1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You invest in both healthcare IT and cybersecurity and your partners invest more in the life sciences angle of it.

Dafina Toncheva: Correct. I actually invest in cybersecurity and enterprise applications, mostly business process automation for various verticals.

Sramana Mitra: I know everybody is talking about AI and Blockchain. If you look at the last 18 months of what you’ve seen, are there nuggets that you could share that are overriding trends?

Dafina Toncheva: It’s a difficult question to answer because it’s broad. It depends on the angle. First of all, there’s a lot of deal flow. The seed >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s build on that and understand your geographical preferences. Are you investing only in Silicon Valley or are you investing more broadly?

Dafina Toncheva: When it comes to cybersecurity, we like Israel a lot. It’s an area that we have been investing in for 20 years.

Sramana Mitra: There are lots of great security companies in Israel.

Dafina Toncheva: We invest in Israel but most of our investments are in the United States. Within the United States, we have made investments in the Valley, LA, New York, Atlanta, and Utah. I’ll tell you one thing. I, more and more, like companies out of the Valley, especially companies that >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: These are banks in the UK? What kind of banks are we talking about?

Alexander Ross: These are tier-one and tier-two European and US banks. What we find is that given that every company that speaks to us will likely get an introduction to one of our bank partners if they’re relevant or one of our strategic investors, an increasing number of companies want to remain engaged with us and refer companies to us. About 70% to 80% of our pipeline is inbound at the moment across our strategic investors and strategic bank partners. The rest comes from conferences, outbound-themed outreach.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the trends emerging from the B2B FinTech space? How would you synthesize that?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you have seen it on our blog. We have a Thought Leaders in Cyber Security series. Ray has actually been on it. He’s running a company these days. In that series, one of the questions that comes up a lot is, if you put yourself in the shoes of a CISO, you have to make decisions about which vendors to work with.

There are hundreds of vendors coming in with hundreds of point solutions. It’s really a complicated job. Let’s say your portfolio company in security, it’s very difficult to get these meetings. How are your companies dealing with this? What are you advising your companies to do?

Dafina Toncheva: That’s a very good point. That goes back to me saying that there’re thousands of companies with a similar marketing message. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can we do some examples?

Alexander Ross: Cloud Margin is a cloud-based capital management solution that I mentioned. It focuses on compliance, clearly, because it enables the end users to monitor transactions. Cost is also a factor. This solution is a multi-tenanted SaaS-based solution. It’s much cheaper to adopt as an organization and much cheaper to manage.

The cost comparison we see to the incumbents that are all deployed is a tenth of the price, which is significant. Compliance, cost, and capital are the three components that that particular solution touches on. Another example would be Privota. That’s a business that sits at the intersection of big data and cybersecurity. It sits on top of the new generation of data infrastructure. It enables differential privacy to the end user. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One small detail question. One of the issues of the current venture capital ecosystem is that Series A financing has become larger. A class of VCs has developed that does the smaller Series A checks. Then you are doing the traditional venture capital. You want to put in $5 million to $10 million. If an entrepreneur just wants $5 million Series A, would you do that round fully as a solo investor?

Dafina Toncheva: Yes. I would love that. I think the appropriate amount of capital keeps everyone disciplined and makes them more focused on achieving milestones that will set the company up for success for the next round. We will definitely lead a Series A financing that is on the smaller side. We’ve led a Series A financing as small as $4 million.

These things have changed quite a bit. What used to be a traditional Series A now edges towards a large seed. What used to be the seed, now is >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Alexander Ross was recorded in July 2018.

Alexander Ross, Founder at Illuminate Financial, talks about his firm’s FinTech investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a little bit about your fund and your investing focus. Let’s get to know one another. Let’s introduce you to our audience.

Alexander Ross: Our fund is called Illuminate Financial. We are a financial market technology-focused venture capital fund. We saw a space in >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Dafina Toncheva was recorded in August 2018.

Dafina Toncheva, Partner at US Venture Partners, is an expert in Cyber Security. We discussed a variety of topics including the shifting of Series A metrics to $2M – $3M ARR for SaaS companies.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself as well as US Venture Partners. Where is the investment focus today? I know USVP has a long history of being in all different corners of the technology industry. >>>