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Akshat Goenka
Partner at Moonfire
Akshat Goenka is a Partner at Moonfire Ventures, a venture capital firm based in London.3 He joined Moonfire in September 2021 as a Principal and was promoted to Partner in December 2023.3 Akshat has a diverse background in finance, entrepreneurship, and venture capital.14
Career Highlights
- Moonfire Ventures: Currently a Partner, focusing on investing in European companies at Pre-seed and Seed stages.3
- Previous VC Experience: Worked as an Investor at Accel and Progression Fund.3
- Entrepreneurship: Co-founded and served as CEO of DocTalk Solutions, Inc., a Y-Combinator backed healthtech startup.34
- Finance Background: Started his career as an Analyst at J.P. Morgan.3
Education
- MBA from London Business School (2020-2022)13
- BSc from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2010-2014)13
- Y Combinator Fellow (F3) and Founder (W17) (2016-2017)1
Philosophy and Approach
Akshat believes in the power of innovative startups to reinvent how we live.4 He brings his entrepreneurial experience to his role as a venture capitalist, offering empathy and understanding to founders.2 Akshat is passionate about data-driven decision-making and leveraging technology to enhance the VC process.24
Highlights
As data and AI have exploded, the ability to process and refine data rapidly and efficiently, as well as keeping a handle on governance and quality, has put immense pressure on enterprise data teams.
Orchestra was founded in 2023 by the inimitable team of Hugo Lu and Will Davies to solve exactly that problem. It offers a unified control plane for data operations, enabling users to build data pipelines and data products, automate pipeline execution, and gather metadata in a governed way – without the need to maintain infrastructure.
That’s why we at Moonfire are leading Orchestra's £1m pre-seed, alongside Sequoia Capital’s Scout Fund and angel investors from companies like dbt Labs, Snowflake, and Snowplow.
You can find out more about Orchestra via Pulse, in the comments below. ⬇️
Had a lot of fun chatting with James and Hector on the latest episode of Riding Unicorns.
Discussed a lot of stuff: my journey from banker to founder to VC, Moonfire’s data-driven approach, and how to handle failure as a founder.
Listen here:
