Artificial intelligence is at an inflection point. Machine learning is permeating industries, touching almost every area of our lives. Home to a significant share of the global talent (Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, ETH, Inria), Europe is at the forefront of a new kind of software. We're excited by founding teams building commercial applications tightly coupled to a proprietary data model either to discover novel insights, or to automate routine work: both with a clear ROI.

‍

Recently we've spent time researching the 'MLOps' tool layer, the picks and shovels as all companies scramble for perceptual gold, especially at the junction of privacy and explainability. We also see great opportunity in applications enabled by new architectures for decentralized training and inference.

‍

Finally, we're excited by the power of machine intelligence to upend regulated and physical environments as they come online; in the lab, in the clinic, in the courtroom, the potential impact on human life is tremendous.

The workplace is changing radically. Accelerated by COVID-19, the next generation workforce is challenging existing ways of working and its supporting infrastructure. To stay ahead, businesses must adapt their tools and practices for work.

‍

Delightful user experiences found in consumer applications are now expected across the enterprise. This has driven a wave of specialised, best-of-breed tools that are bought and set up by end users, rather than centralised IT and procurement functions.

‍

The shift towards remote and distributed workforces has called for new modes of collaboration and communication, with SMEs increasingly being served by low-cost, low-friction tools that bring pen-and-paper workflows online or displace MS Office.

‍

Advances in process automation will continue to empower teams to eliminate their most mundane tasks and allow them to focus on the most value-adding activities.

Money makes the world go round - but as technology reshapes our financial systems, what will that money look like in the future?

We're witnessing an explosion of startups challenging convention in financial services. Europe will produce many winners, given its favourable regulatory environment and its large pool of consumers seeking better experiences.

‍

We see opportunities across the fintech landscape. While banks and financial incumbents continue to struggle with legacy IT, we see an entirely new stack of delightful user experiences, delivered in best-of-breed products: faster, better, cheaper. New consumer brands are being built in important categories, and Europe enjoys regulatory tailwinds - not least as Open Banking and PSD2 accelerate innovation in payments.

‍

Europe is also producing a rising cohort of SME-focused startups, serving unmet needs around invoicing, working capital finance and insurance. Specialised financial products are emerging for underserved participants in the economy, notably freelancers and gig workers.

‍

Ever since Mosaic's first investment, our interests have extended beyond traditional financial services. The concept of 'money' itself is evolving, as crypto assets tip into mainstream adoption, and the DeFi ecosystem gathers momentum. In the long run, we believe that blockchains have the potential to create a paradigm shift in the way society understands stores of value.

Marketplaces have grown to facilitate increasingly complex exchanges as they come online, and the enabling technologies have evolved in lock-step. These have ranged from basic text and images for classifieds like Craigslist, to social identity and trust for P2P sharing and location services for transport.

‍

Consequently, we're always looking for industries or environments that were previously analog, where exchange efficiencies can be created and the increase of participants strengthens the gains for all.

‍

Additionally, as great believers in unlocking entrepreneurial energy, we look for platforms that are creating economies, for example tools that empower a new class of work, for individuals to create their own flexible, independent business.

‍

Finally, as most commerce comes online, we are excited to see developments in the tooling, from fraud to payments to identity - all things that will support the bazaar revolution.

Technology means the extension of human capabilities: as Francis Bacon put it at the dawn of the new science, "the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible". Software-led businesses create new possibilities for humans to flourish, especially at its essential foundations: education and health.

‍

In education, we see tremendous opportunity to broaden access to the best teaching, and equip students of all ages to learn in the manner that works best for them, increasingly outside of traditional institutions and timelines.

‍

Decentralization is core to the empowerment opportunity we see in health. We're in the middle of an explosion of new ways to quantify biology, meeting increasingly cheap and portable, smartphone-interfacing diagnostic tools. This, coupled with a growing enthusiasm for telemedicine, creates an enormous pull away from overcrowded, overburdened clinics and hospitals across many areas of care and wellness. These new care modalities can feed back into the health system with real world evidence for new therapies.

‍

Great progress has been made in the last hundred years on the back of The Green Revolution in agriculture. Now, we're seeing the beginnings of a new revolution in how we feed the world, predicated on a convergence of computational and molecular technologies that enable us to design food systems and products better to support our health and that of the planet.

Thanks to ultra-cheap and ubiquitous edge computing devices, the networked smartphone, nearly everyone is walking around with a supercomputer in their pocket. There are sensors on every person, in every building, factory, vehicle and object.

‍

Emerging location-based services are now mass market - Waze and Uber are the first major instances and the potential impact on transport, commerce (and advertising) is huge. We're excited to see robotics and machine vision driving demand for precise understanding of location, leading to enriched 3D maps and better ways to deliver real-time location and status.

‍

We expect to see the car emerging as new platform and look forward to seeing the technology that will provide 3D vision capabilities and next-gen GPS to allow them to operate safely. This will drive new applications across vehicles, drones and industrial automation.