Having backed over 70 companies including Alibaba, Etsy and King.com, three venture investors are going it alone in the hope of finding the next big things.

Former Accel Partners, Advent Venture Partners, Allen & Company, Apax Partners, Index Ventures and Virgin investment professionals Mike Chalfen, Toby Coppel and Simon Levene are the founding members.

Mosaic Ventures will focus on early-stage start-ups that are deemed to be beyond seed and angel funding but prior to larger eight-figure transactions.

Chalfen started his investment career at Apax Partners, where his last deal involved King.com – a /games business that IPO’d on the NYSE during 2014. He then joined Advent Venture Partners and led investments into the likes of Fizzback, The Foundry and Worldstores.

Fellow Mosaic partner Coppel was part of the team at Yahoo! that was responsible for strategy, investments and M&A. In his role as chief strategy officer, Coppel injected $1 billion into Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba back in 2005 – a figure which is now worth $80 billion.

The last member of the Mosaic founding team, Levene, has worked in both the start-up and investment worlds. Early in the door at @Home Network, Levene saw the company grow to $70 million of revenues before joining Yahoo! alongside Coppel. From there he held positions at Accel London, leading investments involving Etsy and MyHeritage, and served as venture partner at Index Ventures.

Mosaic reveals that its first investment will be into Berlin-headquartered technology company NumberFour, which sells software for small businesses.

The investors say that while there is a ‘plentiful source’ of seed and angel capital, relative to the US, Europe has a lack of ‘experienced early-sage venture investors’ focused on Series A deals.