About

Our story

Mosaic’s co-founders, Simon Levene and Toby Coppel, first met as grad school roommates in the US in 1995.

We moved to Silicon Valley at the birth of the web, just as the first generation of Internet startups were scaling. This was a formative period that shaped how we think about the impact of technology, and the mix of ambition and risk required to be successful. Over the past 30+ years, we’ve operated and invested across the US and Europe, often side by side, through multiple technology waves: the web, cloud, mobile, and now AI — which we believe will become the biggest wave of all.

We began as operators, first at Excite@Home and later together at Yahoo!, building through periods of rapid growth, strategic uncertainty, and market volatility. Those experiences gave us a first-hand understanding of how hard it is to build an enduring company, and continue to shape how we partner with founders today.

Mosaic has evolved over time. Chandar Lal joined in 2020, bringing experience across strategy, corporate development, and enterprise software, and grew into Partner at the end of 2024.

As a team, we’ve learned the craft of investing at amazing platforms including Accel, Allen & Co and Sequoia. Over the years, we’ve also had the privilege to partner with the founders of global category leaders including Alibaba, Criteo, Etsy, Squarespace, and Wise – companies built far from Silicon Valley, but with ambition and execution that matched the very best anywhere.

A Silicon Valley mindset, applied globally

When a founder has a category-defining vision and mission, it helps to have investors who bring experience scaling large startups.

Our approach is shaped by the first generation of venture capital as practiced in the 1970s and 80s, where conviction, trust, and long-term partnership mattered more than process. We bring that philosophy to early stage investing today: supporting founders through complexity and navigating hard decisions, to realize their dream of an outsized outcome.

Our values

We believe technology, deployed responsibly, is a powerful force for good – and that entrepreneurship is fundamental to its progress.

Venture capital only exists because of entrepreneurs like you who put everything on the line, and we’re honored when you choose to work with us.

As your business partner, we promise:

True partnership

We trust in you and commit to offering honest, thoughtful counsel grounded in mutual respect.

Long-term perspective

Success isn’t built overnight: building great companies takes patience, resilience, and courage. We’re in it for the long haul.

Focus

We’re a small, highly collaborative team. We make up to 10 new investments per year, and only invest in early-stage AI applications.

Growth mindset

We are independent thinkers and comfortable taking contrarian bets.

We’re curious, open, and straightforward – shaped by both past successes and mistakes.

Low friction

We value speed, clarity, and doing what we say we’ll do. We respect your time and aim for simple, transparent processes and fast decisions.

Thesis-driven

Since the 1990s, we’ve worked alongside several hundred startups across industries and geographies. Some worked spectacularly, many others didn’t. Those experiences inform our thesis-driven approach: we anticipate how a market might unfold over the next 5–10 years, and then partner with founders whose mission is to bend the universe towards that future. Momentum helps, but we embrace risk and don’t need fully baked KPIs to reach conviction.

We’re drawn to startups with:

  • Products that customers truly love, with early signs of evangelism

  • Vast addressable markets, with uncharted whitespace or vulnerable incumbents

  • The potential for durable moats, often through technology differentiation or network effects

  • Scalable GTM and distribution, especially organic or bottom-up adoption

  • Capital-efficient growth, where funding pays for world-class people to ship and sell world-class products

If these principles resonate, we’d love to chat.