Moonfire Ventures describes itself as a technology company that does venture capital — and the phrase is more than marketing. The London-based seed firm, launched in 2020 by former Atomico co-founder Mattias Ljungman, runs proprietary machine-learning models and a custom-built tech stack across the entire venture value chain, from founder discovery to portfolio support. Its investors describe themselves as being as much product managers and engineers as financiers.
Moonfire closed Fund I ($60M) in 2021 and announced Fund II ($115M) in May 2023 — a $90M main fund alongside a $25M opportunity fund for doubling down on winners. The firm invests at pre-seed and seed, occasionally into Series A, with a "golden triangle" of products that deliver greater access, efficiency and service quality through data.
The current sector focus spans security, infrastructure and tooling; work and knowledge; capital and finance; gaming, community and leisure; and health and wellbeing. The team pairs Ljungman with computer scientist Mike Arpaia, Akshat Goenka, Anneliese Turton, Jonas Vetterle, Thomas Bradley and others — a bench that blends investing and engineering.
Portfolio companies include fintech LiveFlow — which the firm says its AI engine discovered before leading the pre-seed round — HR platform Humaans, open-source BI tool Lightdash, multiplayer football game GOALS, open-source threat intelligence platform Filigran, and Oliva. By its own account, Moonfire has led 23 deals and co-invested in a further 27 alongside firms including Sequoia, Accel, Index and General Catalyst.
The data-driven positioning invites scrutiny, of course: when announcing Fund II, Moonfire said its engine reviews up to 50,000 companies a week — a figure TechCrunch noted it could not independently verify. What is verifiable is the operating style that comes with it. Moonfire blends remote investing with in-person meetings — Ljungman has said the team meets founders in person on a monthly basis — and works the way a product team works: shipping internal tools, iterating on its sourcing models, and publishing the reasoning behind its portfolio construction in the open.
Beyond capital, the firm publishes a stream of engineering and thesis writing — from "972 billion portfolios" on portfolio construction to notes on how seed is broken and how to fix it — and runs founder events including its Pulse and Seed gatherings. Founders testify to the operator network as much as the tech: Humaans CEO Giovanni Luperti credits Moonfire with opening "a network of incredible operators and entrepreneurs that we can learn from."
Why it matters for founders
If you are raising pre-seed or seed in work, finance, security tooling, gaming or health — and your product leans on data — Moonfire offers something unusual: an investor whose sourcing engine may already know about you, an engineering-led team that speaks your language, and a community that treats founders as fellow builders.