TA Ventures is a globally focused venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Viktoriya Tigipko, a Ukrainian entrepreneur and investor. TAV’s team comprises 11 investment professionals across 8 countries. Staying true to its entrepreneurial roots, TAV is a “bootstrapped” VC, investing primarily its own capital. Since 2010, TAV has backed 250+ companies and realized 80+ positions. TAV is also an LP in a number of other VC funds.
Fund strategy overview
Geography: US (50%), EU (30%), SEA & MENA (20%)
Preferred industries: healthcare, fintech, B2B software, D2C
Investment ticket: $100k-1M
Company stage: pre-seed, seed, occasionally Series A
Product type: various
Product stage: various
Revenues: will consider pre-revenue opportunities in some cases
Q&A with Stepan Naumov, Partner at TA Ventures
What are the 5 main things you look for in a startup?
TA Ventures tends to back serial entrepreneurs with a pronounced founder-market fit and “default-alive” mentality. We prefer large “white space” opportunities as opposed to incrementally optimizing on the margin. We also like some degree of complexity, as it gives more room for “moats”. For example, we like regulated industries or spaces with complex distribution, and this is particularly important today in the context of the trivialization of Software (with the advent of Gen AI). Finally, and importantly, we have a preference for asymmetric, non-consensus theses.
What disqualifies a startup as your potential investment target?
Aside from the obvious factors, while we look for ambitious founders, their ambition needs to be backed up by clarity of vision and well-thought out iterativeness in terms of execution. Even the strongest builders sometimes lack this clarity, which can be disqualifying.
What in your opinion differentiates the best founders from the rest?
“Default alive” approach and underdog mentality (“chip on the shoulder”). It is striking that even the most seasoned, serial entrepreneurs with multiple exits tend to maintain this “underdog” mentality – in fact, often more so than others.
What startups should take into account before making a deal with a VC fund?
It is important to have a partner-like dynamic. This requires openness and good communication. And, obviously, this goes both ways.
What is your approach to startup valuation and preferable share in the company?
We are sensitive to valuation but view it in the broader context — it has to be commensurate with the scale of the opportunity at hand, such that the case meets our underwriting standards. We are flexible in terms of the preferred shareholding percentage — for us it is not a zero-sum game. However, we do need to be able to form a sufficiently meaningful position in the company from a dollar perspective.
How do you support your portfolio companies?
We tend to have a partner-like role with the founders that we back. We rarely act as the sole lead investor, but for many of our founders we are the first point of contact in discussing certain topics — and the pace of iteration is often much more frequent than what happens at the board level.
Our practical value add is focused around providing access to our network, which comprises thousands of angels, VCs, and corporate contacts across all of our key verticals. Additionally, owing to our CEE background, we can help with R&D setup in CEE.
What are the best-performing companies in your portfolio?
We’ve backed 250+ companies since 2010 and realized 80+ positions by now. We’ve been fortunate to back 16 unicorns to date, including very early checks in industry-defining European companies like DeepL, SumUp, and Impress.
However, many of our best-performing portfolio companies (10x+ MOIC) are sub-$1 billion outcomes that nonetheless have been great investments due to adequate valuations, position sizing, and, most importantly, capital efficiency on the part of the founders.
What are your notable lessons learned from investments that didn’t work out as expected?
Though it may sound trivial, a very key learning early on for us was to spend considerably more time with the founders personally, particularly before the investment decision. This has helped us a lot over the years.
What are the hottest markets you currently look at as VC and where do you see the biggest hype?
We tend to look beyond the hype. For example, in the AI space we have been extremely cautious about the infra/foundational layer, preferring to focus on vertical applications in our core, “moaty” verticals, as well as the “picks and shovels” space (monitoring / orchestration). We’ve also been spending more time in geographies like Southeast Asia and the Middle East, often focusing on the somewhat overlooked verticals (e.g. consumer in SEA).
In your view, what are the key trends that will shape the European VC scene coming years?
To put it bluntly, the European tech scene will need to rediscover its competitiveness. Looking at the C-level teams of the leading AI companies, we can already tell that Europe has plenty of outstanding human capital.
However, the key to Europe’s success is in making it more attractive for the best European operators to build in Europe. This likely requires finding answers to some of the more fundamental issues that Europe is facing, such as fostering a more entrepreneurship-friendly fiscal policy and regulatory frameworks, as well as resolving Europe’s security crisis.
