Moonfire Ventures

Moonfire Ventures is a London-based pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm founded in 2020 by Mattias Ljungman, a Swedish investor who spent 13 years as a co-founder of Atomico before leaving in 2019 to build Moonfire. The firm positions itself not as a traditional VC but as a technology company that does venture capital, deploying proprietary machine-learning and generative-AI tooling that reviews up to 50,000 companies per week — roughly 600 times the throughput of a typical fund — to systematically surface Europe's best early-stage founders and augment human judgement with data-driven signals. Partner Mike Arpaia, a computer scientist with an AI and quantitative-finance background and former tech lead at Facebook, Etsy, and Workday, co-founded the cybersecurity platform Kolide before joining Moonfire. Around 90% of the team are former founders themselves. Moonfire has raised two vehicles: Fund I at $60 million in 2020-2021, and a $115 million Fund II in May 2023 (split between a $90 million main fund and a $25 million opportunity fund), with Cendana as a primary LP alongside Utah School and Institutional Trust Funds Office and US state endowments. The firm leads rounds and writes typical tickets of $1 million to $2.5 million. The portfolio spans 46 companies across AI, SaaS, fintech, cybersecurity, gaming, healthtech, and future-of-work. Recent investments include Filigran ($35 million Series B, cybersecurity), Flexion Robotics (EUR 43 million, November 2025), Fleet Device Management ($27 million Series B, June 2025), and Neuphonic (voice AI). Additional portfolio names include Humaans, Lingo.dev, and Bloom. Moonfire's AI-assisted sourcing model is designed to reduce the pattern-matching biases inherent in traditional VC and to discover exceptional founders from geographies and backgrounds that conventional networks tend to overlook.