Yuri G. Rabinovich

Having a hard time finding checkwriters to fund your startup? Look no further—these firms are ready to write checks! 🔴 San Francisco based Initiate Ventures launched their debut $45M fund to focus on early-stage startups at the intersection of tech and life sciences. 🔴 Portugal based Bynd Ventures launched its third €40 million fund to invest in early stage technology startups in Portugal or Spain. 🔴 Warsaw based Cogito Capital Partners closed its €90M Cogito Fund II to focus on enterprise software, fintech and healthtech sectors. 🔴 Zurich based Founderful closed its $140M Fund II to support tech startups in Switzerland. 🔴 Luxembourg based Bek Ventures closed its third $250M fund to back early stage tech companies in Central and Eastern Europe. 🔴 Chicago based Chicago Ventures closed $80M between its CV Fund IV and CV Opportunity Fund. The CV Fund IV will focus on supply chain, logistics and warehousing, fintech, and digital health while the CV Opportunity Fund will invest in existing portfolio companies. 🔴 New York City based Portal Ventures closed its second $75M fund to invest in early stage crypto companies. 🔴 San Francisco based Forerunner Ventures announced a new $500M early stage fund. 🔴 Singapore based Wavemaker Partners closed its $30M Wavemaker Growth Opportunities Fund to support startups in the Enterprise, Deep Tech, and Sustainability sectors across Southeast Asia. 🔴 Miami Beach based Bling Capital raised $270M for its Bling Capital Fund IV.

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As a VC, embedded finance excites me a lot. The term 'fintech' often conjures images of disruptive mobile banking apps. But, I strongly believe, integrating financial services seamlessly into non-financial platforms can remarkably expand access and foster a new generation of empowered investors. . Why This Matters? -> Traditional financial institutions struggle to reach underserved populations, leading to generational cycles of reliance on predatory lenders or exclusion from wealth-building altogether -> Embedding financial services into existing trusted platforms (think: payroll apps offering micro-investing, ride-share dashboards with built-in savings tools) removes the need for conscious opt-in, a huge barrier for newcomers -> By leveraging user behaviour already tracked within these non-financial apps, embedded finance can offer tailored solutions without lengthy onboarding. This combats the 'one-size-fits-none' approach that alienates potential customers . I believe this trend is about more than just convenience. It seeds fertile ground to nurture financial literacy through democratized access to investment tools. We're looking for founders who see the intersection of: -> Gamified Investing for Beginners: Fractional shares and recurring micro-investments are already gaining traction. The startups that make this genuinely engaging while teaching core concepts are poised to shape positive behaviour change -> Ethical AI for Accessible Advice: Algorithmic recommendations have the potential to perpetuate bias. The tools overcoming this will make investing safer for those without traditional financial support networks These are just examples. The list is much longer. But, you get the gist. . My experience building a tech-enabled language learning platform (Multibhashi) taught me that meeting learners where they are is key. Same way, finance needs to go where people already are, and not the other way around. That’s what embedded finance is all about. . We're eager to back founders transforming 'banking' from something intimidating into an integral part of platforms serving those neglected by the traditional system. If you are one such founder, I/team at Dexter Ventures would love to learn more. Do reach out at [email protected] and keep anuradha@dexter[dot]ventures in cc :) Anuradha #Dexter #DexterCapital #DexterVentures #Startups #IndianStartups #VC #Entrepreneurs #Entrepreneurship #AngelInvesting #InvestmentBanking | Devendra, Devendra, Jayant, Dexter Capital Advisors

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2023 European SaaS Benchmark report 👇 Via: Serena #founders #startups #entrepreneur #venturecapital #vc #tech #technology #B2BSales #ai #llm #artificialintelligence #saas #fundraising #business #entrepreneurship

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Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

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What’s Happening. A View From The Castle. "Wake up little Susie, wake up"... After an interminable hibernation large VC funds are awakening. So far this year there have been 115 rounds of $100 million or more for US-based startups, compared to only 73 during the same period last year. "To do that, he’s gotta be willing to die himself and I don’t know if he’s ready to do that"... Malls are evolving to stave off the e-commerce juggernaut. Although E-commerce represents 20% of the $5 trillion total of US annual retail sales, 2X its 10% pre-pandemic share, its growth relative to traditional retail has slowed significantly. Play stupid games… The market value of meme coin Normie plummeted 99% in minutes after an exploiter (which many believe was a company insider) significantly increased its token supply by taking advantage of a smart contract flaw. Launched in March and reached a peak market cap of $130 million in April. First do no harm... Ascension, the largest US nonprofit health system, was targeted by a ransomware group that disrupted critical operations across its 142 hospitals and over 2,600 care sites. Mile high vacancy... Office vacancy in Downtown Denver has hit 32.1%, the highest rate in decades. Slam that gate… A $10 billion Starwood Capital Group real estate fund has been trying to preserve cash and credit by limiting investor redemptions. It was hit with $1.3 billion of withdrawal requests in Q1 but only returned $500 million. "How far to the point of know return"??? Farcaster, a decentralized social network popular in the crypto community, raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a Series A round led by Paradigm. The platform only has 13 employees and has had 350,000 paid sign-ups. Here we go again??? For the first time since the global financial crisis investors in a AAA CMBS tranche have suffered losses (and they were significant). The loan on an office building at 1740 Broadway in NYC was sold at a steep discount - all five lower CMBS tranches were completely wiped out, and the AAA holders lost over 25% of their investment. The buyer is considering converting the property to residential. “The family is one of nature's masterpieces"... Private equity accounts for 35% of family office holdings, up from 19% in 2018. Don't worry, we know what's best for you... Amidst significant redemption requests from investors, Starwood REIT reduced its quarterly redemptions cap from 5% to 1% of the fund’s net asset value, and its monthly cap from 2% of NAV to 0.33%. The firm stated it made the move to free up liquidity without selling properties at below their acquisition costs or for below their loan amounts. Precursor to recession, or the new normal??? The yield curve has been inverted for over two years, longer and deeper than any previous inversion in the last forty years. #investmentbanking #technology #corporatecurrency #privateequity #venturecapital #castleplacement #cpgoapp

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Great visualization of what VCs are looking for at each stage of funding

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This is how we invest in startups with NEO FOUNDERS: - Check size: €70k to €120k - Stages: Pre-seed Seed - Sectors: Agnostic – all industries - Geo: Europe I’ve signed up for the Early-Stage Virtual Conf on Jan 30. Read these VC stories at the bottom of the PDF, starting on page 2, to explore the core motivations of investors based on experience attracting hundreds of Family Offices, Funds of Funds, VC & PE funds, Angel syndicates to virtual events. And then: 1. Register for the event for free: https://inniches.com/es 2. Like and comment to receive the list with 128 investor contacts & 100 TechCrunch pitch deck teardowns. Max Pog’s team will send it to you via DM or a connection request. 3. Max will gift 100+ books & cakes to participants of the event. Repost to increase your chances.

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How do investors price pre-seed rounds?  This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of fundraising.  Oftentimes, founders want some framework to better understand what market value is when raising capital into their business.  Public equities and later stage privates have a well defined matrix of revenue/margin profiles that dictate valuation, surely there must be some framework for arriving at a pre-seed valuation. So how do investors price startups that are pre-revenue, or have maybe one of two early customers? In reality, pricing is more a byproduct of a VC fund’s portfolio construction model than any metric of the underlying business.  VCs model out portfolios to include a certain number of companies with an ownership target in each startup.  There are variations to portfolio construction, and the chosen strategy will have a direct impact on the types of rounds a fund will participate in. For example, an early stage fund might raise a $60M fund to lead investments in 30 companies and target 12.5% ownership.   After management fees, there is ~$48M in investable capital.  Assuming a fund holds back ~30% for reserves(this number varies across funds) that leaves ~$30M to invest in initial checks.   In this case a fund must average $1M checks at $8M valuations to reach their intended ownership target of 12.5%.   When you are in diligence with a fund, they are first and foremost trying to get to a yes on the investment opportunity.  When arriving at a valuation though, the math outlined above is the determining factor, more so than any multiple of revenue on the business, or the stated desires of where a founder wants to raise capital.  At the end of the day, a VC is trying to arrive at a valuation that works within their portfolio strategy. This means they are very unlikely to price a deal at $15M cap given the aforementioned portfolio construction, as they would either not own enough($1M = 6.67% ownership) or have to cut too large a check( $1.875M = 12.5%). The thing that is most likely to move an investor off their target valuation is another investor in the picture that is driving the price higher, but even then there are upward bound limits of how high an investor is willing to price a deal. I always advise our port cos to ask an investor early in conversations what their ideal check size/valuation is to make sure there is alignment with the founder's objectives.    

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Atomico, founded in 2006 by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, raised two new funds worth $1.24 billion to back European technology firms. • The two new funds are comprised of a $754 million growth-stage fund for startups raising Series B to pre-IPO financing and a $485 million early stage fund. • The fresh fundraising comes as two of Atomico’s key portfolio companies, Stripe and Klarna, have been circled by speculation of upcoming IPOs. Read more from CNBC: https://lnkd.in/d8nDDTha This raises a significant question: several fund managers have personally told me that fundraising is challenging right now. Yet, at the same time, Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, recently raised $1 billion in just three months for his new AI startup... Are we witnessing a disparity in the fundraising landscape, where select individuals or firms have easier access to capital? #capitalraising #vc #investments #skype

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Hey, hey, calling all angel investors, angel networks, early-stage investment networks, founders (yes, you need to understand your angel investors better), innovation agencies, economic development agencies, banks (yes, banks), and anyone else busy building better startup ecosystems around the world. Today, at 18:00 CET, my good friend Rick Rasmussen and I will host What's Your Angel Strategy Webinar. We will cover the eight types of angel investors, how to shape your early angel investor strategy, the basic building blocks of an angel investor network, the most common mistakes angel investor networks do and much more. Sign up and join us. https://lnkd.in/d7xTUxKD Strategy Tools Strategy Sims #angel #Investors

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This question isn’t right. Equating revenue with VC investment is like comparing venture investment with business brokerage. They are rarely comparable models. No one in their right mind is investing one or more million dollars based on sales alone, particularly in a rapidly loss making company without a lot of compelling reasons to do so. Using a sales threshold is shorthand; either the investor has way to much high quality dealflow (very rare) or arrogance (not rare). Stick to your guns and build something that seriously matters for your customers, in a way that grows gp% and market share and investment will follow. In a good market, you’ll probably get more than you need. If your an early stage venture investor, sales should be lag indicator. What you need is focus.

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🎭 Backdrop: The Why of VC Platform as a Differentiator. Yesterday I answered what platform in VC is: the value-add support and resources funds provide beyond capital. But why is capital not enough? 🚀 Venture capital has exploded over the past few decades, from $1.5 billion in tech investments in 1991 to a peak of over $694 billion in 2021. At the same time, there are ~137,000 startups emerging every day. 🌐 During the dot-com era, tech investments reached $90 billion by 2000, backing companies like Google, Amazon, and PayPal. Despite the crash, the VC industry kept momentum. Heavyweights like Sequoia and Accel diversified toward mobile and social startups, leading to major investments in companies like Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb. Accelerators like Y Combinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and 500 Global emerged, providing founders with critical resources, mentorship, and networks—laying the groundwork for today’s platform approach. 🌍 VC continued to evolve. Hubs emerged outside Silicon Valley, with Europe and Asia now major players. Data and analytics are central to investment decisions, and holding periods have significantly shortened. The rise of mega-funds, micro-funds, and specialised investors has introduced new dynamics. Corporate venture capital (CVC) has also grown, with major firms launching their own arms. As a result, competition for resources, expertise, and networks has intensified. 📉 More recently, the 2021 funding peak, driven by pandemic digital transformation, low interest rates, and heightened tech interest, has given way to a tighter market from 2022 to the present. Economic pressures and market corrections meant that many valuations set in 2021 did not hold up, resulting in promising startups raising flat or down rounds. Consequently, startups have had to tighten their belts and focus on unit economics. While capital remains abundant compared to historic levels, particularly in sectors like AI, funds and platform teams must also remain focused and resource-efficient. 🔎 In this landscape, money alone doesn’t set a fund apart. As one anonymous LP noted in a recent Carta article, it’s “a prerequisite for us to understand how managers provide something other than just capital...How can they win aside from paying the highest price?” In a tougher market, LPs look for fund managers with “credibility from having lived in the trenches”—those who can prove their unique worth. 💡 Mountside Ventures’ Emerging VC Manager Programme—“Europe's first”—highlights this dynamic. While many programmes exist for founders, there is little support for emerging VCs navigating the competitive fundraising landscape. This drives home the rationale for platform teams to offer valuable relationships, practical resources, and support that help VCs stand out and succeed. 🤨 What signals have you observed that support or contradict these evolving dynamics? ⬇️

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Silicon Valley Thoughts At Mento vc, we review about 100 projects a week, and 85-90 of them contain an AI thesis. This is no surprise: Silicon Valley and San Francisco have long been the AI ​​capital of the planet. What surprises me is that the talk here is no longer about AI, but about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). This is a form of AI that is capable of understanding, learning, and applying knowledge in any area of human activity, just like humans do. AGI will come, and it's only a matter of time. The questions that currently concern IT people in the Valley are: - What will we, as humanity, do when AGI arrives? - How quickly will AGI be able to spread? - What regulations will be needed, and are they needed? And investors are in an even greater duality. On the one hand, they invest a lot of money in AI projects, on the other hand, they understand that AGI will come and kill most of them. For investors, this means writing off investments. Over the past six months, at least, we have added a point to our project review: what will happen to the startup if AGI appears? In general, when you spend a long time in the Valley, you may get the feeling that the whole world is already thinking about AGI, and that new discoveries are about to happen, but Portugal is very sobering for me: there everyone enjoys life - the sun, delicious food and a leisurely look at the ocean, where every second person is on a surf... We live in interesting times, friends!

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I was very disappointed when I read this post. It’s an example of a core problem with raising from VCs——bullsh*t criteria filters. It’s lazy and arrogant investing at its finest. 1- Passing because of a “signal”. This is just a weak excuse to not speak with a founder. If there is one thing I’ve learned as an investor, it’s that decks rarely tell the story well. With all the dynamics of early stage company building, relying solely on “minor flags” to pass is just a cheap excuse to not speak with someone. 2- Founder not “paying attention to detail”. Attention to the correct details is important. This type of “detail” is ridiculous. As an outsider, you have no idea what their document management is like. They may have updated the document that very day. You’re getting upset about naming conventions like it means that they can’t possibly build a billion dollar company. It doesn’t matter. 3- Being butt hurt when you realize you weren’t the top of their list. This one makes me laugh the most. What an arrogant stance to take. “Oh, I wasn’t your first call? Go jump off a cliff.” It doesn’t strike people like this that it may have taken months to network their way into the person that he knew so they would get an introduction so this investor would take it seriously? Note, “I was sent a fund deck the other day” means that it was a referral, presumably from someone they know and trust. 4- Fundraising must be tough because you’ve been in market for at least two months. Cut me a break. It’s hard for every company in this environment. Most of the best performing VC investments in history struggled to raise money in their first few rounds. And most of the company who raised huge amounts with no friction end up Hindenberging. This is so lazy and biased. These investors also tend to be logo investors—eg who else is committed to the raise. 5- Saving time by not taking the meeting. A VC cannot possibly take a call with every deck that comes across their desk. However, especially when it comes from a referral, and things sound “pretty good”, give it the benefit of the doubt. Especially when it’s so hard to tell a story to hundreds of investors who all have different expectations for “the perfect deck”. Your obligation to your fund LPs means you turn over every rock. Make the time. Pass it to an analyst to hear the full story. Don’t look for weak excuses like this to pass. If you’ve experienced at fundraising, I’m sure none of this is a surprise to you. Fundraising is extraordinarily difficult. If you’re new to venture fundraising, this is just one example in a sea of irrational behavior exuded by VCs and the analysts that filter deals for them. Buckle up. **Thanks to Alex Dunsdon for sharing this investor screenshot with his network first.

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VC due dilligence starts and ends with the team. The main reason VCs pass right away is they don’t believe this is THE team to do this. The middle of due dilligence is all about the market opportunity and competition. Then in the end it’s back to the team - deep dive to confirm this is THE team to do this. So it starts and ends with the team.

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Join for free 1,000s of investors & startups on Zoom at the Early-Stage Virtual Conf on Jan 30. I've signed up with our startup – TransHeps - Decreasing drug failures with the right iDILI diagnosis 🚀 Read these VC stories at the bottom of the PDF, starting on page 2, to explore the core motivations of investors based on experience attracting hundreds of Family Offices, Funds of Funds, VC & PE funds, Angel syndicates to virtual events. And then: 1. Register for the event for free: https://inniches.com/es 2. Like and comment to receive the list with 128 investor contacts & 100 TechCrunch pitch deck teardowns. Max Pog’s team will send it to you via DM or a connection request. 3. Max will gift 100+ books & cakes to participants of the event. Repost to increase your chances.

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🚀 Every early-stage founder should read this fundraising guide by Y Combinator Inside, you'll find invaluable advice on: 📅 When to raise funds for your startup 💸 How much to raise 💡 Fundraising options: convertible notes, SAFEs, and equity rounds 📑 How to prepare for fundraising success 🗣 How to communicate with investors to build strong relationships #startups #fundraising #entrepreneurship #investors #growth #venturecapital

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