Tom Blomfield, the co-founder and former chief executive of Monzo, has announced he has joined the AI developer Anthropic.
In a post on X, Blomfield said he is taking a “leave of absence” from startup accelerator Y Combinator to join Anthropic, where he will sit in the firm’s compute team alongside its co-founder and chief compute officer Tom Brown.
“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,” he said.
Blomfield co-founded GoCardless in 2011, and in 2014 was briefly involved in Starling Bank as its chief technology officer before quitting to found Monzo in early 2015. In its first round of fundraising the challenger bank, then known as Mondo, raised £1 million in 96 seconds. He served as chief executive at the firm until 2020, staying on for an extra year as president.
In 2021 he joined Y Combinator, which has funded over 5,000 companies to date including Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Reddit, and Stripe.
Anthropic has stepped up high-profile hires in recent months. In April, Anthropic hired Eric Boyd, formerly the head of Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, to head its infrastructure team.
In May, Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and the former director of AI at Tesla, announced he was joining Anthropic’s pre-training team.
The AI giant’s competitors have moved in a similar fashion. In June, OpenAI announced it had hired Noam Shazeer, the co-founder of the AI roleplaying website Character.AI and co-author of Google’s 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” which introduced the transformer architecture that underpins all large language models.
In June last year, Meta onboarded the former Scale AI chief executive Alexander Wang to lead its AI teams after acquiring a 49 per cent stake in the firm.
