F1V in 2023: 15 new deals, portfolio startups’ value hits $3.8 billion

By Vital Laptenok, general partner at F1V

In 2023, Flyer One Ventures reviewed 1,012 startups and backed 15 new companies, including Filmustage, AiSDR, Scalestack, Deskree, Zero Systems, Field Materials, Ludis Analytics, Machinet, and CloudChipr.

This year we co-invested alongside Y Combinator, Techstars, Unpopular Ventures, 10X Capital, Forum Ventures, Hustle Fund, Web Summit Ventures, Seedcamp, Passion Capital, ff VC, and other great VC funds.

Our firm also provided follow-on investments to 11 existing portfolio startups, including RedTrack, All Right, NewHomesMate, Mate academy, and Sheep Inc.

Over the past five years, F1V has invested $40 million in nearly 78 companies. The fund has seen one exit (Vochi was acquired by Pinterest) and the portfolio company Chipper Cash becoming a unicorn.

The total value of the F1V portfolio companies is roughly $3.8 billion. This number is higher than the GDP of San Marino, Andorra, Belize, and the Republic of Cabo Verde.

In 2024, F1V plans to keep investing in startups at pre-seed and seed stages from Europe and the United States with about the same tempo as in 2023, while also supporting its portfolio.

F1V is outperforming some of the European VC market's average numbers, according to the fund’s report made public in mid-2023.

F1V has already returned its first fund (primarily invested in 2019), which is much better than the average return of 1% in Europe. The ratio of distributions to paid-in capital of Fund I is 1.0, while the median among European funds from the 2018 vintage is 0.01x.

Fund I total value to paid in (TVPI) is 3.09x, while the median among the European funds from the 2018 vintage is 1.55x. Fund II TVPI is 1.95x, while the median among the European funds from the 2020 vintage is 1.09x.

The top quartile conversion rate from seed to series A among European early-stage VCs is 40%, and the median conversion rate is 19%. As of the end of Q2 2023, the F1V portfolio's conversion rate from seed to series A was 47%.

The F1V team participated in more than 15 tech events, including as speakers at How To Web, Web Summit, VC Platform Global Community Summit in New York, Pirate Summit, and Surge Summit. We juried at Techchill Milano, Infoshare, and Podim’s Demo Day.

To bolster the local ecosystem, F1V supported the Ukrainian startup delegation at Web Summit and provided speakers for the Venture DeepDive lectures and StartUp Academy 3.0. General partner Vital Laptenok became a mentor at the Mission Possible program for entrepreneurs.

We organized five webinars for the startup community with speakers from Angular Ventures, Earlybird VC, Redpoint Ventures, 20VC, and Wise.

For the F1V portfolio, we conducted workshops on fundraising, B2B sales, AI, and other topics. We held an offline Founders Evening in Kyiv and organized Founders Summit, a virtual event for our founders and LPs.

Vestbee, a matchmaking platform for startups and VCs, included F1V investment director Elena Mazhuha in the list of Top 100 Women In VC in CEE. F1V was also recognized by Vestbee in March 2023 as VC Fund Of The Month.

In 2023, an impressive 37 portfolio companies secured funding.

Here are 10 other noteworthy achievements of our portfolio:

In 2023, F1V partnered with eight stellar advisors to consult its portfolio startups.

Subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter to get one useful article every week via email and on LinkedIn. Each story can be read in under 5 minutes, enabling you to promptly implement insights into your business.