We know, help, develop, and invest in each other for more than 10 years. While successfully building our own companies we've accidentally created one of the largest tech Founder's community in Eastern Europe called Shmit16.
We believe that when founders invest in other founders magic happens. So we launched this fund as a next step.
We believe that when founders invest in other founders magic happens. So we launched this fund as a next step.
Oleg Bibergan
Partner at Kismet Capital Group, which raised the first Nasdaq SPAC out of Russia in 2020. 13 years at Goldman Sachs SSG, most recently as Exec Director. Executed GS investments in HH (#1 Rus job board, Nasdaq: HHR), CIAN (Russia's Zillow), OneTwoTrip (Russia's Expedia), Kaspi (Kazakh fintech leader), IXC (Russia's Equinix). Angel & board observer in Miro and Dostavista.
Key expertise: Negotiations, Fundraising, Investment analysis, Equity story.
Fun fact: Odessa-born Brooklyn-raised Harvard-educated US expat living in Moscow. Started my VC career by accepting equity in exchange for rent from my flatmate, Aleks Shamis.
Andrey Khusid
Founder and CEO at Miro — leading whiteboard platform with 10m+ users and 95% Fortune 100 customers. Raised over $75 mln from top global VCs including Accel, Iconiq and others. Built a team of 500+ awesome Mironeers across the globe.
Key expertise: B2B SaaS, Team building, Product design and GTM strategy.
Fun fact: Also known as a famous singer behind the super hit "Topoliny pukh".
Alex Shamis
As a partner and head of growth, helped grow Dostavista.global from $5m to over $100m in GMV and operations in ten countries. We built a product that gives jobs to millions of people and powers millions of small businesses across the globe.
Key expertise: Marketplaces, Product development, Fundraising, People.
Fun fact: While running my first company I had to bootstrap for several years, with only income coming from late-night poker games at underground poker rooms.
Mike Peregudov
Founder and ex-CEO of Food Party, later Yandex.Chef — Russian largest meal kit delivery service acquired by Yandex (Russian largest tech corp) in 2020.
Key expertise: D2C e-commerce, Foodtech, Marketing & brand building.
Fun fact: Could be a great tennis player in a parallel universe.
Alex Alpern
Founder of Webinar Group, one of the leading B2B SaaS companies in Russia and Eastern Europe with 8M monthly users and 200+ employees, which includes the leading Russian webconferencing service Webinar.ru, virtual events service COMDI and knowledge sharing platform We.Study. Webinar Group is venture backed by Intel and EBRD in 2014th.
Key expertise: B2B SaaS, Video collaboration.
Fun fact: A thai-boxer turned into yoga practitioner.
Anatoly Marin
Failed twice before founding a super effective fintech company Payment Systems with 20m installs / 5m MAU and profit per employee > Amazon, Tencent and PayPal. Runs our legendary community's camp on Burning Man.
Key expertise: Human connection, Interpersonal dynamics.
Fun fact: Ex-military officer, served at two armed conflicts.
Leo Batalov
Partner, Global Co-Head of Emerging Growth Companies & Venture Capital at DLA Piper, top international law firm.
Key expertise: Legal expertise in corporate finance transactions, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital transactions, private equity transactions and general corporate matters for companies in the technology and emerging growth sectors.
Fun fact: Swam across the Bosporus Strait.
Our strategy of building a Founders for Founders Fund is: ① To attract world class global entrepreneurs and operators as LPs ② Invest at late seed / Round A in stellar entrepreneurs and teams with global product and vision ③ Connect Founders with fund Partners through our Advisory platform and help them grow.
How we invest:
How we invest:
Quick decisions , 1-2 zoom calls. Fast and 100% clear feedback to Founders.
Seed to Round-A stages with average check 100-200K.
B2B SAAS and Consumer apps with focus on global markets, especially US and European with market size > 1B.
Existing traction confirming strong product/market fit.
We follow, don't lead. But we can help bringing lead and advice who to choose, if multiple.
Access for Founders to our unique S16 Advisory Platform.
S16 Advisory Platform
We've started this more than 10 years ago just for fun and because we loved it and felt it's the right thing to do. We helped each other grow in different ways and then some time after found ourselves as leaders of one of the largest tech Founder's community in Eastern Europe with 300+ bright leaders in it.
Today we convert it into a powerful instrument for Founder's growth and call it S16 Advisory Platform. It's a network of successful and likeminded Founders and Operators based both on our existing community and an outstanding list of our Lps. It's aim is to accelerate your and your company's growth on a daily basis.
Today we convert it into a powerful instrument for Founder's growth and call it S16 Advisory Platform. It's a network of successful and likeminded Founders and Operators based both on our existing community and an outstanding list of our Lps. It's aim is to accelerate your and your company's growth on a daily basis.
① Regular invite-only online and offline events with global industry leaders and subject matter experts.
② Fundraise terms advising e.g. advising on negotiation strategy, matching Founders with best-fit lead investors.
③ Network of successful global founders and operators.
② Fundraise terms advising e.g. advising on negotiation strategy, matching Founders with best-fit lead investors.
③ Network of successful global founders and operators.
① Building leadership team (hiring, coaching, team building, managing leaders, offsites, planning, etc).
② Fundraising (when, from who, intros, etc) and terms.
③ Learning from those who did it successfully (top Founders and Operators who can be mentors and advisors).
② Fundraising (when, from who, intros, etc) and terms.
③ Learning from those who did it successfully (top Founders and Operators who can be mentors and advisors).
We provide Founders with:
To help Founders
grow we focus on:
grow we focus on:
We've invested and already helping:
A B2B browser designed for modern work, backed by Kleiner Perkins. Meetsidekick.com
Leading end-to-end software localization toolkit, prefered by 1500+ companies over the globe, including Revolut, Tesco, Daimler and many others. Lokalise.com
Meeting S16VC in the summer of 2019 was truly a defining moment for Lokalise. Thanks to Andrey, Mikhail, Alex, and others, all of whom are repeatedly successful founders in significant markets, we realized the business horizon could be found much further afield, than we used to think about it before. We combined their encouragement to explore making a global impact with the ongoing validation we have been seeing from our customers. With this, we managed to change our mindset to one of hypergrowth, where VC-backing would make actual sense. Thus, we raised our first funds, series A, and are happy to see S16VC among the investors. We plan to continue benefiting from their feedback, ideas, and suggestions. In turn, we will be developing Lokalise into the localization category leader.
— Petr Antropov, co-Founder & Head of growth of Lokalise
We were happy to help:
Stage: Seed round
Anatoly helped convincing our ideal candidate for a CTO role to leave his secure job at Yandex and join us.
— Dmitry Pushkarev, Founder & CEO of Sidekick
AI-powered mobile companion for mindful nutrition and intermittent fasting from the Founders of FLO — #1 mobile product for women's health in the world. Simple.life
Stage: Round A
I told Alex that we are looking to hire credible diet specialists in the US, so after a few weeks he brought a vetted database of 8K+ registered dietitians.
— Alex Ilinsky, CEO of Simple
Stage: Round A
All-in-one service to win in app stores: app monitoring, app store optimization and customer support. Appfollow.io
Stage: Round A
Andrey introduced me to two advisors who are helping us structure our global GTM strategy.
— Anatoly Sharifulin, CEO of AppFollow
Oleg was of great help in advising us on our fundraising process and consulting on deal terms.
— Eugene Kruglov, COO of AppFollow
Next generation software that breaks down barriers between applications, gives back privacy and data ownership to users. Anytype.io
Stage: Seed round
An accounting and corporate compliance app for small and medium enterprises. Osome.com
Stage: Seed round
A best-in-class experience for the 25 million Americans that struggle with hypothyroidism, a highly impactful chronic condition. Palomahealth.com
Stage: Seed round
