Exclusive: Day One Ventures closes its third fund at $150 million

When Masha Bucher got a DM from Alex Blania, she had no idea what he was talking about—but Bucher was ready to help. It was 2019, and Blania (then a Caltech academic) had just been rejected from Y Combinator.

“I was really angry and I think [Bucher] had liked a picture of the car I built when I was 16,” said Blania. “I just sent her a message saying: ‘Hey, I think you’re part of the YC application committee, you didn’t take me, and I think it’s a huge mistake…And she was like: ‘Hey Alex, I have no idea what this is about, but maybe I can help you in another way.’”

Bucher—who’d founded Day One Ventures in 2018 as a solo GP—would soon set up introductions for Blania in Silicon Valley that “helped shape my career,” he says. Then, when Blania cofounded Worldcoin with Sam Altman and Max Novendstern, Day One would become a Series A investor in 2021, alongside Andreessen Horowitz and CoinFund.

Worldcoin was valued at $3 billion in 2022, and this year the token has been climbing rapidly. Day One’s portfolio companies have also included Truebill, Remote, and Superhuman.

In a tough year for fundraising and a complex one for solo GPs, Day One has beaten the odds: The VC firm Bucher launched six years ago has closed its third fund at $150 million, Fortune can exclusively report. That far surpasses the firm’s original $100 million target, and I can only find one fund raised by a female solo GP this year that’s bigger (Basis Set raised $185 million).

Bucher’s background is unconventional for tech. Before she came to Silicon Valley, Bucher defected from Putin’s Russia, giving up her passport and ultimately severing as many ties with the country as she could. As a teenager, she was a public-facing member of the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi, and her seismic ideological transformation is the subject of the 2012 documentary Putin’s Kiss. Bucher’s willing to talk about that time: She is “categorically” against Putin and the war in Ukraine, and hasn't returned to the country for years. But Bucher's also careful—her family still lives in Russia.

When she made her way to the U.S., she founded a PR studio and began angel investing to build a track record. But raising that first fund was hard and she had to put her own skin in the game.

“My PR studio was making eight-figure revenues and was very profitable,” Bucher told Term Sheet. “I think I put up at least $2 million just to keep up the fund."

But once that first fund was raised and deployed, it returned in just three years. The rapid return owed to Bucher’s early investment in Truebill, then valued at $15 million. A few years later, Truebill was acquired by Rocket for almost $1.3 billion.

Today, Day One’s portfolio companies are valued at more than $115 billion, and the firm has $450 million in assets under management. For Day One’s second fund, the net IRR is 48%, good for six times higher than the 2020 vintage's median net IRR (for funds under $250 million), according to PitchBook.

From the founders’ side, Day One’s impact is especially strong when it comes to PR, said Adam Guild, CEO and cofounder of restaurant software startup Owner. He told Fortune that Bucher was able to take his startup’s nuts and bolts and retain the “simplest elements, giving journalists a lot more confidence and effectiveness in being able to relay the most important parts of our message."

One institutional LP that Fortune spoke to described Day One’s “forward-looking” approach. And as Bucher looks to the future, she’s imagining a more end-to-end relationship between tech and regulators, where policymakers start understanding companies very early on.

“We can connect early-stage tech companies with the right people…to educate them about what these companies are building,” she said. “So, by the time these companies are big, the stakeholders are educated.”

Ultimately, I suspect Bucher has been so successful because she actively recognizes the value of communication and is incredibly proactive in bridging communication gaps. It’s something that’s evident in the “future of human” thesis under which Bucher’s deploying fund three—a process that's already started with companies like cloud seeding startup Rainmaker and aerospace company Astroforge.

"I think the gap between society and the tech community keeps increasing, and I think that's actually the biggest barrier for tech founders as they're realizing their vision," she said.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com