Hello and welcome to our first newsletter of 2025!

This time, the spotlight is on Lightdash and two of our amazing founders: Hamzah and Oliver.

Following their $11m Series A last October, we had a great chat with Hamzah about why they chose to build open source, the power of community, and his vision for a future where data literacy is as second nature as browsing the web.

And we’ve got our usual roundup of news, books, and podcasts.

Enjoy.

Mattias and the Moonfire team

🌓🔥

The Snapshot

Here's a quick roundup of interesting stuff we saw this month:

• A deep dive into DeepSeek’s performance and training costs
• “New Space” – One of the best space documentaries in recent years.
• Garry Tan on scaling laws
• And our very own Jonas on LLM scaling in 2025
• Parables on the Power of Planning in AI: From Poker to Diplomacy
• Contrary’s tech trends report

What’s Up at Moonfire?

Lightdash’s third act: Building for the future of BI

I’ve told the story before, but my first interaction with Lightdash was trying to hire now Co-founder and CTO Oliver Laslett. I was setting up Moonfire at the time and was so impressed, I offered him a job on the spot. But when he told me what he and Hamzah Chaudhary were building, I asked to invest instead. That was back in 2019, before they went through Y Combinator. We went on to lead their pre-seed round, bringing in top founder-angels Tristan Handy (dtb Labs), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell) and Bradley Horowitz (Google). We also contributed to their $8.4m seed round in October 2022 and continued participation in their $11m Series A in October 2024 – both rounds were led by Accel.

Hamzah and Oliver are phenomenal founders. Their vision is to build the universal operating system for business intelligence, where teams worldwide seamlessly collaborate on insights. Together, they’ve built a company that’s reshaping how data teams work, bringing the best practices from software engineering into the world of data analytics, and rethinking how everyone can interact with and leverage data.

I sat down with Hamzah to talk about the story so far – from setting up Lightdash at the height of Covid, to building the best – not biggest – team, and becoming (unexpectedly) big in Japan.

Keep reading

Podcast of the Month

Big Tech definitely has a seat at the table in Trump’s new-look White House – but what about Little Tech? YC CEO Garry Tan and FAI Senior Fellow Jon Askonas join Evan Swarztrauber, former Policy Advisor at the Federal Communications Commission, to discuss what startups and smaller companies need to thrive under the new administration.

Listen now

Good Read of the Month

Bill Gates takes us through his early life up to his creation of Microsoft. He’s one of the most well-known and written-about figures in tech, but there’s always something to learn when you hear someone’s story in their own words.

Buy it here

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That's all for this time.

Until the next, all the best,

Mattias and the Moonfire team.

🌓🔥

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