Investment company Quarter Partners has rolled out venture fund QPDigital, promising to invest $100 million in Ukrainian startups or international ones with Ukrainian roots.
The fund is keen to finance startups that develop products in the areas of IT-logistics, digital healthcare, game development, blockchain and artificial intelligence.
QPDigital will provide funding for startups from the pre-seed round, when a company has an idea or a prototype of a product, to round A, when a company finishes the product and introduces it on the market.
QPDigital has already invested $2.6 millions into six startups:
- Watched, a service for recognizing the degree of engagement when people watch videos;
- WareTeka, a platform for the rental of warehouses;
- ABM Cloud, which develops cloud solutions for businesses;
- Doc.UA, an aggregator gathering doctors, clinics and diagnostic centers;
- Racoon.Recovery, a tool for rehabilitation after injuries and neurological diseases;
- Datrics, a data science platform for creating machine learning models without coding.
On average, the fund provides a startup with about $500,000 in funding.
Oleg Zaytsev, chief marketing officer at QPDigital, says the fund invested about $750,000 into Racoon.Recovery, while WareTeka got about $400,000 from the fund.
On average, the fund typically receives a quarter of shares in the company in return for the investment.
Startups that want to attract investments should test an idea or prototype on their potential clients, as well as provide the fund with a business model and roadmap of the project for at least two years.
“Our key task is to bring startups to Round B” — when a company expands its market — “with maximum value and a sustainable business model,” Denis Valvachev, CEO and managing partner at QPDigital, said in a press release.
Until May 2019, Valvachev served as an executive managing director at Russian bank Sberbank. Later he was hired as a senior managing partner at Quarter Partners, the company that launched the venture fund.
Quarter Partners has raised equity capital and sold businesses to strategic investors for a total amount of over $5 billions. Now, it manages investment projects in the UDP infrastructure development company and Kyiv Sikorsky International Airport.
