Rob Bishop

Rob Bishop is a British engineer-turned-founder best known for co-founding Magic Pony Technology, a London computer-vision and machine-learning startup he launched in 2014 with Zehan Wang. Magic Pony used neural networks to reconstruct and enhance low-resolution images and video with minimal compute — technology applicable to video streaming, mobile photography, and AR/VR. Bishop served as CEO. In June 2016, roughly two years after founding, Twitter acquired the ~11-person company for a reported sum of up to $150 million, folding the team into Twitter Cortex. Bishop relocated to Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, where he went on to hold senior product/ML roles (reported variously as Director of Product for Media Infrastructure & Machine Learning and VP-level product leadership).

Before Magic Pony, Bishop was an early employee — widely cited as the first engineering hire — at the Raspberry Pi Foundation around 2012, giving him hands-on experience of scaling a fast-growing hardware/software venture. He earned a first-class Master's degree in Electronic/Electrical Engineering from Imperial College London and has a strong background in GPU programming, which underpinned Magic Pony's efficient inference work. He and Zehan Wang were awarded a Silver Medal at the Royal Academy of Engineering awards in June 2017 in recognition of the company's engineering achievement.

Today Bishop's primary role is as a co-founder of Macroscope, an AI developer-tools startup founded in 2023 alongside former Twitter/Periscope leaders Kayvon Beykpour (CEO) and Joe Bernstein. Macroscope builds an "AI-powered understanding engine" that analyzes codebases via GitHub to summarize changes, catch bugs, and answer natural-language questions about engineering activity. The San Francisco company (a team of ~20 as of 2025) raised a total of $40 million, including a ~$30M Series A led by Michael Mignano at Lightspeed Venture Partners, with GV (Google Ventures), Thrive Capital, and Adverb also participating.

Alongside his operating career, Bishop invests personal capital as an angel, backing early-stage (seed) technical founders — a natural extension of his own founder-to-acquisition experience and his ties to the Entrepreneur First and London/SF AI ecosystems.

• Invests as an angel at the seed stage, deploying personal capital into early, often highly technical founding teams.
• Gravitates toward AI/ML, developer tooling, and design/creative software — sectors adjacent to his own building experience (computer vision at Magic Pony, code-understanding AI at Macroscope, animation tooling via LottieLab).
• Credibility as a founder who took a deep-tech company from zero to a nine-figure exit in ~2 years, plus an early Raspberry Pi and senior Twitter ML/product track record, shapes what he can add: productizing research, scaling small teams, and navigating acquisition.
• Frequently co-invests alongside the UK early-stage network — Entrepreneur First, Point Nine, and Harry Stebbings' 20VC appeared beside him in the LottieLab round.