12 Months, 12 Deals: Inside 24Ventures’ First Year

Hours
24Ventures investments

The first 12 months since the Fund’s launch are behind us. During this time, we’ve completed 11 24Ventures investments, and the twelfth project has already received approval from the Investment Committee. This translates to an average of one investment per month, with the majority of the Fund’s investments completed in the last six months, which was due to the timing of investment rounds or a positive project evaluation after a longer period of time. We anticipate that the next year will be just as intense in terms of investments.

Portfolio Strategy: 24Ventures Investments Across 3 Domains

The portfolio has already been highly diversified at this stage, from deeptech projects for which commercial revenues will only be possible in a few years, to B2C projects that have already built impressive traction. We have invested in projects that can be divided into 3 domains:

  • Vertical AI, for gaming, sales and creative industries – a narrow domain and unique data were key to the decision,
  • Deeptechs, in the medical area and edge computing – high technological barrier,
  • B2C and marketplaces – market trends and distribution (GTM).

The Founding Team: Mindset, Track Record & Diversity

Technological changes and the great ease in creating software solutions have made us very critical of the issue of maintaining the competitive advantages of the project. One thing remains unchanged, the founding team is still key to us – its history, results and way of thinking about the project. 

Half of the projects we have invested in are run either by second-time founders or by people who previously held senior positions in leading Polish start-ups (Booksy, Infermedica). Interestingly, we also invested in the founder’s second project, in whose first start-up, after some time, we actually did not invest. This only proves that it is not worth burning your bridges and keeping an eye on what enterprising people are doing. 

The other half of the founders of the Fund’s portfolio companies are first-time founders, for whom the current start-up is the first such large venture conducted on their own, but they could benefit from their resourcefulness, ingenuity and pace of work to many other projects. 

  • Age range of founders – from 20-year-olds to 40-year-olds. 
  • Gender distribution – 25% of start-ups in our portfolio have a female co-founder. Considering that only 1/3 of the projects received by the Fund are co-created by a woman, this is quite a good result.

Looking Ahead: Plans for the Next 12 Months

Plans for the next 12 months? New 24Ventures investments in the three mentioned segments and preparations for the first follow-ons. We continue to intensively search the market for interesting software projects at an early stage of development.

If you see us at events, feel free to come and talk. We have several projects in our portfolio where first conversation was at a conference. We are always open to discuss future 24Ventures investments over a quick coffee.