PANDEMIC EFFECT ON VC

For the second year, the Untitled Ventures supported EMERGE. We had a conversation with Oskar Stachowiak, Managing Partner at the Untitled Ventures, who shared with us his forecasts about the venture capital market during the crisis, how and where to invest after the COVID-19, and what are the fund’s future investment plans.

We are proceeding with that, although, this coronavirus situation has slowed things down, yet for just a couple of months. In general, nothing has really changed for us. The investment focus and the geographical area remained the same.

At this moment we are in the process of finalising the financials. Our fund focuses on companies that originate from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and other CIS countries. We see the huge potential in this region.

The new fund will be € 50 million. It could actually go beyond this benchmark, because we see a lot of demand from investors, especially from the institutional type of investors and corporations. Thus, we are flexible in terms of the size. The new fund could be going up to € 100 million.

All institutional investors and or governmental organizations have seen disruption to their process in terms of capital allocation during the COVID-19 period. However, we see us coming back to norm after the summer and resuming discussions. There are corporations that also have an interest in our strategy.

It is worth saying that various investor groups, that wish to get exposure to the CIS region, don’t have many options. Luckily enough, we have been successful in having access and showing growth of our portfolio companies. We still provide very high returns for the investors and, I think as things open up, our options will definitely grow.

At minimum, the startup has to have a pilot or multiple pilots that have already been launched. Our focus is on B2B and having a pilot with a multinational or a few local large corporations is definitely a good sign. We prefer to get to know startups in terms of the quality of the product and also would like to know the people we invest in.

We are mainly interested in deep tech. One of the reasons is that we believe the region has experience in such innovations. Also, the educational system in STEM subjects is very strong in the CIS countries. We focus on what we believe, the world is going — e.g. space technologies or robotics. Since the team’s roots are in Eastern Europe, we can reach out to the smartest and most efficient people from there.

My colleagues were quite active dealing with the startups during the event. EMERGE conference attracts very talented and ambitious people from across the region we are interested in, and given our focus on deep tech, we are very much satisfied with the pipeline of startups presented at the conference.

The main idea was to discuss what is booming right now and encourage participants to think about new directions - where to go next, which steps to take, and what's the future of VC, especially in the CIS region.

The online conference was great! I wasn’t able to join all sessions, but the talks I attended were awesome. However, there is still a demand for a physical conference, which has substantial benefits.

In the investing world, the ability to meet people and have eye contact is essential, which is difficult to replicate online. Thus, I would personally prefer to attend offline conferences and meetings.

We hope that you enjoyed EMERGE 2020 so far. Stay tuned for the further updates on our blog!