SMRK VC Fund

SMRK VC Fund

SMRK VC Fund launched in Kyiv in autumn 2013, founded by Andriy Dovzhenko and Oleksandr Kosovan. Dovzhenko brought senior operational and due-diligence experience, while Kosovan carried the founder-operator credibility of MacPaw Inc, the company behind CleanMyMac. The fund describes an operator-born thesis: its partners were once early-stage founders themselves and now channel that experience into selecting and supporting a concentrated portfolio of IT startups. SMRK concentrates on seed and Series A rounds, writing initial checks between $0.5M and $1.5M. It targets B2B and B2C software products with clear consumer utility and global market ambition. The portfolio spans enterprise SaaS, robotics, climate technology, and proptech. Named positions include Competera (AI-powered pricing software), Esper Bionics (IoT-enabled prosthetics), Deus Robotics (warehouse robotics), Carbominer (atmospheric CO₂ capture hardware), and Superorder.io (a trading platform). The firm also holds Love & Live Fashion Group, a portfolio of Ukrainian fashion brands, alongside investments in customer-service SaaS, content streaming, and digital education platforms. SMRK is led by Dovzhenko as managing partner, Kosovan as partner, and Vlad Tislenko as partner. The firm operates from Kyiv and has not disclosed total assets under management. The website emphasizes a rigorous, self-limiting selection process: the fund explicitly declines to invest in startups it does not intrinsically understand, those outside its core competence, or products without transparent consumer value. SMRK's architecture fuses venture investing with the lived experience of building a globally recognized software company from Ukraine. This operator-foundation — uncommon in early-stage CEE funds — shapes both its sourcing and its post-investment engagement model, where the team positions itself as a co-builder rather than a passive backer.