Founder Friendly Venture Capital

Adding Value in
New York Moscow St. Petersburg Novosibirsk Kazan Perm Tomsk Samara

Committed Founders Deserve Value Added Investors

  • We Invest in Product-Market Fit

    • Enabling great founding teams to reach product-market fit is our firm's primary reason for existence.
    • Intelligently iterating requires learning from the failures of the past, while being able to accurately discern what has changed to make your success a possibility (eg:Knewton VS iPhone). We rely on our industry specific experience and network in your target market in order to help you understand both.

  • Accelerate Your Growth

    • Rapidly and profitably scaling a value proposition of worth is our firm's secondary reason for existence.
    • Premature scaling is one of the most common reasons why technology company's fail, running out of cash with nothing to show for it. We help you avoid this outcome, while giving you the expertise, network and distribution partners needed to cost-effectivly present your value propositon at scale.

  • Founder Friendly Venture Capital

    • We believe in respect, transparency and mutual understanding by putting our collective interests first.
    • WE DON'T want "control" or 40% of your company to create downstream financing risk and personal demotivation.
    • WE DO want to enable great founding teams to reach their full potential as quickly as possible.

Building a technology company to a $2.5Bn Valuation or a $400MM acquisition requires investors who can offer more than just money.

Sergey Nazarov

Managing Director

I have a deep belief in and respect for Russian technical teams, which have historically created some of the most significant technological advances, domestically and/or abroad. I started QED Capital to give these technical teams access to the same resources that allow their counterparts in the US and Europe to successfully go from prototype/project to fast growing technology company.

When I arrived in Russia in 2011 to recruit technical talent for my consumer internet company ExistLocal; I gradually began to realize that Russia’s need for ethically minded, value added and genuinely founder friendly venture capital was a far larger opportunity to create value.

Previously, I actively created exactly this type of value in New York City; as a part of the investment team at FirstMark Capital, a top-tier venture capital firm with over $2Bn under management, which makes Seed to Series C investments in fast growing technology companies such as Pinterest, Riot Games ($400MM Acq by Tencent), Knewton, Ahalife, AppFirst, Conductor, MyCityWay, Playnomics, Lot18 and many great others. During my tenure, the investment team at FirstMark successfully invested over $90MM in Seed, Series A, Series B and Series C venture capital financings.

While running ExistLocal in New York and participating in board meetings at companies like Second Market through FirstMark Capital, I came to learn what it takes to turn Pinterest from an idea into a company with a $2.5Bn Valuation and Riot Games from a few young guys who like DOTA into a $400MM acquisition. That is what I am offering great technical teams in Russia through QED Capital; the opportunity to build their technology company the right way.

We work with product focused technical teams creating a unique solution for a valuable and technologically complex problem.

What we look for

  • Technical founders

    Great technology is built by founders that can personally launch and continuously improve upon the technology needed to solve their customer’s constantly evolving pain points.

  • A Clear Customer Acquisition Plan

    Great technology companies are sustained by their ability to generate a profit for their offering. Knowing each customer's monetary value and the cost of acquiring them is crucial to this process.

  • Large market

    Without a large market, existing or newly formed, there is no large company to be built. The large risks of a startup are balanced out by the immense successes they can become through serving a large market.

  • Enterprise Software

    Solving a valuable problem for a customer who has a large budget to pay for your solution is a good plan. Solving it using technology that your competitors can't replicate, or at the very least can't replicate quickly enough is a great plan.

  • Russian Consumer Internet

    We are excited about helping you offer Russian consumers access to valuable goods and services via both web and mobile. A clearly defined customer acquisition plan and a team that can clearly execute on that plan are a must.

  • Consumer Hardware

    As new consumer behaviors take hold and the price of hardware continues to decline there is an unprecedented opportunity to provide tangible value. We are excited about working with teams that understand and capitalize on both of these dynamics.

What you can expect from us

  • We decide fast

    Raising Venture Capital is usually a time consuming and emotionally draining process. We respect the time and effort you take to educate us about your company and we try our best to decide on our involvement within one to two weeks of a full presentation

  • Your First Investors

    We will invest $50K - $200K in a company’s seed round and up to $500K in a Series A. We prefer priced equity rounds where the founders retain enough equity to keep them motivated through their series A, B and C rounds. We can do your entire seed round or co-invest with like-minded investors.

  • We Exist to Enable Our Founders

    We don’t believe in controlling founders, we do believe in in initially choosing “the right people” and enabling them to create a company we are all excited about. Our aim is to give you the advice and resources you need with the minimum amount of friction possible, you have enough to focus on.

  • Pattern recognition

    We help you avoid survivorship bias; we have seen the well known wins, as well as the not so well known failures in your industry. You save time and possibly your company by knowing what caused one company to succeed while others failed.

  • We help you sell

    Enterprise sales depends on the right relationships to fast track you in the sales process. Understanding online consumer behavior is what decides if an application succeeds. After working with the best enterprise and consumer internet companies in the US, we know what works and what doesn’t.

We offer time tested customer acquisition, financing and product development best practices from the top technology companies in the US.

We are based in New York City with offices in
San Francisco, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia.

  • Founders

    We prefer you contact us through an introduction from our extensive network, but if that isn't an option then we understand and you can reach us at socialproof@qed.vc
    If you plan to present your company to us in written form, we highly recommend you use these principles.

  • Developers

    If you are a great software or hardware egineer, we have interesting problems to solve, very smart people to work with and the opportunity to make a product you can be proud of. Feel free to reach us with your github and/or resume at careers@qed.vc

  • Press

    For any press Inquiries, please feel free to reach us at press@qed.vc