Masha Bucher knows what she likes and she does it. After all, enterprise capitalism is about taking daring risks – and doing so at the earliest stages.
This strategy paid off for the company’s founder and general partner First day ventures over the last six years. This early-stage enterprise capital firm has taken a unique approach to the industry by spearheading the public relations of its portfolio firms.
Through Fund I ($20 million) and Fund II ($50 million), the Silicon Valley company’s portfolio had 22 exits, including an initial public offering with Terran Orbital. It has also backed eight unicorns, including Superhuman, Remote, Worldcoin, Truebill (which moved to Rocket Companies in 2021), and DuckDuckGo.
Five years ago, Day One Ventures had $11 million under management, and Bucher and her team have grown that to only over $450 million, she told TechCrunch. She also surrounded herself with material experts, including ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi, who joined the company in 2022 to take a position in climate technology.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $150 million Fund III, which can aim to support early-stage founders “to address humanity’s most pressing problems, from deep wealth disparities to the urgent threat of climate change and growing feelings of social isolation.”
She also said the recent fund “marks a new chapter, with deeper integration of arts and culture alongside our established expertise in storytelling and PR.”
From Russia with PR skills
Venture capital is not the only area where Bucher has taken risks. She grew up in Russia. We go through Masha Drokova. Washington Post. in 2022, he published a quite extensive article about Bucher’s teenage ties to Russia, including being the teenage leader of Nashi, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s youth organization. There is also a 2012 documentary on this topic titled “Putin’s kiss“
Speaking about this, Bucher stated that she was young and didn’t feel that she could select for herself whether to be a part of the organization or not. WaPo also reported that Bucher met with wealthy Russians and accepted capital from them. She told TechCrunch that she has never been affiliated with them or taken money from them.
“I cannot return to Russia because I am an enemy of this country,” Bucher said. “I am unable to see my grandparents. This is not home for me at all. “I also deeply disagree with what they are doing, and I am very sad about the damage they have caused to my loved ones in Ukraine on my mother’s side.”
Meanwhile, at the age of 18, she founded her first company – a social media agency, which grew to 80 people inside six months. She then moved into public relations as a field that provided her with the opportunity to achieve more knowledge about how firms operate.
In 2010, she met Runa Capital co-founder Serg Bell on Twitter. “When we connected, he had already founded three unicorns, which was quite surprising,” Bucher told TechCrunch. “He told me about startups and his quantum technology projects in Singapore and London. As he described to me what he was working on, I realized it was much more about taking care of the world than social media marketing.”
Bucher liked what she heard and joined Bell at Runa Capital in 2011. She served as the company’s director of public relations until 2013, when she joined data protection startup Acronis as vp of communications.
Bucher got here to the US around 2014 and opened the PR M&A Studio. She has cooperated with clients including: Houzz, Hoteltonight and PandaDoc. She met many founders and worked with about 100 firms. They also asked her for guidance on an increasing variety of issues outside public relations.
“It was clear that I was helpful in more ways than PR, and they told me it was helpful to have someone to talk to about strategy or business development,” Bucher said. “I didn’t wish to limit myself just because we had a contract, because it was interesting for me.
In 2017, she decided to vary the scenario a bit and change into a business angel, where she will take risks and deal with PR for free. She invested in firms, including: Lithic, Chatfuel, Acquired.io and Truebill.
A yr later, Bucher left M&A PR Studio and founded Day One Ventures.
Placing bets on artificial intelligence
Over the past six years, the firm has focused on areas reminiscent of AI, fintech, climate, the way forward for work and web3 – some of which have fallen out of VC favor in favor of comprehensive AI.
In 2023, she told my colleague Anna Heim that on average two out of 1,000 AI startups will survive unless they have each the knowledge and business drive to tackle the industry.
Bucher, nevertheless, believes that artificial intelligence, if done well, will help us function more effectively as a society.
“There are huge economic inequities like climate change and health care issues, and I think AI will help solve them,” Bucher said. “Artificial intelligence will come and unlock a lot of resources that can give us humanity. Over time, it will help people change into happier. When we invested in Superhuman, I used to be amazed at how they might write emails for me in my style and edit them with a quick command like, “Hey, this is too long.”
It’s a recent dawn, it’s a recent Day One
Now, with Fund III, Day One Ventures is focusing on what Bucher called the “Future of Humanity,” which Bucher says is a category that is at “a crossroads in history, with technological advances opening up unprecedented opportunities for human progress.”
She said Future of Human may even cause the company to think about deeper integration of art and culture.
Two of Day One’s recent investments are Rainmaker, a cloud seeding startup that can force clouds to form and rain in drought-stricken areas, and Cradle Healthcare, which is developing technology to cryogenically freeze bodies. Yes, the latter technology is already available, but Cradle is working on faster freezing technology in addition to a approach to reverse it, Bucher said.
“The purpose of Cradle is to preserve your personality and memory for the future,” she said. “In the past, freezing of the brain was so slow that part of it turned to water and everything was damaged. Cradle can freeze it so quickly that it doesn’t turn into water, so it can be preserved. This technology will also work for freezing eggs.”