Two years ago we announced Mozilla Ventures and its core mission of investing in companies building technology designed to have a positive impact on people’s lives and society as a whole. Since then, adoption of AI has been both widespread and rapid, presenting vast opportunities alongside new challenges in terms of security, data privacy, and ethical usage and design.
Today, we’re at a critical juncture, much like we were 25 years ago when Mozilla played an important role in ensuring the growth and future of open source software. That’s why we are, now more than ever, driven to support an ecosystem of startups that are innovating in a responsible manner.
Unlike most Silicon Valley funds where the goal is to maximize investor profit, we believe that success is most meaningful when it balances positive impact and business growth. That’s why we are hyper-focused on three pillars: trustworthy AI, healthy communities and security and privacy.
Investing in a better AI future
The companies we invest in are in the early and growth stages developing a wide range of technologies – and that spectrum is by design. Each one aims to push the industry in a more positive direction. So far, we’ve invested in over 45 startups across the world.
Trustworthy AI has been a key focus for Mozilla Foundation since 2020. This perspective is the foundation for our thesis around AI, and we have since become one of the most active investors in founders who think deeply about what responsibility and trust means when deploying this technology.
We have invested in AI governance leaders such as Credo AI, Fiddler AI, and Holistic AI, and companies building the technical infrastructure for AI and machine learning (ML) training, deployment and management such as Themis AI, Vera, TruePic, and Trail. One portfolio company, Armilla AI, is pioneering AI insurance offerings.
We're pushing back against the trend of big tech dominating with closed-source AI by supporting AI labs that are rethinking how we create and use technology in fresh, innovative ways. Like Lelapa AI, which is building resource-efficient language models in Africa; Nous Research who are working obsessively on open source AI development; Flower AI which has created the leading open source system that helps AI learn from data spread across different locations, keeping everything safe and private; Probabl is a startup based on the ubiquitous scikit-learn open-source library; and Answer.AI is a new type of AI R&D lab that is building in public.
Mozilla Ventures deeply believes enabling technology that can expand to other parts of the world makes everyone’s technology better.
Fostering connections, collaboration and innovation
We’ve also partnered with Betaworks on their AI accelerators, bringing together startups that are creating tools to boost human creativity and collaboration. These programs not only help us discover innovative talent but also align with our mission to ensure technology works for people — not the other way around.
We don’t just fund startups — we build connections that grow the Mozilla ecosystem. For example, Filament worked with Mozilla Builders to expand the Uniffi toolkit for React Native. Now, startups can easily use Rust libraries with React Native, combining safety, speed, and cross-platform flexibility.
There are other examples of the seeds of our efforts sprouting in multiple ways:
- We invested in Pindo, a company founded by former Mozilla Fellow, Remy Muhire. Remy is building products serving the communication needs of people in East Africa, as well as continuing his previous work at Mozilla on the Common Voice dataset.
- Mozilla Ventures portfolio company Germ Network, which makes a privacy-preserving messaging app; the first consumer application to implement the Message Layer Security protocol (MLS), a novel standard of communication created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Mozilla was a core member of the working group that built this communications standard.
All of these connections and collaborations are just the beginning of our work to bring more and more startups into the Mozilla ecosystem and share our mission with founders. By democratizing access to funding, we’re removing some of their biggest hurdles.
Exploring new ideas and markets
We support visionary founders with bold ideas and a shared vision of impact, and work to help them scale responsibly. Mozilla Ventures deeply believes enabling technology that can expand to other parts of the world makes everyone’s technology better. This allows us to constantly learn and challenge ourselves, while bringing in fresh perspectives and helping ship more code.
While the future is uncertain, and vast challenges remain, we believe that the right investments today will shape a more inclusive and healthy online world for tomorrow.
