British entrepreneur Ross Mason has raised $120 million to back founders building AI’s ‘engine room’ through his firm DIG Ventures.
DIG was launched in 2018 and is led by Mason, founder of enterprise integration company MuleSoft, which Salesforce acquired for $6.5 billion; Melissa Klinger, former UK sales lead at MuleSoft; and Rytis Vitkauskas, founder of YPlan and a former partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The operator-led team brings first-hand experience of building, scaling and exiting software businesses.
Its third fund is backed by LPs including Horsley Bridge, Sofina, Granite and a leading US university endowment fund. Entrepreneur LPs include the founders behind Slack, Datadog, Nord Security, Cast AI, Supercell and Dash0.
As AI makes software faster and cheaper to create, but harder to defend and distribute, DIG’s conviction is that the defining enterprise companies of the next decade will be those that own the critical control points – data, identity, compliance and orchestration layers – on which other companies depend.
Fund III will invest in founders building at the frontier of this AI infrastructure ecosystem, backing approximately 30 European pre-seed and seed-stage companies innovating across AI-native enterprise infrastructure. DIG intends to lead most rounds and has already begun deploying capital from the fund.
DIG’s current portfolio includes Dash0, the AI-native observability platform valued at $1 billion following its $110 million Series B; Taktile, which raised a $110 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs; and CUBE, whose AI-powered regulatory technology is used by over 30 global financial institutions.
Other Fund II companies include AI HR platform Jack & Jill and AI orchestration platform Nexos.ai, founded by the founders of Nord Security.
DIG has also recently recorded a number of portfolio exits, including insurance infrastructure company Flock, acquired by Admiral for $109m; data infrastructure platform Tower, acquired by MotherDuck; and workload identity platform Cofide, acquired by Keyfactor.
“Our conviction as a fund is clear: as development accelerates and differentiation erodes, the truly scalable, defensible companies will be the ones building the foundations on which wider enterprise software depends,” said Mason.
“These are the companies whose advantages compound as the cost of building software falls.
“In Europe, we are seeing huge waves of innovation on this frontier – the continent is not short of technical talent. But the challenge is turning technical advantage into global distribution. Having built and sold enterprise software globally, our operator-led team knows what it takes to cross that gap.
“We built DIG to help founders do exactly that. We guide our startups from day zero through to their first US customers, and beyond. With Fund III, we’ll steer a further generation of founders towards global growth.”
Mirko Novakovic, CEO at Dash0, commented: “I don’t think there is another VC in Europe that offers true partnership the way that DIG does.
“They think like founders, are deeply connected in the enterprise fabric globally, and never waiver from their conviction. Ross, Rytis and Melissa believed in Dash0 before we had much more than an idea.
“They brought a level of depth and experience that proved instrumental as we built a foundational technology, enabling us to get product decisions right and scale globally at a crazy pace.”
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