Why We Invested in Ethos
Talks about Ethos, AI in financial services and model compliance
SM
Sheel Mohnot
GP at Better Tomorrow Ventures; seed
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Sheel Mohnot is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Better Tomorrow Ventures, a seed-stage fintech investor in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a background in entrepreneurship and management consulting, Sheel has successfully founded and invested in companies like InScope, Basis, and Effectiv, showcasing expertise in strategic partnerships and business development.
Work Experience
Co-Founder / GP
2019 - Current
BTV is a seed stage venture fund focused on building the future of fintech by leading seed and pre-seed rounds of fintech and fintech-adjacent companies. I led the pre-seed or seed rounds of Unit, Coast, Mendel, Salsa, Basis, Layer, Brkz, Deck, Agree, Salsa, and others.
Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) is an early stage fintech focused fund that leads rounds in pre-seed and seed-stage companies.
Founder / GP
2016
I run a fund called 500 Fintech and invest in technology businesses that impact the financial world. The fund invests globally and was originally set up with my own capital, but now includes outside capital. We are typically but not always the first investors in our companies, and we help with capital but also connections and strategy. I've led investments (generally as the first institutional capital in) in Albert, Kin, Indio (acquired), ChipperCash, YayPay (acquired), Ethic, Mercury and some others.
Co-Founder
2015
The podcast where founders pitch investors. I started it in 2015 due to what I thought was a gap in the podcasting world. It worked really well and 100s of thousands of listeners from around the world tune in to hear what we think about startups. After we got acquired by Gimlet (and then Spotify) and moved the studio out of my office, I don't participate in all of the recordings. The podcast does well over $1m in ad revenue a year. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-pitch
Podcast where real entrepreneurs pitch to real investors—for real money.
self
2012
deals as a personal angel. Luckiest ones are Flexport, Ironclad, Ethos Insurance, ApartmentList. Most of them were at the seed stage. https://angel.co/sheel/
Co-Founder (not day-to-day involved)
2013
Thistle is a healthy food company, with a mission to provide access to delicious sustainable nutrition for all. We started the company because we found ourselves choosing convenience over health (in our previous banker, consultant, lawyer incarnations) and wanted to provide a sustainable healthy alternative, and didn't think the existing companies had solid business models. We were right about the other food companies, as most of them went out of business. Although I'm not involved in the business on a day-to-day basis, I still serve as a very active advisor. We're growing fast (#495 on the Inc5000 list!) and hiring for lots of positions! (front of the house, back of the house, technical, operations, etc).
Thistle is a food and juice company that delivers fully-prepared, plant-forward meals to the doorsteps of its customers.
Raised $16,950,000.00 from GroundForce Capital, Alumni Ventures, Siddhi Capital, Rich Products Ventures and Studio Management.
Adjunct Professor
2012 - 2024
Taught "Creating and Financing Technology Ventures" Evaluated 4.85/5 by students Stopped teaching after one semester because it was interfering with my work/travel too much, though I enjoyed it immensely and am still in touch with students many years later.
Investment Committee
2016 - 2022
Catalyst Fund addresses a common problem for frontier market early-stage fintech startups: they have a hard time securing the capital and expertise needed to complete and test their products. This throttles innovation and limits the impact from new approaches. In 2016, Catalyst Fund started deploying grant capital from the Gates Foundation and JP Morgan Chase alongside of tailored advisory services to about 20 startup enterprises globally.
Co-Founder
2013 - 2016
Co-founded an auction company with GMV in the 100's of millions USD. Innovative Auctions Limited (IAL) is one of the worlds leading providers of services for high-stakes auctions for telecommunications spectrum, natural resources, electricity, and top-level domains. Our team includes economists, software engineers, auction managers, an in-house lawyer specialized in auctions, and quality assurance experts. Our exceptionally deep understanding of high stakes auctions results from projects with government regulators, bidders in spectrum auctions, non-governmental organizations, consulting firms, and economists in academia.
Vice President Of Business Development
2012 - 2014
In early 2012 Groupon purchased our company FeeFighters to launch efforts in the payments space. Later, we acquired a Point of Sale company called Breadcrumb and integrated the teams, ultimately with a team of 175 people, encompassing both point of sale and payments. I ran Business Development for all things payments and point of sale at Groupon, including managing the checkout flow and a card partnership with AmEx. Through my role at Groupon, I spoke on the evolutions of payments and point of sale innovation at a number of conferences, including keynotes at the Mobile Banking Summit, the PayFac event, and the Mobile Marketing Strategies Summit.
Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that offers discounted gift certificates usable at local or national companies.
Raised $1,387,000,000.00 from MIG Capital, RTP Global and Atairos.
Businessman
2010 - 2012
Raised $1.6M for a payments company and sold the business to Groupon in early 2012. The technology that we developed at FeeFighters become Groupon Payments, which was launched shortly after the acquisition. FeeFighters was started because of frustrations we had with the credit card processing options that were available at the time -- all of which were lousy. Initially we solved that problem by building a comparison engine to accurately compare each of the processing options (like Kayak, but for credit card processing). Shortly after raising money, however, we decided none of the existing providers was good enough and developed from scratch our own modern payments processor (similar to Stripe or Square). After launching that technology we were almost immediately acquired by Groupon to power payments at Groupon. Despite a number of accolades including being featured as Americas hottest startup in Businessweek, I think my proudest moment was when my alma mater Carnegie Mellon featured me on their homepage for a week as an entrepreneur doing well by doing good (fighting the good fight for small business merchants). Here are some other links about FeeFighters: http://www.finovate.com/fall11vid/feefighters.html http://tech.co/feefighters-hottest-early-stage-startup-chicago-2011-04 http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/23/feefighters-launches-payment-gateway-samurai/