team to look at. It’s a strategy the firm is also exploring more in Europe.
There’s a series of services businesses that can be transformed with AI all over the world.
“What we’re thinking through as a firm currently is… how do we help companies enable a go-to-market pathway and help them get through the permitting and the implementation process to get to a meaningful scale, and what is the right capital framework to activate these businesses? I don’t think it’s pure venture dollars that will do the job,” Fürstenberg recently told the Sifted podcast.
And General Catalyst isn’t just using traditional venture dollars. It is also embarking on a strategy for funding infrastructure in areas like climate that includes huge capital commitments — like its investment in US-based nuclear company Pacific Fusion last year, where the firm committed an eyewatering $900m in structured financing.
The strategy is to make “sure we’re investing in those building blocks — so Pacific Fusion is an example of that — and if those building blocks are really capital intensive, then we will create unique structures,” says Taneja.
“Most of the deals you’ll see announced over the coming weeks and months actually have that set up,” adds Fürstenberg; of working with local financial partners and using different capital solutions.
“A lot of it will come down to infrastructure-related financing options; that’s where we are spending a ton of time currently as a firm — to truly bridge that gap and come up with creative solutions to drive that,” Fürstenberg told the Sifted podcast.
Recent reports have also emerged that General Catalyst is in the early stages of considering an IPO in the US — a rare step for a VC, although some investors like Molten Ventures are public in Europe.
But Taneja dismisses the reports.
“That was a complete rumour. And I can tell you, we’ve never really discussed going and doing that,” he says, before adding: “Never say never. For the next four or five years, I don’t see that happening.”
Amy Lewin contributed reporting.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/general-catalyst-europe-investing/
