Mike Arpaia

I’m a computer scientist with experience building early-stage start-ups as well as contributing to industry-leading tech companies. I’m passionate about machine learning, distributed systems, open-source software, and quantitative finance.

I started off in New York working on data infrastructure and operating system security before joining Etsy as a Software Engineer. In 2014, I moved to San Francisco and joined the team at Facebook, where I created and open-sourced osquery in 2014. Osquery has since become a standard in the information security industry, used by thousands of companies worldwide to detect and respond to security threats and other critical incidents. Wanting to build a company of my own, I left Facebook in 2016 to co-found an infrastructure analytics company called Kolide. At Kolide, I served as co-founder and CTO, leading a high-performing, fully-remote engineering team and acting as the lead architect and developer for nearly all of our backend, infrastructure, and operating system software. After three years at Kolide, I joined Workday’s Machine Learning organization, leading the successful launch of a distributed embedding-based search and multi-document matching engine. I also worked as a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Mila, a leading academic deep learning lab, on a project that combined state-of-the-art computer vision and climate science to combat climate change.

I’ve long been passionate about venture capital and the opportunity to support early-stage founders. After meeting Mattias and learning about his vision for Moonfire, I knew I had to sign up. At Moonfire, I’m responsible for defining and delivering the firm’s technology strategy.

In my role, I work directly with founders to help them navigate key early challenges. I assist in hiring senior technical leaders, developing technical hiring strategies, and refining technical architectures, including machine learning and data infrastructure. I also organize deeply technical events for founders, fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration across our portfolio. At Moonfire, our focus on building cutting-edge technology not only sharpens our ability to identify transformative opportunities but also deepens our understanding of the challenges founders face, allowing us to partner with them more effectively on their journeys.

I’m excited about what we’re building and look forward to working closely with Europe’s best founders to help them turn bold visions into reality.