1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Semyon Dukach, Managing Partner at One Way Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How close is your activity portfolio within the MIT community? 

Semyon Dukach: We have quite a bit of stuff around MIT. I’ve been physically in Boston ever since I went to MIT 30 years ago. We have a lot of stuff with Harvard and other universities as well. I think that is one of our areas of focus – IT startups with defensible tech.

We have other kinds of startups from other places. A lot of our deal flow comes from other portfolio founders that we know. I’ve invested for a long time. There’re over 200 companies that I’ve been involved in. We see a lot of exits from the investor base. It’s not all around universities. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some case studies of what kind of projects you have invested in. We both have a soft spot for MIT. Why don’t we start with a company that you invested out of MIT that you feel particularly good about?

I don’t want a list of companies. I want one company. Take us through how you encountered them. What did you see? What were they doing that made you want to write a check? What is special about that company?

I’m trying to give our audience a view into how you think about which companies you invest in besides the immigrant issue. I’m sure there are also other factors that you think about as you decide if you want to invest in a company. 

Semyon Dukach: We look at the strength of the founder, the size of the opportunity, and the sensibility of the tech. Let me talk about Kebotix. That’s one interesting company out of the Harvard-MIT academic world. We were the first investor and we led a large seed round for them.

In their case, the additional seed stage came before revenue. It came early before the product. It was a $5 million round that three other VCs followed us into.

They had a strong team of co-founders. Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik was their original chairman. He is one of the top authorities in the world of AI for material science creation. He has a big lab at Harvard. He was an immigrant from Mexico.

He was a bit political, so when Donald Trump won the election, he ended up leaving the US and moving to Toronto. Justin Trudeau personally recruited him to take his whole lab to Toronto. It was a huge loss for Harvard and the US. There were four other postdocs who were brilliant scientists in the space.

In a startup, you typically get one or two people like that, but this startup just had a lot of academics. They were all immigrants from different places – Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. All of them had a Ph.D. in Chemistry.

The CEO who joined slightly later also had a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard. He had previously bootstrapped a company to a significant revenue, but he joined this company as the CEO. We invested in them because of the depth of the technical differentiation in terms of their work relative to what other folks are doing.

It also had to do with the scale of the opportunity. If they could displace the big industrial chemical companies in the world of investing and creating materials, then they could be larger than that. It seemed like a $100 billion opportunity. It justifies a little bit more risk investing in this round before the product was complete. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Semyon Dukach, Managing Partner at One Way Ventures
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