Announcing Tom Bradley as Moonfire’s New Staff Software Engineer

We are excited to announce that Tom Bradley has been promoted to Staff Software Engineer at Moonfire!

Over the past three years, Tom has had an outsized impact on how we build, how we work, and how Moonfire presents itself to the world. When Tom joined, Moonfire already had a powerful, data-driven sourcing, screening, and evaluation engine that was consistently surfacing exceptional investment opportunities. What we lacked was a user experience that matched the sophistication of the underlying system.

At the time, our workflow depended on an off-the-shelf CRM that we had pushed far beyond its intended use. Through years of disciplined engineering, we had found every sharp edge and dark corner in that platform. The result was functional—but constraining. We knew that the quality of experience we could offer investors, founders, and our own team was fundamentally limited by tooling that was never designed for how we work.

Tom joined Moonfire and led the design and implementation of Launchpad, our next-generation, AI-native venture investing platform.

Launchpad began as a front-end for capabilities we had already developed across sourcing, research, and evaluation. Under Tom’s leadership, it evolved into something far more ambitious. Today, Launchpad sits at the center of our technology stack. It is where the team spends the majority of its time, the visual identity of our business, and the interface through which we engage with the next generation of exceptional founders. In a very real sense, Launchpad is the physical manifestation of Moonfire’s way of thinking.

There is much to say about Launchpad itself, what it has become, and where it is going. But the story here is really about Tom.

Tom brings a rare combination of qualities:

• A strong product instinct and deep empathy for users, allowing him to internalize real workflows and pain points
• Creative range in UI and UX, consistently producing novel, elegant solutions rather than incremental improvements
• Solid engineering fundamentals, enabling him to turn ambitious ideas into reliable, scalable product infrastructure
• A deeply collaborative mindset, paired with genuine kindness and a desire to help others succeed

One of my favorite things about working with Tom is his love of surprising and delighting people. It is not uncommon for him to open a team meeting by saying he has “been cooking up something fun,” and then demo a feature or workflow improvement that none of us knew was coming but which immediately feels obvious and indispensable. That habit captures something essential about how Tom operates: he observes carefully, thinks creatively, and builds with joy and intention.

As Staff Software Engineer, Tom will take on a broader technical leadership role. He will help define the long-term technical and creative direction of Launchpad, set a high bar for product quality and engineering craft, and mentor engineers both within Moonfire and across our portfolio companies. His influence will extend well beyond individual features or systems, shaping how we build products at Moonfire more generally.

Congratulations to Tom on this well-earned promotion. I am very much looking forward to what we’ll build together next.