Akshat Goenka

I am an ex-banker turned startup founder turned venture capitalist, with a strong belief that the most innovative startups have the power to reinvent the way we live. I have been on the roller coaster of entrepreneurship and understand the importance of 'just being there' for a founder.

Like the majority of my Wharton classmates, I graduated and joined finance. I started off as a banker at JP Morgan Chase before eventually starting my own company that was incubated at Y Combinator. As founder/CEO of a healthtech venture, I led workflows across product, operations, sales, fundraising and HR to try and successfully piece together the crazy puzzle of startup success. After 4 years at DocTalk, I had tasted failure in terms of scaling a business, and wanted to share my learnings of what to do and, more importantly, what not to do with aspiring entrepreneurs. I launched StartupConnect, a collaborative social organization for founders to learn from their peers.

During this journey, I saw that working with driven founders on early-stage ideation and execution invigorates me and the possibility of backing founders and partnering with them in a mission-oriented manner became my calling. Since then, I have worked at Progression Fund and Accel before meeting Mattias and Mike and falling in love with their vision of building a truly tech-driven VC.

My personal experiences have shown me that startups are really really hard. Thousands of data points have to line up for progress to be made. The life of a founder is not one of glamor but of grit and determination - where lows are soul-crushingly low and very frequent while the rare high is never as all-encompassing as you would like. I always add this lens to my relationships with founders.

I am continuously excited by the remarkable founders working on fantastic ideas across Europe. I firmly believe that through our combination of data-driven investing and human-centric relationships, Moonfire is uniquely positioned to help early-stage founders reach their next milestone while never losing focus over the bigger long-term target.

I am excited for the journey ahead and am happy to chat on how we could partner up. Dont worry, I am quite informal in how I communicate and will give you a real representation of my thoughts.