Masha Bucher knows what she likes and she does it. After all, venture capitalism is all about taking bold risks — and early stages at that.
This strategy paid off for its founder and general partner Day One Ventures the last six years. The early-stage venture capital firm took a unique approach to the industry by spearheading public relations for its portfolio companies.
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 has also backed eight unicorns, including Superhuman, Remote, Worldcoin, Truebill (coming 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 more than $450 million, he told TechCrunch. He is also surrounded by subject matter experts, including ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi, who joined the company in 2022 to invest in climate technology.
On Tuesday, the company announced its $150 million Fund III to support early-stage founders “to solve humanity’s most pressing issues, from deep wealth inequalities to the urgent threat of climate change and the growing sense of social isolation”.
He also said the new fund “signals a new chapter, involving a deeper integration of art and culture alongside our established expertise in storytelling and public relations”.
From Russia with PR prowess
Venture capital isn’t the only area where Bucher has taken risks. He grew up in Russia (with Masha Drokova). The Washington Post did a fairly lengthy piece in 2022 about Bucher’s teenage ties to Russia, which included him being a teenage leader of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Nashi youth organization. There is also a 2012 documentary made about it called “Putin’s kiss.”
Speaking about it, Bucher said that she was young and didn’t feel like she could choose for herself whether to be a member of the organization or not. He also called the WaPo article “inaccurate” — it said Bucher was meeting with wealthy Russians and accepting funds from them. He told TechCrunch that he was never affiliated with them or took any money from them.
“I cannot return to Russia because I am an enemy of the country,” Bucher said. “I can’t see my grandparents. It’s not home to me at all. I also deeply disagree with what they are doing, as well as deeply saddened by the damage they have done to my relatives in Ukraine on my mother’s side.”
Meanwhile, she started her first company at 18, a social media agency, which grew to 80 people in six months. She then moved into public relations as a field that provided her an outlet to learn more about how business works.
In 2010, he met Runa Capital co-founder Serg Bell on Twitter. “When we connected, he was already the founder of three unicorns, which was very strange,” 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 doing, I realized that he was serving people much more than just doing 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 vice president of communications.
Bucher came to the US around 2014 and opened the M&A PR Studio. Worked with clients including Houzz, HotelTonight and PandaDoc. He was meeting many founders and working with about 100 companies. And she was increasingly sought out for guidance on matters outside of PR.
“It was clear that I was useful in more ways than PR, and I was told that it was useful to have someone to talk to about strategy or business development,” Bucher said. “I didn’t want to be limited just because we had a contract, because it was interesting to me.
In 2017, he decided to flip the script a bit and become an angel investor where he could take risks and do PR for free. He has invested in companies including Lithic, Chatfuel, Acquired.io and Truebill.
A year later, Bucher left M&A PR Studio and started Day One Ventures.
Betting on AI
Over the past six years, the company has focused on areas such as artificial intelligence, fintech, climate, the future of work, and the web3 — some of which are areas that are not VC-friendly in favor of all things AI.
He told my colleague Anna Heim in 2023 that, on average, two AI startups in 1,000 will survive if they lack both the knowledge and business acumen to tackle this industry.
If executed well, however, Bucher believes AI will help us function more effectively as a society.
“There are huge economic disparities, like climate change and health care problems, and I think AI will help solve them,” Bucher said. “AI will come and unlock a wealth of resources that bring us humanity. In time, it will help people be happier. When we invested in Superhuman, I was blown away by how they can write emails for me in my style and edit them with a short command like ‘hey, it’s too long.”
It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day first
Now with Fund III, Day One Ventures is adding a focus on what Bucher called the “Future of Human,” which Bucher said is a category that is at “the crossroads of history, technological advances are unlocking unprecedented possibilities for human progress”.
The Future of Human will also have the company thinking about a deeper integration of art and culture, he said.
Some of Day One’s recent investments include Rainmaker, a cloud-making startup that will force clouds to form and rain in drought-stricken areas. Astroforce, which mines asteroids in space. Affiniti, which offers credit cards to small businesses. and Layer N blockchain network.
In addition, the company invested in Cradle Healthcare, which develops technology for cryogenically freezing bodies. Yes, the latest technology is already available, however, what Cradle is working on is faster freezing technology and also a way to reverse it, Bucher said.
“The goal of the Cradle is to preserve your personality and memory for the future,” he said. “The freezing of your brain in the past has been so slow that part of your brain turns into water, so everything is damaged. The Cradle can freeze it so fast that it doesn’t turn into water, so you can preserve it.”
