I am a venture capitalist and philanthropist, deeply interested in open source. I primarily spend my time on:
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Investing at Runa Capital, where I focus on seed-stage open source, developer-focused, and infrastructure software.
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Building the Open Source Endowment, the world’s first endowment fund dedicated to sustaining open source software.
I started programming at age 13, curious about how to build computer games and websites. At university, I studied maths, physics, and computer science, and have been experimenting early with new tech ever since — like tech startups (since 2009) and AI & machine learning (2011).
Open source has been my long-standing passion. Over the years, I’ve journeyed from being just a user to its supporter by investing in open source startups and donating to OSS projects.
I live in London and often visit the San Francisco Bay Area.
Work
I am a General Partner at Runa Capital, a VC firm that funds enterprise software and deep tech. We invest $0.5–5M in seed-stage startups and have supported 100+ companies since 2010, including Mambu, n8n, SuperAnnotate, Nginx, MariaDB, Acumatica, and Pasqal.
Some startups I led our investments in:
- Mastra AI — the leading open source TypeScript AI agent framework
- Twenty — the leading open source CRM platform (thesis)
- OpenReplay — open source session replay and analytics
- Keep — open source AIOps & alert management (thesis), acquired by Elastic
- Sidekick — work-focused browser based on Chromium, acquired by Perplexity
Since 2020, I've been publishing a quarterly index of the fastest-growing OSS startups and various data-driven research, such as open source benchmarks and contributor analysis. I also launched and continue to lead the development of Runa's internal AI and data platform.
If you're building an open source or infrastructure startup, contact me at [email protected]!
Philanthropy
In addition to donating to charities, I have ideated, founded, and co-built several online communities, endowments, and other nonprofit projects. This is an important part of my life philosophy and an exciting way to gain hands-on experience, applying modern tech tools to solve interesting problems.
I am the Chairman & Co-founder of the Open Source Endowment, the first-ever endowment fund aiming to enable truly sustainable funding for open source maintainers. This is a new community-driven, tech-enabled nonprofit that leverages diverse ideas, including:
- What Open Source can learn from universities to fix its funding
- How I algorithmically donated $5,000+ to OSS via GitHub Sponsors and PyPI data
We are currently assembling a community of founding donors (tech founders, investors, and executives) and welcome all passionate individuals willing to support its cause.