Masha Bucher knows what she likes and goes for it. In spite of everything, enterprise capitalism is about taking daring risks — and on the earliest stages.
That strategy has paid off for the founder and general partner of Day One Ventures over the past six years. The early-stage enterprise capital firm took a singular tackle the industry by spearheading public relations for its portfolio firms.
Through Fund I ($20 million) and Fund II ($50 million), the Silicon Valley firm’s portfolio has had 22 exits, including an IPO with Terran Orbital. It also has backed eight unicorns, including Superhuman, Distant, Worldcoin, Truebill (which exited to Rocket Firms in 2021) and DuckDuckGo.
Five years ago, Day One Ventures had $11 million under management, and Bucher and her team grew that to only over $450 million, she told TechCrunch. She’s also surrounded herself with subject-matter experts, including ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi, who joined the firm in 2022 to speculate in climate tech.
On Tuesday, the firm announced its Fund III of $150 million to back early-stage founders “solving humanity’s most pressing issues, from profound wealth disparities to the urgent threat of climate change and the growing sense of social isolation.”
She also said the brand new fund “marks a brand new chapter, encompassing a deeper integration of art and culture alongside our established expertise in storytelling and PR.”
From Russia with PR prowess
Enterprise capital will not be the one area where Bucher took risks. She grew up in Russia (going by Masha Drokova). The Washington Post did a fairly lengthy piece in 2022 about Bucher’s teenage ties to Russia, which included being a teen leader of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s youth organization, Nashi. There’s also a 2012 documentary made about that called “Putin’s Kiss.”
Speaking about that, Bucher said she was young, and it wasn’t something she felt she was in a position to select for herself, whether or to not be an element of the organization. She also called the WaPo article “inaccurate” — it had reported Bucher meeting wealthy Russians and accepting capital from them. She told TechCrunch she was never related to them nor took money from them.
“I cannot return to Russia because I’m an enemy of the country,” Bucher said. “I can’t see my grandparents. That’s not home for me in any respect. I also deeply disagree with what they do, in addition to deeply sad for the damage they’ve done to my relatives in Ukraine from my mother’s side.”
Meanwhile, she began her first company at 18 years old, a social media agency, that grew to 80 people in six months. She then made the progression to public relations as an area that provided an outlet for her to learn more about how businesses operate.
In 2010, she met Runa Capital co-founder Serg Bell on Twitter. “Once we connected, he was already the founding father of three unicorns, which was quite surprising,” Bucher told TechCrunch. “He told me about startups and about his quantum technology projects in Singapore and in London. As he was outlining to me what he’s working on, I spotted that it’s way more catering to the world than doing social media marketing.”
Bucher liked what she heard and joined Bell at Runa Capital in 2011. She served as PR director for the corporate until 2013, when she joined data protection startup Acronis as vp of communications.
Bucher got here to the U.S. around 2014 and opened M&A PR Studio. She worked with clients, including Houzz, HotelTonight and PandaDoc. She was meeting numerous founders and dealing with about 100 firms. They usually were asking her for guidance on an increasing number of issues outside of public relations.
“It was clear that I used to be helpful in additional ways than PR, and they’d tell me that it was helpful to have someone to confer with about strategy or business development,” Bucher said. “I didn’t wish to limit myself simply because we had a contract, since it was interesting for me.
In 2017, she decided to flip the script a bit and develop into an angel investor where she could take risk and do PR free of charge. She invested in firms, including Lithic, Chatfuel, Acquired.io and Truebill.
A yr later, Bucher exited M&A PR Studio and commenced Day One Ventures.
Making bets on AI
Over the past six years, the firm has focused on areas like AI, fintech, climate, way forward for work and web3 — a few of that are areas which have fallen out of VC favor in favor of all-things AI.
She told my colleague Anna Heim in 2023 that, on average, two AI startups out of 1,000 will survive in the event that they don’t have each the knowledge and business acumen to tackle this industry.
If executed well, though, Bucher believes AI will help us function more efficiently as a society.
“There are huge economic inequalities, like climate change and healthcare problems, and I believe AI will help solve it,” Bucher said. “AI will come and unlock an abundance of resources that bring us humanity. Over time, it would help people be happier. Once we invested in Superhuman, my mind was blown at how they’ll write emails for me in my style and edit with a brief command, like ‘hey, it’s too long.’”
It’s a brand new dawn, it’s a brand new Day One
Now with Fund III, Day One Ventures is adding a concentrate on what Bucher called “Way forward for Human,” which Bucher said is a category that sits on the “crossroads in history, technological advancements unlock unprecedented possibilities for human progress.”
Way forward for Human will even have the firm considering a deeper integration of art and culture, she said.
A number of of Day One’s recent investments include Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding startup that may force clouds to form over and rain on drought-stricken areas; Astroforce, which is mining asteroids in space; Affiniti, offering industry-specific bank cards to small businesses; and blockchain network Layer N.
As well as, the firm invested in Cradle Healthcare, which is developing technology to cryogenically freeze bodies. Yes, the latter technology is already available, nevertheless, what Cradle is working on is quicker freeze technology and likewise a option to reverse it, Bucher said.
“Cradle’s goal is to preserve your personality and memory for the longer term,” she said. “Freezing your brain prior to now was so slow that a part of your brain turns into water, so it’s all damaged. Cradle can freeze it so fast that it doesn’t turn into water, so you may preserve it.”
