Europe’s Earlybird VC closes €360M Fund VIII
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Earlybird closes €360M Fund VIII, its largest ever, with a new perpetual ownership model and a deeptech-first thesis
April 30, 2026 - 8:15 am
The Berlin firm, founded in 1997, has raised a new fund every three to four years through every market cycle. Fund VIII is oversubscribed, manages €2.5 billion across strategies, and bets heavily on AI infrastructure, foundation models, and deeptech.
Earlybird Venture Capital has closed its eighth early-stage fund at €360 million, the largest in the Berlin firm’s 29-year history, the company announced today. The fund is oversubscribed and backed by a mix of large institutional investors and family offices, many of whom have backed Earlybird across multiple fund generations. Across all its investment strategies, including Earlybird Health, the firm now manages €2.5 billion in assets.
The close continues what Earlybird describes as a defining discipline: raising a new fund every three to four years, without exception, through bull markets and corrections alike. Fund VII, raised in 2022 at €350 million amid a market downturn, was itself oversubscribed. Fund VIII is €10 million larger and arrives at a moment when European venture capital is once again accelerating, with the continent raising €66.2 billion in 2025, though still roughly 22% of the equivalent US figure.
Earlybird has structured its investment thesis around three areas:
- AI applications
- Software infrastructure and foundation models
- Deeptech
The firm has already deployed capital from Fund VIII into a cohort that includes:
- Black Forest Labs, the German image generation startup that raised $300 million at a $3.25 billion valuation in December 2025;
- SpAItial AI, a 3D AI foundation model company;
- Sintra AI, a Lithuanian AI startup for SMBs;
- Arago, a photonic chip company focused on reducing AI energy consumption;
- Porters, a financial services back-office software company;
- Rivia, a clinical trials data infrastructure business.
The thesis on where value accrues in the AI stack is articulated clearly by Partner Dr Andre Retterath, who leads Earlybird’s AI and infrastructure practice. In an interview with Tech.eu, he argued that the application layer is the most competitive and lowest-margin part of the stack.
"At the application layer, it has never been easier to build a product, you can spin something up over a weekend. The constraint has shifted from building to distribution. So while applications are noisy and highly competitive, infrastructure offers stronger moats."
Foundation models, he said, tend to sit in the 30 to 50% gross margin range. Infrastructure and hardware, Nvidia being the reference case, running at 70 to 75%, offer substantially higher margins and stronger defensibility. Earlybird’s portfolio reflects that view: it has invested in companies building the physical, computational, and software infrastructure on which AI applications run, rather than the applications themselves.
Fund VIII also introduces what Earlybird is calling a ‘perpetual ownership model’ for the firm.