Mosaic Ventures: Reflections on Our First Year

Mosaic Ventures
Mosaic Ventures
Published in
4 min readDec 23, 2015

At the end of Mosaic’s first full year of operations, we continue to feel excited. It’s a privilege to do what we love: investing in the most ambitious startups being built by Europe’s most talented entrepreneurs.

We’d like to thank everyone who has supported us during this formative time. It has been an incredible journey. We’ve been blown away by the number of transformational startups that we’ve met across Europe, and especially the calibre of founders behind them. Keep ’em coming!

Below we’d like to share some data that may bring to life the past 12 months. After 350,000 miles flown, 4,380 cups of green tea, and partnering with 10 of the best early stage companies in Europe, we’re really looking forward to what 2016 brings.

Wishing you all happy and healthy holidays, and our very best for a fulfilling new year.

It’s been an exciting year for technology. Below are some of our favourite posts from 2015:

Mosaic Ventures Podcast: Introduction to Mosaic — We are investing our first $140 million fund in entrepreneurs that are reshaping big markets, fundamentally disrupting existing industries and radically innovating. In our first podcast our COO Michael Odai sits down with Mosaic Co-Founder and Partner Mike Chalfen to discuss the story of Mosaic Ventures, our values, how we partner with entrepreneurs and what we look for in aspiring founders….Read More

Where is all the innovation in insurance? Let the capital flow— A giant and heavily regulated industry which many would argue has lost sight of its customers should be ripe for attack. After all, entrepreneurs are tackling some of the toughest challenges in sectors like healthcare, transportation and financial services, using software to radically transform the product offering. Yet insurance has been overlooked, protected by large capital requirements and regulatory complexity…Read More

The Challenges Of Building AI Apps — Artificial intelligence has an intellectual lineage stretching back to the greats of computer theory, Turing and ultimately Babbage, inventor of the calculating machine. What we now see in London, where leading teams such as Deep Mind are working on machine learning, is the movement from the realm of computer science to practical uses, and business cases…Read More

Messaging & Notifications: The New Platforms — In Britain users spend as much time on WhatsApp as they do on Facebook mobile and Snapchat accounts for 75% of all messaging data traffic on Vodafone’s UK network. However, it isn’t just the UK where chat app popularity has exploded: the 10 biggest messaging apps — Facebook Messenger, KakaoTalk, Kik, Line, Skype, SnapChat, WeChat, WhatsApp, Tango, Viber — boast more than 3 billion users…Read More

The SaaS Startup KPI : In the rush to grab a piece of the $500bn software market, we see a lot of SaaS startups focusing almost entirely on marketing efficiency. Fine. You’ve found your customers, but what are you really doing for them? The sales pitch isn’t exactly the easy thing, but it is very far from being everything. As someone who started their career in software in the 90s, I remember the practice of selling empty ‘seat licenses’ to big enterprises that didn’t need half of them…Read More

Unbundling of the Banks in Europe: Who will disrupt banking? We’ve all heard about the opportunity from a breakdown in trust after the financial crisis, but little about who will replace the full service financial institutions in retail and investment banking. Since the birth of the internet, only a handful of US companies such as Etrade, Lending Tree, and Bankrate have successfully built new mass consumer financial services brands and they were all launched in the late ‘90s…Read more

You can follow us on twitter @Mosaic_VC, Linkedin, Facebook and Angelist

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Mosaic Ventures
Mosaic Ventures

We back founders who are reimagining the world. We invest $1–10m early, in those building daring adventures across Europe. — Mosaicventures.com