Hi, I'm Simon. I was born in London to a family of second/third generation immigrant-entrepreneurs – folks who came to Britain in some instances as refugees, and on whose shoulders I stand.
I moved to the US for grad school (in political thought and philosophy) aged 21, just as the web was emerging, and stayed for over a decade. An early adopter of online services, in 1993 I downloaded Netscape’s Mosaic, the first browser, and began surfing the web with a 14.4k modem. It was an epiphany. After another stint at grad school earning an MBA, I headed west to Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the Internet ecosystem.
From 1996-2000, I was an early employee at @Home Network, a startup founded in 1995 to pioneer the broadband Internet we take for granted today. I co-founded @Home’s international efforts and then led bus dev/corp dev for that group. In four years this ramped to $70M revenue and 500 employees in 10 countries (as a whole, the company grew to 4,000+ employees). @Home was one of the poster children of the first Internet wave, and flew high post-IPO before crashing due to a byzantine ownership structure and an ill-fated merger with Excite.
After a spell on the beach, my friend and partner Toby Coppel, helped to recruit me to Yahoo! in 2001, where I spent four years as VP Corp Dev in a small team that came together following the dotcom crash. Yahoo! was then the #1 website globally, and a great platform from which to enter the nascent search and mobile businesses, and double down on shopping, travel, finance, geo/maps, voice, photos, games and many other emerging web “verticals”. It was intellectually fascinating to work alongside a deep bench of world-class talent across such wide-ranging consumer-facing applications, and deliver product to (then) the web’s biggest audience.
As a result of these operating experiences at Silicon Valley darlings, twice-over I am a member of a fantastic diaspora of alumni, represented at many exciting startups today – a huge positive from the creative destruction inherent in our space.
I joined the venture community in 2006 and learnt the business as a partner at Accel in London. This offered a fantastic apprenticeship and platform to forge strong relationships with many entrepreneurs and fellow investors.
At Mosaic, I focus today on Machine Intelligence investments (most of which are SaaS), Human Empowerment and Marketplaces. I have also led investments across our other core themes, including Future of Money.
Outside the startup world, I love to spend time with my amazing Danish wife and our young family. I also enjoy reading, sharing good food and wine with friends, and nature.
Hi, I'm Simon. I was born in London to a family of second/third generation immigrant-entrepreneurs – folks who came to Britain in some instances as refugees, and on whose shoulders I stand.
I moved to the US for grad school (in political thought and philosophy) aged 21, just as the web was emerging, and stayed for over a decade. An early adopter of online services, in 1993 I downloaded Netscape’s Mosaic, the first browser, and began surfing the web with a 14.4k modem. It was an epiphany. After another stint at grad school earning an MBA, I headed west to Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the Internet ecosystem.
From 1996-2000, I was an early employee at @Home Network, a startup founded in 1995 to pioneer the broadband Internet we take for granted today. I co-founded @Home’s international efforts and then led bus dev/corp dev for that group. In four years this ramped to $70M revenue and 500 employees in 10 countries (as a whole, the company grew to 4,000+ employees). @Home was one of the poster children of the first Internet wave, and flew high post-IPO before crashing due to a byzantine ownership structure and an ill-fated merger with Excite.
After a spell on the beach, my friend and partner Toby Coppel, helped to recruit me to Yahoo! in 2001, where I spent four years as VP Corp Dev in a small team that came together following the dotcom crash. Yahoo! was then the #1 website globally, and a great platform from which to enter the nascent search and mobile businesses, and double down on shopping, travel, finance, geo/maps, voice, photos, games and many other emerging web “verticals”. It was intellectually fascinating to work alongside a deep bench of world-class talent across such wide-ranging consumer-facing applications, and deliver product to (then) the web’s biggest audience.
As a result of these operating experiences at Silicon Valley darlings, twice-over I am a member of a fantastic diaspora of alumni, represented at many exciting startups today – a huge positive from the creative destruction inherent in our space.
I joined the venture community in 2006 and learnt the business as a partner at Accel in London. This offered a fantastic apprenticeship and platform to forge strong relationships with many entrepreneurs and fellow investors.
At Mosaic, I focus today on Machine Intelligence investments (most of which are SaaS), Human Empowerment and Marketplaces. I have also led investments across our other core themes, including Future of Money.
Outside the startup world, I love to spend time with my amazing Danish wife and our young family. I also enjoy reading, sharing good food and wine with friends, and nature.
Hi, I'm Simon. I was born in London to a family of second/third generation immigrant-entrepreneurs – folks who came to Britain in some instances as refugees, and on whose shoulders I stand.
I moved to the US for grad school (in political thought and philosophy) aged 21, just as the web was emerging, and stayed for over a decade. An early adopter of online services, in 1993 I downloaded Netscape’s Mosaic, the first browser, and began surfing the web with a 14.4k modem. It was an epiphany. After another stint at grad school earning an MBA, I headed west to Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the Internet ecosystem.
From 1996-2000, I was an early employee at @Home Network, a startup founded in 1995 to pioneer the broadband Internet we take for granted today. I co-founded @Home’s international efforts and then led bus dev/corp dev for that group. In four years this ramped to $70M revenue and 500 employees in 10 countries (as a whole, the company grew to 4,000+ employees). @Home was one of the poster children of the first Internet wave, and flew high post-IPO before crashing due to a byzantine ownership structure and an ill-fated merger with Excite.
After a spell on the beach, my friend and partner Toby Coppel, helped to recruit me to Yahoo! in 2001, where I spent four years as VP Corp Dev in a small team that came together following the dotcom crash. Yahoo! was then the #1 website globally, and a great platform from which to enter the nascent search and mobile businesses, and double down on shopping, travel, finance, geo/maps, voice, photos, games and many other emerging web “verticals”. It was intellectually fascinating to work alongside a deep bench of world-class talent across such wide-ranging consumer-facing applications, and deliver product to (then) the web’s biggest audience.
As a result of these operating experiences at Silicon Valley darlings, twice-over I am a member of a fantastic diaspora of alumni, represented at many exciting startups today – a huge positive from the creative destruction inherent in our space.
I joined the venture community in 2006 and learnt the business as a partner at Accel in London. This offered a fantastic apprenticeship and platform to forge strong relationships with many entrepreneurs and fellow investors.
At Mosaic, I focus today on Machine Intelligence investments (most of which are SaaS), Human Empowerment and Marketplaces. I have also led investments across our other core themes, including Future of Money.
Outside the startup world, I love to spend time with my amazing Danish wife and our young family. I also enjoy reading, sharing good food and wine with friends, and nature.
Podcastle is giving superpowers to the next generation of content creators
Fixing customer service one phone call at a time. The power of LLMs to enable the largest virtual customer service team in the world
LLMs and generative AI could change education for good
Where does power really lie in the creator economy value chain, and which are the most attractive market segments?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We founded Mosaic as optimists who see technology as a force for good, and believe that the startup ecosystem will positively impact society.
Tech support for physical products is a huge market. Any enterprise that ships a manual with their product is a potential Mavenoid customer, as are companies that employ field service engineers to repair hardware and software....
Shipamax announced their $7M Series A last week, so we thought we'd share why Mosaic is excited to be leading the financing...
We are blessed to partner with great founders to build breakthrough startups.
Renting a residential property is a high-friction process, plagued by mishap, misunderstanding, and misfits.
Since the credit crisis, we've observed massive growth amongst new entrants disrupting the banks and financial services.
Great entrepreneurs dream about creating new sectors, reshaping entire industries and fundamentally disrupting the status quo
Sometimes it takes a while to announce a new Mosaic portfolio company
The 'watercooler' conversation at Mosaic HQ usually drifts towards the books we are reading, so we decided to share our thoughts in our bi-monthly
Co-Founders of Bonify: Dr. Gamal Moukabary , Dr. Josef Korte, Dr. Andreas Bermig, and Dr. Jan Ortmann
It is with great pleasure that we welcome the latest addition to the Mosaic team, our new venture partner Dr Jack Kreindler
Have you ever stopped for a moment to think about how the shirt you're wearing arrived at the store?
With the holiday season fast approaching we thought we would share three books that we've been enjoying over the past couple of months
In this podcast, Mosaic partners Simon Levene and Mike Chalfe explore sectors including Energy and Synthetic Life
Human fallibility (accidents, alcohol and so forth) is the root cause of massive loss of life on the roads, despite continuous improvements in auto safety technology
It may be a surprise to hear this from a venture capitalist, but the vast majority of startups should not take money from our industry
We are thrilled to announce that Pascal Gauthier is joining Mosaic as a Venture Partner
A big question founders often ask themselves is when should their startup raise venture capital
Mosaic recently participated in the$55M Series A financing for Blockstream, an unusual start-up founded by a group of idealists with a cypherpunk-inspired vision of revolutionizing the world of money, assets and contracts
We are entering the age of the "quantified self"
You get glimpses of possible futures, 108 of them to be exact, crammed into two and a half minute pitches at YCombinator's Demo Day
There's more to Berlin than e-commerce in this bustling startup hub - thoughts from a Mosaic week in Berlin
For those of you who have never heard of Slush, you are becoming part of the minority
Great founders are rare. Pioneers, geniuses, rule-breakers. Forging their own path with a drive to "make a dent in the universe."Like many great founders, you have some of the following traits in your DNA
We are optimists who believe that technology and the startup ecosystem are generally progressive forces in society
