One Way Ventures Q2-2024 Newsletter
Q2-24 investment note.
Hi friends,
We had a productive quarter, supporting several portfolio companies as they closed new rounds and worked on various new investments. Our brand is gaining wider recognition and we're building on this momentum with the growth of our Pathfinder Collective of unicorn founders.
We're continuing to back exceptional founders at the seed stage by maintaining the more concentrated portfolio approach that we've refined over the past few years. To recap, One Way Ventures is a seed-stage VC fund backing exceptional immigrant founders.
Team: Founded by Semyon Dukach, a top-performing Managing Director of Techstars (Boston) in 2017. The investment team includes Eugene Malobrodsky (co-founder of AnchorFree, $300M raised), Lex Zhao (Bridgewater/Vestwell), and Leo Arango (Sequoia/Capital One).
Strategy: The immigrant journey filters for the exceptional, those with grit, risk tolerance, and a hunger to succeed. Targeting 20 U.S.-based seed-stage companies by leading with ~$2M checks and investing in sectors that capitalize on our team’s experience in SaaS (including AI), fintech, and deep tech.
Portfolio Support: Network of portfolio advisors some of whom are part of our Pathfinder Collective of 25 unicorn founders (e.g. co-founders of LinkedIn, Slack, Duolingo, and Noom). Fund I/II investors are value-add LPs (e.g. founders of companies including Robinhood, Techstars, Oculus, Vivox, and AirSlate; executives from Amazon, Meta, Google, and Netflix)
We want to thank you for your ongoing support, whether helping our portfolio companies or simply following us through this newsletter. We're excited to continue to double down on what we do with the next chapter of One Way Ventures.
New Investment in Q2
Nim | AI
Nim is a full-cycle AI video production studio that allows freelancers and creative agencies to produce medium-length AI-generated videos ten times faster than current alternatives, incorporating a variety of open-source models.
Founder Yury Lifshits won two gold medals at the International Mathematics Olympiad as a high schooler in Russia. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science at the age of 23, then immigrated to the US as a postdoc at Caltech and later a scientist at Yahoo! Research. He then started several edtech and consumer social companies, participated in YCombinator, raised $14M+, and was a key contributor to an $80M+ exit.
Portfolio Highlights
✅KarmaCheck: A software company offering technology-based solutions for background checks, credentialing, and compliance, closed a $45M Series B funding round as they revolutionize the way companies conduct background checks. [PYMNTS]
💳Qashio: A spend management solution that monitors expenses and facilitates payments through virtual corporate credit cards, has announced a strategic partnership with Landmark Group’s Shukran, one of the region’s largest loyalty programs. [MENAFN]
🚗 Helm: Specializing in AI software for driver assistance systems, autonomous driving, and robotics, has introduced VidGen-1, AI video model tailored for ADAS and L4 autonomous driving. Trained on extensive data, VidGen-1 simulates diverse global driving scenarios, bridging the 'sim-to-real' gap with highly realistic outputs. [TheRobotReport]
🖥️Brelyon: Known for its headset-free immersive solutions for enterprise and metaverse applications, has won the prestigious xTechSearch 8 competition. [Yahoo Finance]
🏆 Tive: A hardware and software platform designed to track the conditions of shipments has been honored with the '2024 Top Supply Chain Projects' award by Supply & Demand Chain Executive for revolutionizing logistics in collaboration with Mary Kay Global. [Tive]
Pathfinder Collective Highlight
Our Pathfinder Collective is a network of unicorn founders, dedicated to helping portfolio companies as they scale.
Eric Ly, LinkedIn's Former Co-Founder & CTO, and CEO of KarmaCheck.
Eric, who co-founded LinkedIn and was instrumental in building it into the world’s largest professional network, is now applying his expertise as the Co-Founder and CEO of KarmaCheck, one of our portfolio companies. At KarmaCheck, he’s leading the charge in revolutionizing employee verification by using AI to deliver faster, more accurate background checks.
One Way Ventures in the News
One Way’s Founding Partner Semyon on His Most Visionary Founders (The Full Ratchet)
Today’s Ethical Dilemmas Are Being Decided by Tech Bros. (The Next Web)
How Can VCs Create Community at a Time of Division? (Crunchbase News)
Eugene Malobrodsky from One Way, on Backing Immigrant Founders (Life Self Mastery)
Semyon, in Unite.AI Interview Series (Unite.AI)
Featured Jobs
Interested in working for a venture-backed startup? Explore some of our handpicked selections below or visit our careers page to learn more:
First Marketer at Nim (📍Remote)
Senior Full-Stack Engineer at Ribbon (📍Remote)
Data Labeling Specialist at Helm.ai (📍Remote, USA)
VP of Business Development at Impilo (📍Philadelphia, USA)
Full-Stack Software Engineer at RaySecur (📍Westwood, MA, USA)
Want More?
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