Hello and welcome to our final newsletter of the year.

This time, we’re sharing some big wins from our portfolio and the content that got everyone talking this year, as well as a bumper version of our usual reading and listening recommendations.

Enjoy.

Mattias and the Moonfire team

🌓🔥

*****

The Snapshot

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

• Following on from Vitalik Buterin’s post about prediction markets and info finance last month: Boring News.
• Actual breakthroughs of 2024 – and some speculative ones.
• An anthropologist’s journey into the culture of venture capital – feat. Mike!
• The difficult relationship between multistage firms and smaller seed funds.
• Marc Andreessen on why the curse of the entrepreneur is being too early.
• A big week of AI and robotics news.
• Meet the most interesting investor in the world.
• Andrej Karpathy’s favourite books.

Round-up of 2024

It’s been a big, busy year.

Conversations that mattered

June saw our inaugural Founder Summit and the biggest Pulse Summit yet, featuring thought-provoking discussions with Harry Stebbings (20VC), Mehdi Ghissassi (DeepMind), Rosalyn Moran (Stanhope AI), and Yoram Wijngaarde (Dealroom), among many others. We covered everything from differentiation and disruption in AI to building trust through policy and global sales.

Harry and Jordan Schwarzenberger (Manager of The Sidemen) joined Mattias on stage to discuss how influencers and content creators have redefined what it means to be an investor in today’s world – a timely conversation given Harry’s recently announced fund. It serves as proof that being a content creator first can be a serious advantage in VC. As we wrote in our ensuing piece, the more types of venture model we have, the better it is both for VCs and founders.

Big wins across the portfolio

Our founders have had some big wins, reflecting their determination and vision.

Samuel and Julien, founders of Filigran, secured a $35m Series B – just months after their $16m Series A, demonstrating their rapid progress and the market’s belief in their mission. Lasse, Anita and Evan raised a $13.5m Series A for LiveFlow and launched a new platform: LiveFlow Next.

Hamzah and Oliver, the founders of Lightdash, announced their $11m Series A. Mike and Brandon at Brightwave closed their $15m Series A in October – quadrupling their revenue since their $6m Seed in June.

Guillaume, Florent, Anatole and the Revyze team raised a $6m Seed to make learning fun. George and Edrei at Stellar Sleep raised an initial $6m to rethink the treatment of chronic insomnia. Pete and Raj at Healthtech1 raised a $3.5m Seed to automate admin in doctors surgeries. Hugo and Will at Orchestra raised £1m to help enterprises rapidly deliver data and AI products. Jiameng and Sohaib at Neuphonic raised a £3m Pre-seed to transform voice AI with the world’s fastest text-to-speech technology.

Over at Humaans, Giovanni, Karolis and the team released their new HR AI companion. Flagright won multiple awards from G2, demonstrating its leadership in the anti-money laundering space – congratulations to Baran and Madhu. Pento was acquired by HiBob. And Scriptic was recognised by a16z as one of the companies shaping the ‘AI Pixar’ of the future – congratulations Nihal and Benedict.

Celebrating our founders

Beyond the numbers, 2024 was about the people driving them.

We shared the journeys of Samuel and Julien (Filigran) and Lasse, Anita and Evan (LiveFlow) – and sat down with many others, exploring what inspired them to start their companies, the unexpected challenges and surprises they’ve faced along the way, how they work with their co-founders, and advice they would give to other tech founders – as well as some lucky dip questions!

From our first AI Engineering Workshop to our Christmas party, it’s been an incredible year of connecting with our founders and celebrating their achievements.

Writing and thinking

We continued to share our perspectives on where we think the market is headed and where the opportunities are – from gaming in the time of infinite content to where founders should focus to capitalise on the $2tn security opportunity.

One piece, in particular, stood out: ‘Seed is Broken’. In it, we argued in favour of a fundamental rethink of how we approach seed-stage startups and funding. Our framework of Seed Inception and Seed Expansion helps both investors and founders re-orient the company, raise, and valuation back to the fundamentals: level-setting capital against where the company’s at on its journey and clarifying what the capital should be spent on.

It clearly struck a chord, featuring in the Sifted Up Round newsletter, and generating a lot of discussion. Here’s to starting more conversations in 2025.

Building for the future

This year, Moonfire was recognised as one of the top 20 data-driven VCs in the world, out of a list of 190 – and the only one with more engineers than investors. Four years since our founding, it’s testament to our commitment to build and apply novel technology to venture capital.

Our engineering team has been sharing more about the journey – check out Jonas’s ‘Fine-tuning is all you need’ – offering a practitioner’s view on building and running a technology-driven VC. We also launched our occasional AI newsletter Moonshot, where we share new developments in AI, what we’re working on, and lessons learned as we apply AI to venture capital. Read the first and second issues.

Meanwhile, we’ve been hard at work on Launchpad, our all-in-one platform for investors. Looking ahead, we’re expanding its functionality to support founders, with tools designed to accelerate growth, provide personalised metrics and feedback, and enhance talent search capabilities with professional datasets. Our long-term vision is for Launchpad to become the go-to hub for collaboration, execution, fundraising, and networking, empowering our community of founders, partners, and industry experts.

All of this culminates in our new website, which better tells the story of what we’ve always been about: dedicated to supporting the best early-stage tech founders and using technology to accelerate their journeys.

Here's to 2025

So, to our founders, investors, and community: thank you for making 2024 such an extraordinary year. You make Moonfire what it is, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead. Here’s to an equally incredible 2025.

*****

Podcasts of the Month

Odd Lots: Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era

VC Ethan Kurzweil – formerly Bessemer Venture Partners and now founder of new firm Chemistry – discusses the case for starting a small firm, what technologies excite him most right now, and the landscape for seed-stage investing.

Listen now

BG2Pod: Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella joins the show to discuss his journey to becoming Microsoft CEO, Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, consumer and enterprise AI, the future of AI agents, and share his advice for CEOs.

Listen now

Dwarkesh Podcast: Gwern Branwen – How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory

Pseudonymous researcher, writer, and polymath Gwern discusses going down rabbit holes, human vs artificial intelligence, AGI timelines, a grand theory of intelligence, automating Steve Jobs – and a lot more.

Listen now

*****

Good Reads of the Month

'Elon Musk' by Walter Isaacson

Having shadowed Musk for two years – walking the SpaceX and Tesla factories, attending board meetings, sitting in on his acquisition of Twitter, and interviewing friends, family, co-workers and adversaries – Walter Isaacson captures the relentless drive, visionary thinking, and complex personality. It’s an epic portrait of the most impressive innovator of our time and the power of unrelenting ambition.

Buy it here

'Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son' by Lionel Barber

From humble beginnings in a Korean slum to reshaping the global tech landscape, this book captures the man, his wild ride through a quarter-century of hyper-globalisation, and his unique blend of financial engineering and crazy risk-taking.

Buy it here

'Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World' by Nick Bostrom

Bostrom’s last book, Superintelligence, focused on what might happen if AI development goes wrong. What if things go right? What happens in a future where human labour is obsolete, and our efforts are no longer needed for practical purposes? Bostrom explores how we might find meaning and purpose in such a world. Star Trek’s Federation or Iain Banks’ Culture?

Buy it here

*****

That’s all for this year. We hope you had a happy, healthy, and fruitful 2024, and best wishes for 2025.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Until the next, all the best,

Mattias and the Moonfire team.

🌓🔥