F1V in 2024: 9 new deals, portfolio startups valued at $4.4B

By Vital Laptenok, General Partner at F1V

When the year is coming to an end, I like to reflect on its most significant moments. So, what was this year about for Flyer One Ventures?

Investments and portfolio

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In 2024, we spoke with 1,052 startups and backed nine new companies, including RemotePass, Heartbyte, and Tilta. Our current conversion rate is about 1%, so it's easier to get into Harvard than into our portfolio.

In these deals, we co-invested with funds we deeply respect, including ff VC, Seedcamp, Zacua Ventures, Y Combinator, 212 VC, Navitas Capital, Blumberg Capital, Dreamcraft Ventures, 10x Founders, Superangel, Lead Ventures, Passion Capital, and Specialist VC.

We also supported seven companies with a follow-on check, including Jome (formerly NewHomesMate) and Fintech Farm.

Nearly 20 of our portcos all together raised over $100M in fresh funding this year; conversion from seed to Series A among all companies increased to 55%.

Over the past six years, F1V invested nearly $43M in 87 companies. Our portfolio startups are valued at $4.4B, which is — for comparison — more than the GDPs of several small nations like Andorra, San Marino, or Cabo Verde.

What about 2025? We'll focus more on pre-seed deals and industries like enterprise SaaS, health tech, construction, logistics, and fintech. We’ll also be excited to invest more in tools that improve productivity by automating personal and business workflows. Additionally, we’ll focus on consumer tech, where F1V has significant expertise.

If you want to pitch us your startup, fill out our typeform.

Portfolio news

If you read our LinkedIn, you might notice regular posts about the achievements of our portfolio. I’m proud of every company — especially those operating from Ukraine.

Let’s not forget: Russia's been invading Ukraine for almost three years now. And for Ukrainian startups, it remains just as hard to keep business going, fundraise, and operate during blackouts as it was when the full-scale war began. But they’re doing it really well.

None of our Ukrainian portfolio companies has shut down since that moment.

Here are a few achievements of our Ukrainian portfolio startups worth your attention:

• Liki24.com operates now in nine countries: Ukraine, Romania, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
• Fintech Farm created neobank Roarbank in India. Previously, it launched Leobank in Azerbaijan, Liobank in Vietnam, and Simbank in Kyrgyzstan.
• For the second year, intelligence platform HolonIQ included All Right in its list of the most promising European edtech startups.
• Tech.eu listed Deskree and Jome among the 10 most resilient startups in Ukraine.
• Liki24.com and RedTrack are the fastest-growing startups in Eastern Europe and the Baltics among 30 companies, as highlighted by Sifted.

Events and F1V news

Not a single month in 2024 has gone by without something epic happening on our team: a great event where we took the stage, a big promotion, or a valuable partnership.

• Elena Mazhuha and Oleksii Yermolenko became partners at F1V (Oleksii is also the firm’s co-founder). Both of them were included in the European Forbes 30 Under 30 list this year. Elena Mazhuha was also named one of the most influential women in Ukraine’s VC industry in Vestbee’s ranking.
• F1V became one of the most active investors in Ukrainian startups in H1 2024, according to Forbes.
• Oleksii Yermolenko was elected to the supervisory board of the Ukrainian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (UVCA).
• The F1V team participated in over 30 tech events and startup programs as speakers, mentors, judges, hosts, or partners — double the number from last year.
• The coolest events we spoke at: the World Economic Forum, TechChill, South Summit, Viva Tech, StartupFair, Slush, 0100 Conference, Founders Forum, PE & VC Summit in Warsaw, Ukraine Tech Summit, 500 Eurasia’s Demo Day, and StartUp Academy by Genesis & Meta.
• We juried at around 10 events, including Startup Fair’s Pitch Battle, Vestbee Winter Pitch, and Wolves Summit.
• We hosted side events at Web Summit and Slush that brought together over 600 startup founders and investors.
• We were partners of TechChill’s networking event in Kyiv.
• We joined the investment committee of Techosystem, an organization that supports Ukraine's tech sector.
• Endeavor, a global network of rockstar founders, launched its Ukraine chapter, and I was honored to become the chair of its founding board of directors.
• We married TRMNL4 (just kidding!). We officially partnered with it. This is a connector for startups, investors, and global tech players in CEE, and we decided to work with the guys more closely in organizing events and startup programs in 2025.

Supporting startups

We’re trying to stay in touch with most of our startups, asking how they’re doing and offering hands-on and hands-off help. This year, we’ve resolved over 300 portfolio requests across fundraising (including hundreds of intros for startups), operations, growth, marketing, PR, and recruiting.

Our recruiters found 71 talented specialists for our portfolio and partners through nearly 6k candidate applications and 2.5k interviews.

The PR team handled around 50 requests, supporting portcos with media comms, writing stories, PR strategy, and long-term PR for a few startups. While working with Liki24.com for three months, the team achieved over 40 mentions in top Ukrainian media, including Interfax, Forbes, and Unian.

In 2024, we’ve done many great things. If someone asked me to describe this year for F1V in a few words, I’d instead show a snapshot of our heartwarming team gathering in Lisbon this November. Let it speak for itself.

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