NASHVILLE-based Mozaic Payments' former Co-Founder and CEO Marcus Cobb, 48, is soon likely to face a Boston judge, given his recent indictment and Dec. 8 arrest pursuant to a federal charge of having committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in concert with Rachel Knepp, Mozaic's co-founder and former SVP-Growth.
Knepp was identified in the same court filing as Cobb's co-conspirator, though she was not charged as defendant in the Cobb indictment.
Yesterday, Cobb's initial appearance before Magistrate Judge Jennifer C. Boal was set for the morning of Jan. 8, 2026.
For the backstory on Mozaic since Cobb arrived Nashville from Chicago roughly 10 years ago in order to join the Nashville Entrepreneur Center's then-extant Project Music, please see VNC's previous reporting under Mozaic and-or under its previous brand, Jammber.
Though at this writing both Cobb's and Knepp's roles within Mozaic are described in their respective LinkedIn profiles as on-going, federal documents in this case consistently refer to those roles in past tense. See Cobb | Knepp
A Dec. 8 indictment filing said, in part, that a Mozaic App served customers in the entertainment industry the Mozaic App that was described as processing "revenue-sharing transactions, for example, by splitting a royalty payment from a music-streaming service among an artist, a recording label, and a distributor." The federal attorneys' filing at one point referred to the Mozaic app as insufficiently functional.
The same document asserts that beginning about March 2023, Cobb and Knepp agreed to defraud a private-equity investor by "falsely representing Mozaic's financial condition in order to obtain a $20,000,000 private-equity investment in Mozaic."
Federal prosecutors said in their filing that should Cobb be convicted in this matter, a minimum forfeiture money judgment of nearly $1.8MM would be in order, adding that, more broadly, Cobb's real and-or personal property that "constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to the offenses" could also be forfeited.
The filing alleges that in committing fraud, the founders created an array of false financial documents, recruited fake satisfied customers to deceive the PE investor and created "fake board of directors' materials to misrepresent Mozaic's operations and financial condition."
The filing notes, "By about February 2025, Cobb and Knepp had spent nearly all of the $20 million Mozaic received from the investor. The Investor discovered the fraud, and Mozaic collapsed."
Thus far, court filings associated with this case have not, to our knowledge identified the PE investor. (Not all documentation in this matter is viewable by all visitors to the nation's PACER court records system.)
We do note that Techcrunch reported in autumn 2023 that Mozaic announced raising $20MM from Boston-based Volition Capital.
Notably, earlier that same year Volition announced closing Volition Capital Fund V LP with "over $675 million in capital commitments..."
VNC found that Mozaic's October 10, 2023 SEC filing reported raising $25.5MM from 35 investors.
In addition to Cobb and Knepp, the only other director listed in the SEC filing was Larry Cheng, whom our further research suggests is a managing partner of Volition Capital. Volition has not responded to our attempts to reach Cheng.
As this article was published this afternoon, the Mozaic website seemingly remained live.
See these related court documents 1 | 2 | 3 |
Cobb's defense counsel was listed on a Nov. 20 document as Boston-based Scott Lopez of Lawson & Weitzen LLP. He did not respond to a VNC query.
.last edited 1730 11 December 2025
