Mozilla leads Mastodon app Mammoth's pre-seed funding

Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app that's trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, which invested in the company's first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce's Marc Benioff.

The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps, including the whimsical music app Vinyls and the Twitter client Aviary 2. The latter was impacted by Elon Musk's Twitter API changes, which put an end to third-party Twitter clients, prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon.

Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that's now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem.

Now, the team at Mammoth is just three full-time employees and a handful of contractors. And while the total investment round is undisclosed, Decrem characterized the pre-seed as a small amount -- "a million or two is the general round" at this stage, he says.

The new Mammoth founder's background is both in open source and consumer apps, in addition to entrepreneurship.

In '99, Decrem worked on a Linux startup called Eazel which aimed to make Linux easier to use. While others on that project later ended up building Safari and other technology at Apple, Decrem found himself at the Mozilla Foundation ahead of the Firefox 1.0 launch. There, he ran marketing and business affairs and worked on branding and the international launch. He was also a part of the search monetization discussions, including the initial Google search deal.

He later went on to more entrepreneurial efforts including the VC-backed social web browser Flock (which received its fair share of TechCrunch coverage back in the day), followed by an early smartphone game maker Tapulous, makers of Tap Tap Revenge. The latter landed him at Disney following an acquisition, as the head of the mobile games group, which put out products like the "Where's My Water" series and some "Temple Run" titles.

Some of these prior efforts also involved the same approach of finding and partnering with existing developers, Decrem notes, including the original Tap Tap Revenge developer. Later at Disney, he found a developer in QA who had built a No. 1 game on the App Store, but not under Disney's branding. Decrem brought the developer into his group and gave him the space to create what became "Where's My Water?," a title that's seen a billion-some downloads by now.

"The way I like to do things is you find somebody special and then get out of the way and support their vision," Decrem explains. "I saw that spark in [Mammoth founder] Shihab [Mehboob], and that's why we're working together."