When Ross Mason founded MuleSoft in 2006, there were just two real options for venture capital: Index Ventures and Balderton Capital. So he packed his bags, moved from Malta to San Francisco, raised money there, and 12 years later his company was acquired by Salesforce for $6.5bn.
Later the same year, Mason founded DIG Ventures to start backing pre-seed and seed-stage technical startups and to bring some of what he’d learned back to Europe.
“I was a European founder, I couldn’t raise capital there, and increasingly you see many European founders going to the US,” Mason told Pathfounders. “I basically wanted to try to inject a bit of that knowledge back here, so that we can actually build bigger companies of consequence in Europe.”
The firm has just closed a $120m Fund III, which invests in what Mason describes as “the engine room”. With models constantly improving, he says, they are looking not to the application layer that “looks good but maybe devalues over time”, but to the layer below that — critical control points such as governance, security, data, identity and orchestration layers that other companies depend on.
“The engine room is kind of our North Star,” he said. “The founders are thinking globally, but starting in Europe and the thing they’re building, no matter how good the LLMs get, will accrue value or a control point in a customer that adds value over time.”
It’s a fairly simple rubric, he says, but what’s hard is looking at every idea they see and figuring out if they’re assessing it correctly to reach that conclusion.
The fund will back around 30 pre-seed and seed-stage companies innovating across AI-native enterprise infrastructure, and the firm has already begun deploying capital.
LPs in the fund include Horsley Bridge, Sofina, Granite and a leading US university endowment, alongside the founders of Slack, Datadog, Nord Security, Cast AI, Supercell and Dash0 — an AI-native observability platform valued at $1bn that DIG backed in its second fund.
Mason founded the operator-led venture capital firm alongside Melissa Klinger, former UK sales lead at MuleSoft, and Rytis Vitkauskas, founder of YPlan and a former partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, with the intention of not just investing money in Europe’s next generation of technical founders, but taking a hands-on approach to helping them. He believes it’s not simply a lack of capital that is holding founders back, but rather an inability to take Europe’s “exceptional technical talent” and turn it into global commercial leadership.
“You can get US capital in Europe every day of the week,” he says. “That’s not an issue. It’s not really capital. What it is is a bit more of a mindset that I think you naturally get in the US because the market is so large and open. What I realised being there versus looking from the outside is that being in that market just makes it feel like there’s unlimited possibility because there really isn’t a lot of friction in terms of borders or controls. And in Europe, we haven’t done a good job yet of really papering over some of those challenges. But it doesn’t mean we can’t.”
Mason said that it is typically because of the firm’s operator knowledge and active support that founders seek out DIG in the first place — it is what makes them a contender in even competitive deals despite not necessarily having as much brand recognition.
According to DIG’s internal portfolio data, 80% of Fund II companies raised further institutional capital within two years of DIG’s investment and more than 90% of commercially launched Fund II companies entered the US market within 12 months.
“I don’t think there is another VC in Europe that offers true partnership the way that DIG does,” Dash0 CEO Mirko Novakovic said. “They think like founders, are deeply connected in the enterprise fabric globally, and never waver from their conviction.”
Alongside Dash0, DIG’s portfolio includes Taktile, which went on to raise a $110m Series C led by Goldman Sachs; AI HR platform Jack & Jill, which recently raised a $40m Series A led by Air Street Capital; and Nexos.ai, an AI orchestration platform launched by the founders of Nord Security.