Former Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield has joined AI research firm Anthropic as part of co-founder Tom Brown’s compute team, effective immediately. To take up the opportunity, Blomfield has taken a leave of absence from his general partner position at technology start-up accelerator Y Combinator, where he has worked since 2021.
Blomfield is best known for co-founding UK challenger bank Monzo in 2015 alongside Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, Paul Rippon, and Gary Dolman. He served as the bank’s first CEO until June 2020, when he transitioned to president as TS Anil took over as chief executive.
Blomfield departed Monzo in 2021, noting that the demands of scaling the company during the global pandemic had affected his mental health. His earlier ventures include co-creating Boso.com, and UK fintech GoCardless, which was acquired by Dutch paytech Mollie last year for $1.1 billion.
Announcing his move to Anthropic, the developer of generative AI assistant Claude, Blomfield writes on X, “Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve.”
