Participated · Seed · Nov 2022

Valarian Technologies develops ACRA, a software layer described as a sealed operating room for AI workloads and sensitive applications that controls what data leaves systems, who can access it, and who can shut it off. The product is positioned to let governments and enterprises retain control while still using major cloud providers by enforcing policy and access controls outside those providers’ native stack. The company was founded and is led by Max Buchan, with co-founder Josh McLaughlin joining from a senior role at Palantir, and is based in London. Valarian’s positioning responds to geopolitical risks such as the U.S. CLOUD Act and recent restrictions on access to U.S.-based AI services. Financially, the company has raised $70 million to date, including a $50 million Series A led by NEA.

Participated · Seed · Dec 2021

Awesomic is a designer-to-client matching platform that leverages AI to pair clients with designers for fixed-price jobs, promising matches without interviews and delivery within 24 hours. The startup has completed over 10,000 projects for 1,500+ clients, including Reface, Ciklum and roughly 200 Y Combinator alumni. Backed by Y Combinator, Awesomic won the 2022 Red Dot Design Award in Branding and Communications. The company was co-founded in 2020 by Pavlyshyna and Roman Sevastyanov, who serve as CEO and CTO. The new funding is intended to help expand Awesomic’s geographic footprint and to mitigate the effects of the war in Ukraine on its operations. The product positioning emphasizes speed, fixed pricing, and AI-driven matching to reduce time spent on sourcing and negotiating with designers. Awesomic operates a subscription-based mobile marketplace that matches businesses with web designers via an algorithm that assigns tasks to the best-suited designer. Users create tasks in the app and the platform pairs them with designers who work with clients on multiple projects and provide daily progress updates. The company mainly serves Ukrainian designers who produce logos, websites, presentations and animation, and currently works with 60 designers. Over 500 businesses in the U.S. and Europe use Awesomic, including Reface, Lift99, Ciklum and People.ai. Awesomic says it has grown revenue 12-fold since joining Y Combinator and plans to increase annual revenue to $10 million next year. The startup intends to use the new capital to expand the team to 50 people and attract hundreds more designers to the platform.

Participated · Equity · Mar 2020

Founded in 2020 and headquartered in London with an office in New York, Synthesized delivers agentic AI-powered test infrastructure for large enterprises. Its platform provisions lifelike, compliant test data and complete test environments in minutes, replacing the traditional weeks-long setup cycle. The system plugs directly into CI/CD pipelines and supports heterogeneous databases, packaged applications and custom systems, enabling continuous testing and smoother cloud migrations. Built-in privacy features such as masking, anonymisation and region-aware protections keep sensitive customer information within production boundaries and simplify audits. Enterprises using Synthesized report releasing software twice as fast, cutting QA spend by up to 40 %, shrinking cloud-migration timelines by 75 % and, in Deutsche Bank’s case, halving test-data provisioning time. The company is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for autonomous QA agents across regulated sectors including banking, healthcare, energy and life sciences. Its recently secured Series A funding of more than €17 million will fuel expanded hiring in go-to-market, customer success, AI R&D and engineering across North America and Europe.