Michael Levit

Michael Levit is a serial entrepreneur, company builder, and angel investor with more than two decades of internet experience. He is a co-founder and Managing Partner of Founders Den, a San Francisco workspace and community for startups and investors that he helped build alongside Jason Johnson, Jonathan Abrams, and Zachary Bogue. Early in his career he was part of Accenture's technology and strategy consulting practice, where he co-founded its Internet Center in Palo Alto, and he later established AOL's Broadband division and held sales and marketing roles at HearMe and Paltalk. He also co-founded Bluelight.com, a venture between SoftBank, Martha Stewart, Kmart, and Yahoo.

Levit led business operations at Vendio, an e-commerce platform where he grew transactions to more than $1.5 billion per year before the business was sold to Alibaba (reportedly Alibaba's first U.S. acquisition). In 2008 he co-founded and bootstrapped Spigot Inc., one of the world's leading multi-platform application developers (browser and search apps), which he sold for more than $250M to Genimous, a diversified public conglomerate based in China.

Today Levit is co-founder and CEO of Tempest, an internet-privacy company founded in 2019 with Sean Murphy and headquartered in Shannon, Ireland. Tempest builds privacy-first products including a private search engine (Tempest Search) and a secure browser (Tempest Browser), and the company has scaled to operations spanning multiple continents. He has also served as a Strategic Advisor to Catapult Capital. Aggregator profiles report academic ties to the University of Oxford and UC Santa Barbara (MA in Business Economics).

• Invests at the seed and angel stage, typically into founder-led internet, software, and consumer startups he can help build as an operator.
• Sector range spans developer/cloud infrastructure, ad tech, social/media, consumer commerce, and occasional genomics/biotech bets.
• Values founders building category-defining internet products — his own ventures (Spigot, Tempest) and bets (Docker, Socialcam) cluster around platforms with broad consumer or developer reach.
• Brings deep operator credibility: having scaled and exited multiple companies, he tends to back teams where his go-to-market, scaling, and bootstrapping experience is additive.