There are moments in history when the rate of progress seems suddenly compressed — when centuries’ worth of change are measured in years.

Athens. Baghdad. Kaifeng. Florence. Industrial Britain.

It is our view that we are living in just such a moment now. The foundational discoveries of the last 80 years, embodied in the continuing progress of AI, have led us to the brink of a new golden age of discovery.

“We are living in an age of miracles in which anything can be achieved.”Josiah Wedgwood

And in ages where progress happens on such scale, it is often in fundamentally unscalable places that we should look for its driving force. Small groups of builders, inventors, and tinkerers, convened over dinner, were the place where the ambitions and progresses of each age were dreamt up, discussed, and put into action.

We think this is missing today. To fix this, we are restarting the Lunar Society.

In the late 18th century, an extraordinary group met every full moon at a house in Birmingham. Many were in their twenties. Between them: the steam engine, the discovery of oxygen, the foundations of evolutionary theory, the invention of the consumer brand. They brought wild schemes and real problems and helped each other fix both. Towing icebergs to the equator, artificially seeding weather patterns, intercontinental balloon travel — these were the crazier projects. But for the ideas that worked, they changed the world: had Watt not met manufacturer Matthew Boulton at a Lunar dinner, his engine may never have spread to every factory in Britain and beyond. The butterfly effect, writ large.

What gave those evenings their strength was not genius alone. It was the informality, the inefficiency, and the focus on relationships over outcomes.

We’re recreating those conditions.

Lunar

We host a dinner every full moon in London for the most exceptional young scientists and builders we can find, and weekly sessions between moons to break down the hardest problem any member is carrying.

The ambient belief, absorbed from peers, that building something enormous is a normal thing to attempt, is what we exist to restore.

A home in central London, a year of dinners, and grants for the people around the table.

The problem

Ask the smartest maths and CS students in Britain what they want from their careers and they say something like "massive impact." Ask where they are going after graduation and many say a quant trading firm. I've experienced this first hand in my friendship group: a five-time national chess champion joins Optiver's macro desk this summer; a 23yo student who built neural networks to track ocean microplastics runs engineering at hedge fund QRT. Recruiters mark the route to a trading desk from freshers' week onwards. The route to entrepreneurship is unmarked, so people price it as far more dangerous than it actually is, and most who ought to try it never do. Anyone good enough to get an offer from these firms at 21 can get it at 23. A year or two spent building something hard costs almost nothing and the upside is bounded only by the size of the problem being tackled. Almost nobody takes the leap, because almost nobody they know has taken it, and ambition calibrates to whatever the people around you are attempting. The ambient belief, absorbed from peers, that building something enormous is a normal thing to attempt, is lacking in the UK.

What Lunar is

In 1765 a dinner club began meeting in Birmingham on each full moon, so members could ride home by moonlight. They called themselves the lunaticks. Around that table sat Matthew Boulton and James Watt, whose steam engine partnership went on to power the factories and mines of the Industrial Revolution; Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen; Josiah Wedgwood, who industrialised manufacturing; and Erasmus Darwin, whose grandson Charles would carry the family curiosity worldwide. Benjamin Franklin wrote to them and visited. Historians credit that one dinner table with much of the machinery of the modern world. It remains the highest-leverage gathering in British history, and it was, structurally, just dinner among friends who believed enormous things were buildable.

We are running the same playbook on the same soil, two and a half centuries on. Lunar hosts a dinner every full moon in London for the most exceptional young scientists and builders we can find, and between moons the group meets weekly to break down the hardest problem any member is carrying, whether that is a company or an experiment.

Lunar exists to normalise the unmarked path, helping the most talented people in the country take their first steps into entrepreneurship. We are a non-profit and take no equity in anything our members create. Our initial network is built from the London, Oxford and Cambridge ecosystems, and we do all of the scouting ourselves. The dinners put these people in the same room so ideas cross-pollinate and friendships form between people who would otherwise never have met, and the more time they spend around each other, the more normal building becomes. Recent tables held three recipients of Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures grant, an individual with a patented direct-air-capture device (19yo), the CEO of a rocketry programme attempting an altitude record this summer (21yo), and an AI and biosecurity researcher on a UN Biological Weapons Convention working group (20yo). Full profiles are on this website.

Why us

Lunar is run by Dillon and Lucas. We spent our early twenties learning to underwrite talent in places that punish ambition, then came home to a country that rewards it and watched its best people behave as if it didn't.

I am Dillon Roberts. At 21 I joined a $350M AUM emerging-markets VC as an investor and was posted to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to find and underwrite founders across Central and South Asia. Emerging markets strip talent spotting to its essentials. Between 2021 and 2025, the founders in my markets built through conditions that would end most companies. Pakistan's rupee collapsed past 300 to the dollar while inflation hit 38%, the highest in three decades, and the prime minister was ousted and then jailed. Bangladesh switched off the nation's internet for ten days, taking every online business dark overnight, weeks before the government itself fell. Kazakhstan opened 2022 with an uprising and a nationwide blackout. Capital is scarce in these markets, institutions are fragile, and the safest employers in the country are the state banks, so the most talented people rationally queue for them. The founders who walked away from that queue and built through those conditions anyway sit in the global top 0.1%. Reading talent where every conventional signal is stripped away trains you to read it anywhere.

Those years gave us the playbook Lunar runs on, and our work with Hummingbird Ventures since has helped us sharpen it. In our view, three tells matter more than everything else combined:

Lucas Jacobelli worked the same problem from the other end, from Oxford University. He saw how densely opportunity concentrates in a place like Oxford and set out to bridge founders into it. He co-founded OxFounders Global, growing it from Oxford's most popular entrepreneurship society into a community of over 3,000 student and alumni founders. He then took it worldwide: pitch events in ten countries across five continents, from Brazil to Nigeria, reviewing over 1,000 startup pitches and putting emerging-market founders in front of investors from more than a dozen countries. He secured funding from BBVA and other financial institutions to do it, advised the Nigerian government on innovation policy, appearing twice on national television in Nigeria.

We met in Tashkent, at a dinner, both trying to build the Uzbek startup ecosystem from our respective angles. Back in London, the contrast was impossible to ignore. In Central Asia, taking the safe job is defensible: failure there is expensive and the ladder back is missing. In Britain the same choice makes no sense. A failed startup costs a couple of years and becomes a good story in the next job interview, and the desks that wanted them before will want them after. The safety nets exist, and still the most gifted people in the country file into quant firms. Talent is distributed evenly across the world; opportunity is not; Britain is the rare place holding an unclaimed surplus of both.

The room described above is our track record. Every person at those tables we found ourselves, most a year or two before anyone else noticed. Each of them carries what we learned to look for in harder markets: a hunger formed years before any opportunity arrived, ideas they cannot put down even when nobody is watching, ramp rates visible across weeks. We are also products of the exact mechanism we are proposing. Two ambitious people sat at the same dinner table far from home, and both trajectories changed. Between us we have spent our early twenties finding exceptional people early and putting them in rooms together. Lunar is the natural formalisation of this.

The plan

The grant funds a year of ramped-up operations, twelve full-moon dinners and the weekly problem sessions, and it gives Lunar a permanent home in central London (identified and costed on this website). A room that is always there makes the founding path visible in a way occasional dinners cannot. We close on the space in the first month and move the weekly sessions in. It also funds a member grant pool: travel to the conferences and customers that matter, and the small cheques that remove real development bottlenecks. We will report monthly on the cohort, what each member is working on, and the outcomes coming off the back of them. The outcome we are working toward in year one is at least ten members starting companies. Each one is a person who would otherwise have chosen a status-signalling job instead of working on something that truly matters.

Why grants

Several global VC firms have offered to underwrite the Lunar dinners, because we reach exceptional people a year or two before they found anything. We keep declining. VC sponsorship would cover our costs, but it adds nothing for the cohort: the evidence from our own tables is that people come for the network, and the UK's early-stage funding ecosystem is developed enough that any Lunar member can raise within a month of deciding to. What members cannot get elsewhere is the talent density. Hummingbird Ventures mentors us on talent sourcing, and we want relationships like that across the whole ecosystem, on our terms, with no one fund holding the pen. Grant funding is the mechanism that allows us to stay independent while giving the cohort more.