Our story
Built by Immigrants,
Investing in Immigrants
Ihar Mahaniok, an immigrant engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building code and machine learning models for startups and conglomerates, founded Geek Ventures in 2021 after seeing the difficulties immigrant entrepreneurs faced when trying to raise capital and make connections within the U.S. venture-capital ecosystem. Prior to Geek Ventures, Mahaniok invested in notable unicorns as an angel investor including Instacart, PandaDoc, People.ai, Airbyte, and Jeeves at the pre-seed and seed stages, and in hundreds of other successful companies.
Today, the Geek Ventures team includes Maks Strukov, Alexander Zemlyak, Masha Vasylyeva, and Sarah Romanko.
Maks Strukov joined in 2022 as an Analyst and soon grew into an Associate, adding analytical and financial expertise, empowering Geek Ventures to go broader and deeper.
Alexander Zemlyak joined in 2023 as a Principal. He brings a decade of experience in venture capital and an impressive track record, contributing significantly to identifying and investing in the most innovative and impactful ideas and founders.
Masha Vasylyeva joined in 2023 as an Executive Assistant. She contributes operational expertise to Geek Ventures to ensure the smooth and effective functioning of all internal processes.
Sarah Romanko joined in 2024 as an Associate. She brings her experience building relationships with VCs, founders, and community builders, sourcing and evaluating startups, and performing due diligence, as well as significant connections in the Austin ecosystem.
Geek Ventures is committed to investing in bold, innovative, and brilliant immigrant entrepreneurs, coming to the US from all over the world. We believe that the challenges immigrants face when coming to a completely new environment nurture resilience and determination. We aspire to become guiding lights for such founders in order to accelerate their integration into the new tech ecosystem.
How we make decisions
We enjoy investing in exceptional founders that geek out in their category. We are looking for large and fast-growing TAM ($10B+). We come in early - pre/seed and seed (from idea stage to $1.5M ARR). Bold ideas preferred. High scalability is a must.
We are sector-agnostic. Though immigrant founders are our priority, we consider underappreciated US-born founders as well.
- Application: Startup submits an application.
- Review (0-2 weeks): Evaluation of potential fit.
- First call: We schedule the first call to get to know each other.
- Due diligence (1-3 weeks): In-depth analysis of the startup's team, market, competition, financials, unit economics, achievements.
- Investment committee (1 week): Discussion of the opportunity in front of the investment committee.
We help our immigrant founders become experts in fundraising in the US. We connect the founders with the most relevant investors and educate them on how to pitch and negotiate. Often our $100k check is followed by $1M+ of investments through our introductions.
We are on the founders’ side when they negotiate term sheets for later rounds with lead investors; bringing lots of experience and battle scars to help the founders know how to get the best possible deal.
We run multiple communities; starting with our most close-knit community of Geek Ventures portfolio founders, and all the way to our extended community for which we host regular founder-investor events in NYC, SF, and Lisbon.
We work with many partner organizations that provide discounts and preferential services to our portfolio companies.
Our unique LP base is a great resource for our founders.
“We only believe in win-win investments, where we can join amazing founders on their journey and help accelerate it”