SID Venture Partners, a Ukrainian investment fund, has announced investments in Iris Finance, Vendora, and Relari, the fund informed AIN. These are the first publicly announced companies with exclusively American founders in the fund’s portfolio.
SID Venture Partners has already announced more than 20 portfolio startups. Previously, the fund was recognized as the best investor in Ukraine according to Ukrainian Startup Funds and Startup Awards by Lift99.
SID Venture Partners was founded in December 2021 and supported by Sigma Software Group, Datrics, IdeaSoft, Near Protocol. Now, the fund has 13 partners.
The founding companies and partners of SID Venture Partners have considerable expertise in the US, so we are expanding our geography. All the startups announced today are players in very promising markets, from e-commerce to generative AI,Dmytro Vartanian, added.
What is known about startups:
- Iris Finance is an AI-powered profit tracking and planning platform designed for consumer goods brands. The founder of Iris is Alexander Heckmann, who was previously a member of the founding team of the startup clean.io, whose co-founders include Ukrainian entrepreneurs.
- Vendora is a SaaS platform designed to streamline shipping and increase online sales for grocery retailers. The founder of the project is Sunny Singh (former Head of US Strategy & Expansion at the startup Cornershop, which was absorbed by Uber). The startup was a graduate of Y Combinator’s 2023 fall batch.
- Relari develops an opensource platform designed for modeling, testing and validating products with generative models (GenAI). Relari can generate large volumes of its own synthetic data for training and testing GenAI applications. The founders of the company are Pascal Antonanté and Yi Zhang, former employees of NVIDIA, Raytheon Technologies and the unicorn Pony.ai. The startup was a graduate of Y Combinator’s 2024 spring batch.
Agreements took place in the period from the second half of 2023 to the beginning of 2024. Amounts and estimates were not disclosed. The fund’s primary focus remains on companies with Ukrainian founders, but SID Venture Partners also sees opportunities to find promising companies in other markets, primarily in the US.
