Announcing Jonas Vetterle as Moonfire’s New Head of AI & ML

We are excited to announce that Jonas Vetterle has been promoted to Head of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at Moonfire!

For the past four years, Jonas has been instrumental in shaping our technical direction. Most recently as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer and as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer before that. Jonas has personally built many of the elements of our stack which are central to our core business today. Jonas’ new role reflects the continued importance of AI and ML across everything we do at Moonfire — from sourcing and investment evaluation to portfolio support and fundraising and more.

Jonas brings a rare combination of strengths:

• A deep technical background in machine learning, with an MSc from UCL's rigorous ML masters programme (one of the most robust in the world), and several years of production experience training and deploying ML models
• Significant experience in software engineering and infrastructure, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and clean design
• A strong foundation in economics, which gives him a structured view of markets and behavior

He’s been a key builder of our platform, a thoughtful collaborator across the team, and a trusted advisor to many of the founders in our portfolio who are building technical machine learning products.

As Head of AI & ML, Jonas will take on a broader leadership role, focusing on:

• Defining and driving the vision for how we apply AI across the firm
• Leading engineering efforts tied to core business outcomes
• Bridging research and practice, identifying where emerging ideas can create practical impact
• Mentoring technical founders and helping portfolio companies make smart, early bets on data and ML
• Communicating openly how Moonfire’s AI capabilities differentiate our approach

At Moonfire, we were recently joined by Ben Coughlan in Q4 2023. Ben has dramatically strengthened our machine learning and data infrastructure capabilities, giving us a more mature, efficient, and scalable compute platform. This sets the stage for us to scale our AI systems and unlock the next level of performance and automation across the business. Jonas will play a central role in that next stage of growth for us.

If you’d like to get a sense of how he thinks, I recommend this earlier interview or this piece we wrote together, where we discussed applying rigorous, data-driven thinking to venture.

Congratulations to Jonas on this well-earned promotion. I’m looking forward to what we’ll build together next!