FLINT CAPITAL SUPPORTS EMERGE FOR THE THIRD YEAR IN A ROW

For the third year now, Flint Capital has been one of the main partners of EMERGE. The fund partners will be members of the jury panel during the EMERGE CHALLENGE — startups pitching competition. They will also moderate the panel discussions and will co-organize the traditional closed party for investors.

We had a chat with Dmitry Smirnov, the founder and managing partner of Flint Capital, who revealed us a secret that even in times of quarantine and lockdown, the fund made 8 deals! We asked Dmitry to share the latest news in the VC world with our participants.

The smaller number of transactions can be explained by the fact that some of the large funds started paying more attention to their portfolio companies. The investments in those sectors that were mostly affected by the quarantine measures have been stopped. I believe this is a short-term trend and soon there will be a return to the previous indicators. Speaking about Flint Capital, the active work continues here. Switching to the remote working format wasn’t a big surprise for us, as our tream of 10 people is distributed across different cities — in Boston, Menlo Park, Tel Aviv, Minsk and Limassol. Generally, the venture capital investors rarely go to the office.

During the quarantine, we made 8 deals. We made two exits (partial from WalkMe and full from CyberX), two follow-on investments in portfolio companies (BrandTotal, Socure) and four new deals (Cyolo, XR Health and two more companies that have not been announced yet). There are several other interesting companies in the pipeline that are adequately rated. In general terms, the adequacy of the startup assessments is becoming a global trend. Now the market is owned by investors and we need to make the best deals for the best money as quickly as possible.

Yes, we are all in this together now. We were forced to radically change the several processes associated with work, life, habits, communication. The exchange of information, experience, knowledge on a remote basis has not become a habit, and most likely it will not happen soon. Therefore, I believe that the quarantine itself will not change anything globally. Many people have already used that time for good purposes and self-education. We studied new professions, skills, programs in online courses. Luckily, several educational platforms have made many online courses and lectures available for free during the quarantine.

Indeed, most of the online services for education, communications, and teleworking have grown rapidly during this time, and Zoom leads this triumphant march. The number of users in our portfolio project called Webinar doubles every month. But we must admit that after the quarantine cancellations across the countries, interest in these video conferencing products will decline.

Thanks to the crisis, competition has become healthier in many sectors, most companies have optimized their structures and increased efficiency. Actually, it feels that the crisis has been there for a long time. During the previous difficult times, we have learned to be prepared for various challenges and diversify the investment portfolio as much as possible: by country, market, market niche, audience, business model, etc. But even in the best years, it is necessary to organize work and make it well-structured. For instance, do not spend much effort during the crisis just on cutting costs and minimizing negative consequences for the business, try always have an "airbag", even a small one. This also applies to startups.

Now we are in the active investment phase and we have our second fund called Flint Capital II. Its keys areas of investment are healthcare, cyber security, various SaaS-based, artificial intelligence and machine learning appliances, which can be used in the enterprise, productivity and communication sectors. We are also interested to invest in the B2C market - e.g. mobile apps for healthcare or edtech purposes.

EMERGE is one of the fastest-growing conferences in the world. Each year it gathers awesome speakers, invites guests from all over the globe and attracts more and more wonderful people. It has been existing only for three years, but it tends to be one of the best conferences in Europe so far, so we are proud to be partners of this event. During the past events we got a huge number of meetings with talented people, and after that, we were following their career success. The fund partners are eager to offer master classes and speak at the conference to spread the knowledge and experience to the entire IT community in the region. That is why, we are happy to recommend the best entrepreneurs, including our investors and founders of portfolio companies, to participate in this conference.

We are open to talk about any topic. However, we are mostly interested to share thoughts on the global economic recovery from the current crisis, the most promising investment areas in the forthcoming years after the pandemic, changes in the venture capital market in the next few years, new elements of the venture capital ecosystem, changes in the business models and business processes, blockchain in the venture capital industry, and the line.

We would like to kindly remind you that Flint Capital will host the invite-only investors networking reception on 1 June available only for Venture tickets. Join us!