Our Manifesto

We founded Mosaic as optimists who see technology as a force for good, and believe that the startup ecosystem will positively impact society.

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The New Gatekeepers

What do the macro shifts in tech have to do with the remake of commerce, and how Generative AI turns the hype cycle?

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Evaluating SaaS metrics at Series A

Which SaaS metrics are most predictive of long-term success? A benchmark of the key metrics we look at in diligence.

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ChatGPT and the Imagenet moment

The wave of enthusiasm around generative networks feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. What can it create, and where are the humans in the loop?

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Why We Invested in Vektor AI - a Platform Unlocking Mentoring for Tech Talent

Founded by ex Meta Anna Buldakova and Victor Buldakov, Vektor AI uses matching technology to connect tech talent with experienced mentors.

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Ways to think about a metaverse

Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean?

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Powering Personalisation: Why We Invested in Ninetailed

We believe that Ninetailed will make website personalisation far more accessible than ever – unlocking new revenue for digital businesses of all kinds.

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Meet Johannes Barth - Mosaic's New Head of Analytics

Johannes will play a crucial role in helping us streamline and automate our investment process.

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The creator economy: a power law

Where does power really lie in the creator economy value chain, and which are the most attractive market segments?

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Rocket ships and tractors

For some companies, revenue is a feature.

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Within and tech M&A

The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to regulating competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC’s attempt to block Meta from buying Within is a test case for all of this. So, how many interesting problems can we count?

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Back to the trend line?

The Covid Rotation turns, and ecommerce penetration is back to the trend line. But which trend line, and which penetration?

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There’s no such thing as data

Data is the new oil, we are told. Every country needs a data strategy, and all of us should own our data, and be paid for it. But really, there is no such thing as data, it’s not yours, and it’s not worth anything.

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Now what? A Letter to Founders on How to Survive a Bear Market

Mosaic’s co-founder and partner Toby Coppel shares his view on how the market volatility impacts venture capital and gives advice to founders on how to survive a bear market.

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What do Europe’s leading founders have in common?

Are there some founders who are more likely to build a Unicorn? We analysed 197 founding CEOs of European unicorns, to uncover patterns in their backgrounds and previous experience.

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Introducing Chandar Lal, Mosaic’s new Principal

We’re excited to announce that we have promoted Chandar Lal to Principal.

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AI for code: the next frontier in software development?

As large language models are applied to code, we can give ‘superpowers’ to developers. Could this transform the way we build software in the coming decades?

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TV, merchant media and the unbundling of advertising

Amazon’s ad business is bigger than YouTube and more profitable than AWS. Shein is the biggest fast-fashion retailer in the US, with no stores. US pay TV subscribers have fallen by a third. Where do ad budgets go, where does rent go, and how many brands will there be?

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‘Google meets Which’: cost of living data platform Nous raises $9m

London-based fintech Nous has raised $9m (£6.6m) in a seed funding round to develop its platform for aggregating the cost of living data in areas such as energy, insurance and broadband.

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Privacy on the internet: what comes next?

Will there be a “killer app” that gives individuals sovereignty over their online identities – at global scale? And what is the role of startups in a domain contested by governments and Big Tech alike?

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Introducing Mosaic’s New Head of Platform, Jennifer Cabala

We are thrilled to announce Jennifer Cabala is joining our team as Head of Platform to expand Mosaic’s platform services around three core pillars: strategic impact, scaling business operations and founder-centric support.

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Tech questions for 2022

Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.

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Three Steps To The Future

Exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Three Steps to the Future’.

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Nexar is building a ‘digital twin’ of cities using crowdsourced dash cam data

Nexar, a company best-known for its line of smart dash cams, has raised $53 million in a Series D financing round led by Qumra Capital. The funds will be used, in part, to scale its “digital twin” service built off crowdsourced dash cam footage for automotive OEMs and cities.

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Notes on newsletters

Email newsletters unlocked a new way to pay for content, but is this a tool or a network? You can write all you like, but how do you get readers? And is the take rate 10% or 90%?

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B2B marketplaces: what comes next?

The future of B2B commerce is open and frictionless

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When big tech buys small tech

‘Big tech’ buys hundreds of startups, but what are they, what does that mean for competition, and how does this fit into the broader market? How many more Instagrams are there, and how many DAOs?

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Metabrand

Has Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook, or rebranded VR? What is the metaverse? And can any company decide to build the future anymore?

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Blockchain says it posted $1.5 billion in revenue this year

The auspiciously named Blockchain.com recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, which may as well be a century in crypto years. The U.K.-based private company has another reason to celebrate too: Its revenue just surpassed $1.5 billion year to date, according to vice chairman Nicolas Cary and chief executive Peter Smith, who shared the figure exclusively with Fortune.

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Metaverse! Metaverse? Metaverse!!

‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.

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Privacy on the internet: who cares?

The world of technology cannot, and should not, stand apart from ethics and the norms of civil society. On the internet, one of the most central normative questions we have wrestled with is the relationship between software applications, derivative data stored and shared in the cloud, and privacy -- notably, consumer privacy.

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Reimagining the future of buy-to-let. Why we invested in GetGround.

Real estate is the world’s largest asset class: UK buy-to-let alone is £1.2T. Yet it remains completely un-securitised and inefficiently managed. Individual investors often find themselves lacking a clear view of property yield, while having to manage an ever-changing landscape of regulations and tax laws.

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Stepping out of the firehose

What does a mailbox with 351 thousand unread emails say about Bauhaus, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Metaverse?

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A decade of the Tim Cook machine

In all the enthusiasms, arguments and panics around tech, Apple is the $2tn elephant in the corner, mostly silent and serenely indifferent to the news cycle. It just ships - and it ships market-leading products, with metronomic precision, at massive scale, on a decade-long strategic roadmap. It also likes lecturing its peers. But is there another Jesusphone?

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Why We Invested in Lightyear

About a year ago, via our friend and co-investor Taavet Hinrikus, we learnt about a promising pair of ex-Wise (formerly TransferWise) executives who were under the radar, on a mission to democratise retail investment in Europe. At the time, in “stealth mode” the project was called Gandalf. As longtime consumer fintech geeks and Tolkien fans, we were doubly intrigued.

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Mainframes, ML and digital transformation

‘Digital transformation’ sounds like a parody of meaningless tech marketing, but actually captures some pretty interesting and important shifts in big company tech. It’s not as exciting as crypto or AR, and it takes a decade or two, but it’s just as big as smartphones.

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Ads, privacy and confusion

Privacy is coming to the internet and cookies are going away. This is long overdue - but we don’t know what happens next, we don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition.

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Do App Store Rules Matter?

We’ve been arguing about Apple’s app store rules for a decade now, but whatever your opinion of them, it should now be clear that something is going to change.

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Why we invested in Zerion

Evgeny, Vadim, and Alexey have blown us away at every turn, with a powerful vision of creating the one-stop shop for DeFi. With a sharp eye for product and growth, they are rapidly bringing that vision to life.

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Unleashing the potential of the extended workforce. Why we invested in Utmost.

We are living through a fundamental shift in the structure of work: the rise of the non-employee. This presents new challenges: how do you manage an increasingly heterogeneous workforce in a unified, holistic way?

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Integrative SaaS: A new OS for the workplace?

There has been a proliferation – and fragmentation – of new work software in the cloud. End users can now pick and choose products that work for them, pioneered by the likes of Slack and Dropbox. But maintaining a coherent workflow across large teams is a struggle. So what should the “connective tissue” between SaaS applications look like?

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Antitrust posturing

Late last year the US congress's antitrust committee held a series of hearings, and produced a 400 page report, on competition issues around big tech platforms. The report, co-authored by the new FTC nominee Lina Khan, essentially claimed that these companies are collectively the new Standard Oil, crushin

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The Potential of Real Time Trade Finance. Our investment in Hokodo

By now, most of us have used or been offered a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) option when we shop online. BNPL not only makes checkout experiences faster, but also drives consumers to spend more money.

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Boxes, trucks and bikes

The traditional way to think about ecommerce penetration is to look at share of total retail sales, and then deduct things like car repair, gasoline and restaurants - to get to ‘addressable retail’.

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Apple, Fedex and the cookie apocalypse

We’re now a couple of weeks into Apple’s latest iOS privacy move. If you want to track users between apps and the web, or from an ad through the app store to an install, then you need to ask permission, and Apple has deliberately framed the question such that almost no-one will say yes.

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Can Apple change ads?

Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company. iPods were a much bigger business than the Mac, and they also made Apple a dominant force in the music industry.

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Does Amazon know what it sells?

Of Amazon’s top 50 best-sellers in “Children's Vaccination & Immunisation”, close to 20 are by anti-vaccine polemicists, and 5 are novels about fictional pandemics. This poses two questions

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Resetting the App Store

Apple launched the App Store in 2008, and tightened up the payment rules in 2011, and we’ve been arguing about it ever since. In many ways the issues haven’t really changed - it’s just that the numbers got a lot bigger.

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The challenge of cross-border arbitrage: How to scale exchange and commerce platforms across Europe

Exchange and commerce platforms – and the tooling that comes with them – are having a moment. Hundreds of new marketplaces are being launched each month, leveraging new technology to supercharge supply and demand across sectors and geographies.

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A second ‘DeFi Summer’? The next phase of Decentralised Finance

Decentralised finance – or DeFi – is gathering pace. After the ‘DeFi Summer’ of 2020, we’ve seen further growth in adoption this year. But is DeFi really moving towards the mainstream – and if it is, what are the second-order effects?

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Step changes in ecommerce

The recent lockdowns led to a forced adoption and forced experiment, and a lot of future growth was pulled forward into a couple of quarters. The UK had a much more rigorous lockdown than the USA, and it had a much larger increase in e-commerce adoption.

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Is content moderation a dead end?

In the late 1990s, Microsoft was the evil empire, and a big part of ‘evil’ was that it was too closed - it made things too hard for developers. But then came the great malware explosion

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Crossing the pond: Decoding US vs UK startup funding, with Kindred’s Maria Palma

Startups face many challenges on their growth journey – but breaking international markets is one of the biggest. The US and UK investment ecosystems might speak the same language, but they’re worlds apart: investor attitudes, founder profiles, culture and working styles all differ significantly.

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Machine learning meets creative content

The merging of production tools and ML-driven creative tools will redefine creative processes. In the next 10 years we’ll be able to turbocharge templates to create whole new forms of rich media.

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Amazon's private labels

Amazon is a big and very aggressive company, that’s radically changing how retailing works, and that attracts a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism. Some of this is entirely justified. However, there’s one strand of criticism that fascinates me because it attacks Amazon for something that’s been part of retail for 150 years - the private label business.

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Picks and shovels for ecommerce

New tooling will emerge to power the next generation of online retail. The future is headless, social, and content-driven.

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How to pitch your early-stage start up to investors with Mosaic Partner, Toby Coppel

Sooner or later, every founder has to talk about what they’re building to external people. The most dreaded group of all may just be investors. We sat down with Toby Coppel to unpack how early-stage founders should go about the investor pitch.

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Crypto with Morgan Beller, #futureofmoney

#Cryptocurrencies are crossing the chasm. Meaningful adoption from companies like @PayPal, @ChristiesInc and @MorganStanley mean there’s now no going back.

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Outgrowing software

When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.

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Do Amazon ads bring in more cash than AWS?

There’s an old and common narrative around Amazon that it doesn’t make money, it sells below cost, it’s subsidised by investors and in particular it’s subsidised by AWS. People tend to repeat these to each other as though they’re unquestionable true, but they’re either debatable or objectively false.

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Retail, rent and things that don't scale

I generally think about retail as sitting on a spectrum from logistics to experience. At the logistics end, you know exactly what you want and retail’s job is to provide the most efficient way to get it. At the experience end, you don’t know, and retail’s job is to help you, with ideas, suggestion, curation and service.

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Shopify

Shopify’s 2020 results came out today, and much as expected, it reported that consumers spent a total of $120bn on its platform, almost exactly double the figure from 2019.

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Paying for news

Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.

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The year 2021 will bring DeFi into adolescence

After DeFi's breakout growth, we'll now see innovation in user experience, liquidity, scalability, and regulation.

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The Great Unbundling

COVID, China, regulation.. tech is becoming a regulated industry, but what does that actually mean? How will tech look like when entering its second 50 years?

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Why we invested in Indeez

Gig workers have been hard hit by COVID. Freelance designers, Uber drivers, chefs and independent consultants alike have little visibility about when pre-pandemic life will return and their careers can resume. They were not protected against such a life-altering event: the crisis has been an awakening to the importance of income protection insurance.

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Online speech and publishing

Facebook has close to 2bn users, posting over 100bn things each day. The global SMS system, at its peak, had 20-25bn messages a day.

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Europe, Unicorns and Global Tech Diffusion - The End of the American Internet

Anyone will do anything online, and a whole wave of companies is being created to take advantage of that, even, yes, in Europe.

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Platforms, bundling and kill zones

In the 1980s, if you installed a word processor or spreadsheet program on your PC, they wouldn’t come with word counts, footnotes or charts. You couldn’t put a comment in a cell. You couldn’t even print in landscape. Those were all separate products from separate companies that you’d have to go out and buy for $50 or $100 each.

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E-commerce growth during lockdown

Lockdowns triggered a huge spike in online sales of every kind, will this stabilise - once things calm down, where will the new level be set? Our Venture Partner Ben Evans looks into it.

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Q&A with Habito's Daniel Hegarty

Daniel Hegarty, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Habito, came up with the idea for the business six years ago, after an eye-opening experience trying to buy his first home when his own mortgage broker made several frustrating mistakes. Dan realised that the mortgage market was rife with manual errors and confusing jargon.

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Our Slush Workshop: A Fintech Founder's playbook for uncertain times

Our partner Toby had the chance to lead a workshop at Slush2020 on how FinTech founders can prepare for uncertain times.

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Crypto protocols: in search of the emerging winners

We continue to witness a Cambrian explosion of public blockchain development. In recent years, the fabric of the decentralised web has begun to be woven, and the social contract of money is being rewritten. Bitcoin and later Ethereum are the two platforms on this movement was catalysed. In this post, we explore what comes next.

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What is your market?

One of the basic building blocks of any competition case is market definition

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Machine intelligence and legal contracts: why now?

Machine intelligence applied to the law is not a new concept – yet its gestation has been slow, and it has not inflected into widespread adoption.

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Ecommerce discovery

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at ecommerce and discovery - how do people decide what to buy online, when a shop can’t show it to them? It seems to me that pretty much every part of that question is being reset this year

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Preclinical drug discovery: does software eat the CRO?

The productivity of pharmaceutical research and development has been on the decline for decades. In fact, reports indicate a negative rate of return for many recently developed drugs.

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A new operating system for work: our investment in Qatalog

What will be the operations software to power the modern connected organisation? After several years asking this question, meeting Tariq Rauf in July 2019 was an epiphany.

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Procurement software: crossing the chasm

Machine intelligence is permeating into more enterprise functions than ever...

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Amazon's profits, AWS and advertising

People argue about Amazon a lot, and one of the most common and long-running arguments is about profits. The sales keep going up, and it takes a larger and larger share of US retail every year (7-8% in 2019), but it never seems to make any money. What’s going on?

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What tech regulation can teach us

It took 75 years for seatbelts to become compulsory, but tech has gone from interesting to crucial only in the last five to ten years. That speed means we have to form opinions about things we didn’t grow up with and don’t always understand quite so well as, say, supermarkets.

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Trust in a time of anti-trust: lessons from big tech

We all, I think, understand that the iPhone was a generational change in computing, but that change came in two parts. The multitouch interface is obvious, but the change in the software model was just as important. Apple changed how software development worked, and by doing so expanded the number of people who could comfortably, safely use a computer from a few hundred million to a few billion.

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The ecommerce surge

Both the UK and (today) the USA have given official statistics on how ecommerce and retail have changed during lockdown. The headline numbers are pretty dramatic. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30% in two months, and the USA from 17% to 22%.

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What if we broke up big tech?

We’re clearly going to be arguing about the size, power and market share of large technology companies a great deal in the next couple of years

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Smarter hiring in a post-COVID world

Why now? Poor hiring decisions are costly and time-consuming - and now there's an acute problem to be solved

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Tech and the new normal

We've heard a lot about "the new normal" but what does that mean for tech?

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What comes after Zoom?

We had video calls in science fiction, and we had video conferencing in the 1990s, just as the web was taking off..

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Advertising

There are two ways you can talk about newspapers. You can talk about the ‘fourth estate’, and newspapers’ role in culture, politics, governance, the exchange of ideas and civil society. But you can also talk about newspapers as a specialised light manufacturing industry, that aggregated attention to sell advertising.

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Privacy: from compliance to competitive advantage

Last month, GDPR celebrated its second birthday...

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Why we invested in Keelvar

If you've ever sold to large enterprises, we suspect you've felt the pain of procurement...

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Online events

Online events remind me a lot of ecommerce in about 1996. The software is raw and rough around the edges, and often doesn’t work very well, though that can get fixed. But more importantly, no-one quite knows what they should be building.

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Pop culture

‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’ is a great catch phrase, and it’s also a great way to describe a whole class of product and a whole class of startup.

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Predicting tech

A lot of really important technologies started out looking like expensive, impractical toys.

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The VR winter

We tried VR in the 1980s, and it didn’t work. The idea may have been great, but the technology of the day was nowhere close to delivering it, and almost everyone forgot about it. Then, in 2012, we realised that this might work now.

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COVID and cascading collapses

You might call this the Wile E Coyote effect - you’ve run off the cliff, or the cliff has disappeared from under you, but there’s a brief moment while your legs windmill in the air before gravity kicks in. It can take a while for the inevitable to happen, but then, as Lenin pointed out, you get a decade of inevitable in a week.

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Balancing the books: the SME accounting opportunity

When Luca Pacioli first recorded the method of double-entry bookkeeping in the fifteenth century, he may not have anticipated the impact he would have on the modern world...

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COVID and forced experiments

In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA began in a smartphone app. By 2019 that was probably closer to 50%.

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COVID-19, the future of work, and second-order thinking

COVID-19 is an immense human tragedy...

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Rethinking retirement: the next generation of pensions

When reading about the state of retirement savings in Europe, one often encounters the journalistic trope of a 'time bomb'

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