Tomer London
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, Gusto (angel investor) at gusto
Reviewed Updated Jul 21, 2026This profile is AI-generated. If you spot an error, please help us fix it by sharing a URL to the correct information.
Background
Tomer London is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto, the payroll, benefits, and HR platform for small and mid-sized businesses 12. He co-founded the company as ZenPayroll in November 2011 alongside CEO Joshua Reeves and Edward Kim, and the company went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 batch 32. As of recent reporting, Gusto serves over 400,000 businesses and has been valued at approximately $9.5 billion 3. Total capital raised across Gusto’s history exceeds $700 million from investors including General Catalyst, CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity, alongside individual backers such as Sam Altman, Max Levchin, and Tobias Lütke 4.
London grew up in Haifa, Israel. He taught himself to program at age 12, initially building an inventory management system for his father’s clothing store 13. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and subsequently completed both an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he met his future Gusto co-founders 13. Before Gusto, he co-founded Vizmo, a company building mobile self-service technology for enterprises 1. He was named to Inc.’s 30 Under 30 list in 2013 for his work on ZenPayroll 5.
Stated Thesis
London does not publish a formal angel-investing thesis. In his role as an angel, his focus areas — per his profile on multiple aggregator databases — are API, developer tools, enterprise SaaS, fintech, and health/wellness, spanning both Israel and the US/Canada 67. He operates with a typical check size of around $50K, invests at pre-seed through Series A, and does not lead rounds 6.
In his 20VC podcast appearance, he has discussed how founders should approach fundraising through a “values/motivation alignment test” rather than optimizing purely on valuation, and why “delight” is a critical variable in consumer-facing product design 8. Speaking on entrepreneur Alejandro Cremades’ podcast, London emphasized that customer conversations build the intuition needed to build products, and that “the thing that pops up in my mind is probably the hardest and most important…is all around people” 9.
Inferred Thesis
Only Demostack is independently verified via primary press coverage; the remainder of the portfolio is corroborated across multiple aggregator databases (Signal by NFX, Mercury’s investor database, BoringBusinessNerd, Seedtable, PitchBook, Tracxn) but individual press citations naming London could not be located 671011. Aggregate patterns from these sources:
- B2B SaaS bias: 5 of 6 identified investments are B2B software companies (Demostack, Retool, Figma design-for-teams, Mercury banking-for-startups, Amplitude analytics, Checkr background checks). Consumer/consumer-facing is essentially absent.
- Product-led, developer-adjacent tools: Retool (internal-tool builder), Figma (design collaboration), and Amplitude (product analytics) all serve engineers/product teams — sectors adjacent to London’s day job as a product leader.
- Fintech infrastructure connection: Mercury (banking-for-startups) sits within London’s home domain of SMB financial workflows.
- Israeli connection where present: Demostack is Israeli-founded, and London participated in its seed alongside Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport, WalkMe CEO Dan Adika, and Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman — a clearly Israeli-operator angel network 10.
- Aggregators indicate ~24 total investments, meaning most of London’s angel activity is not visible via public sources; the identifiable subset is heavily concentrated in developer/product-adjacent B2B software.
Portfolio
| Company | Year | Stage | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demostack | 2020 | Seed (Amiti Ventures led) | 10 |
| Demostack | 2021 | Series A (Bessemer Venture Partners led) | 10 |
| Retool | ~2017 (founding year proxy) | Angel (aggregator-reported; exact round undisclosed) | 67 |
| Figma | ~2013 (early angel; company founded 2012) | Angel (aggregator-reported; exact round undisclosed) | 67 |
| Amplitude | ~2014 (founding year proxy) | Angel (aggregator-reported; exact round undisclosed) | 67 |
| Mercury | ~2019 (founding year proxy) | Angel (aggregator-reported; exact round undisclosed) | 67 |
| Checkr | ~2015 (founding year proxy) | Angel (aggregator-reported; exact round undisclosed) | 67 |
In Their Own Words
On building product intuition through customer conversations:
“When you talk with a lot of your customers and you talk with them about their day, talk with them about the problems that they’re seeing, what ends up happening, it’s not just data points. You build intuition.” — Tomer London, interview with Alejandro Cremades 9
On listening for emotional signal:
“Look for emotions. When the customer is super pissed off, or when the potential customer is super excited about something, that’s where your ears need to perk up.” — Tomer London, interview with Alejandro Cremades 9
On the risk of over-relying on intuition:
“You’ve got to spend time with the customer. There’s I think the one mistake people make is to just completely rely on their intuition without even talking with customers.” — Tomer London, interview with Alejandro Cremades 9
On go-to-market as an equal-weight problem:
“The primary one is when you build a plan and try to figure out how the startup is going to work, obviously the product and technology are critical. But if you have that and you have no go to market, you’re dead.” — Tomer London, interview with Alejandro Cremades 9
On the shift between phases of company building:
“What makes zero to one successful is not what makes one to end successful.” — Tomer London, interview with Alejandro Cremades 9
What Founders Say
No independently sourced founder testimonials about Tomer London as an angel investor were found during research. Public funding announcements that name him (e.g., Demostack) do not include direct quotes from founders about the working relationship.
Sources
-
TechAviv, “Tomer London” profile, accessed July 2026. https://www.techaviv.com/people/tomer-london↩↩↩↩
-
Crunchbase, “Tomer London - Co-Founder and CPO @ Gusto,” accessed July 2026. https://www.crunchbase.com/person/tomer-london↩↩
-
Wikipedia, “Gusto, Inc.,” accessed July 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gusto,_Inc.↩↩↩↩
-
Alejandro Cremades, “This Serial Entrepreneur Raised $700 Million To Build A Payroll and HR Software Platform,” accessed July 2026. https://alejandrocremades.com/this-serial-entrepreneur-raised-700-million-to-build-a-payroll-and-hr-software-platform-enabling-smes-to-manage-and-grow-their-workforce/↩
-
Inc., “Inc. 30 Under 30 2013: ZenPayroll, Tomer London,” accessed July 2026. https://www.inc.com/30under30/jeremy-quittner/zenpayroll-tomer-london-2013.html↩
-
Mercury, “Tomer London - Investor Database,” accessed July 2026. https://mercury.com/investor-database/tomer-london↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
-
BoringBusinessNerd, “Tomer London,” accessed July 2026. https://www.boringbusinessnerd.com/investor/tomer-london↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
-
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), “Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today,” accessed July 2026. https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/tomerlondon↩
-
Alejandro Cremades, “Tomer London On Raising $700 Million To Build A Payroll and HR Software Platform,” accessed July 2026. https://alejandrocremades.com/tomer-london/↩↩↩↩↩↩
-
PRWeb, “Demostack Raises $17.5 Million to Shake Up How Software Sales Teams Demo,” April 21, 2021. https://www.prweb.com/releases/Demostack_Raises_17_5_Million_to_Shake_Up_How_Software_Sales_Teams_Demo/prweb17880901.htm↩↩↩↩
-
Seedtable, “Tomer London — Portfolio & Investments,” accessed July 2026. https://seedtable.com/investors/tomer-london↩