Michael Stothard

Michael leads investments in B2B AI (both vertical and horizontal), AI infrastructure, consumer/prosumer investments as well as being in charge of French coverage for the fund.

Before firstminute, Michael spent more than a decade as foreign correspondent for the Financial Times where he was senior correspondent and bureau chief in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm and New York. After that he was founding editor of Sifted.eu, which he helped scale from an idea to a media platform with a team of 80 journalists and engineers producing world-class, in-depth coverage of the European technology landscape. He has a first class degree from Cambridge University.

He works closely with companies building across the AI stack, from foundational model companies such as Mistral (frontier LLM lab) and AMI Labs (frontier world model lab) to application layer AI companies such as Granola (AI powered notetaker), Alecto (AI native consumer lawfirm), Vocca (multimodal AI for specialist healthcare clinics), ai.work (AI native ITSM systems), Agemo (AI agent platform for building internal company workflows), Maihem (AI for robotic welding), Claimsorted (AI-native third party administrator), Nabla (AI medical scribe), Layla (AI native travel agency) and Teero (AI dental software and labour marketplace). Others include Unleash (open source feature flag management software), Mondoo (managed vulnerability management service), Revyze (consumer edtech) and Typology (D2C skincare brand).