The Ukrainian market of startups is pretty versatile and requires firm financial assistance both in their initial and late stages of growth. Adventures Lab is one of the Ukrainian investment funds that has gained a reputation on the market. It has invested more than $15 million in projects and has 14 businesses in store created from scratch.
Ruslan Timofeev (Ruslan Tymofieiev), the founder of Adventures Lab, spoke about how to put into practice the idea of a startup and make millions, the risks each investor can face, and shared his predictions of the Ukrainian startups’ ecosystem.
Major investments of Adventures Lab
As soon as the fund started its activity, it made strides by investing in six significant projects. Among the biggest ones are StreamHERO, EduDo, and Reface.
The Reface project is one of the most considerable assets of Adventures Lab. With a deep belief in its success, the fund invested in it at the early stage. Last fall, Reface took the first position in the rank of the most popular AppStore apps.
Adventures Lab was the lead investor in international projects, too. The EduDo project from Belarus was among them. It is a platform used for educational purposes. This platform allows users to upload videos that take a maximum of 3 minutes with educational content made by themselves.
The partners and investments by Adventures Lab focused on improving the platform at large by creating more tools for content generation, adding features, and further monetization. The EduDo project raised a $300,000 round.
StreamHERO offered the live stream advertising service and gained $550,000 in the pre-seed round. In this project, Adventures Lab took part as a leading investor. Ruslan Timofeev added that the willingness and zeal of StreamHERO’s team and founders impressed a lot. Moreover, eSport is a fast-growing industry that appeals to more investors.
The concept of StreamHERO involves integrating ads into gamer’s streams. Thus, this service allows running ads on enormous live streams in the short term. And today, thousands of gamers throughout the world use this service to stream.
The way the startups are selected
Ruslan Timofeev (Ruslan Tymofieiev) admits that the process of seeking projects to invest in requires powerful analysts and predictors to monitor the market and find potential projects fascinating to a customer, not an investor. Also, it defines high risk for investors because it is not always possible to know if the project is successful.
Accordingly, start-ups that opted for investment are categorized into three stages: early stage, growth stage, and late stage. Early-stage presupposes projects that are at the point of starting their development and leads to gaining little money. The growth stage involves projects that are in the development process with a business plan and strategy. Late-stage projects are those that require multi-million investments to promote.
When it comes to the Adventures Lab team, the foundation is focused more on two start-ups phases: pre-seed and seed. Ruslan Timofeev explains a pre-seed investment as an investment in the idea or the development of a demo version of the application. It typically takes about $100,000 – $200,000. The seed investment involves scaling the product on the market.
Due to influencing factors in the last decade, many domestic startups relocated their businesses abroad. However, the founder of Adventures Lab believes the ecosystem of the Ukrainian startup market has begun to restore again, thanks to new opportunities for ambitious entrepreneurs. The more domestic engaging projects are to run, the more investors they will choose to invest in domestic startups.