The special Startups of The Year 2024 Winners Interview series is a celebration of all this year’s Tech Champions. You’ve earned it! The HackerNoon community can’t wait to learn more about your journey!
Tell us about you.
I’m Yotis Tonnelier, founder and managing partner at YOBE Ventures. We’re an international venture capital firm focused on tech backing SaaS, fintech, AI, Proptech, etc… and deep tech startups across the U.S., Europe, and LATAM. Our mission is simple: we invest in founders who’ve hit product-market fit and are ready to scale globally — supporting them not just with capital, but with a decade of hard-earned global investor, founder, and operator experience.
Tell us how your startup is changing the world.
YOBE Ventures isn’t just deploying capital; we’re building a relational ecosystem. We help founders accelerate traction, open capital pathways, and craft early liquidity strategies. Our ultimate goal is to be the VC partner who founders and LPs trust when everything is on the line — not just when things are smooth.
What sets you apart from the competition?
Three things:
(1)Our founder-operator roots— we’ve been in their shoes.
(2)Our global LP network— we bring capital plus deep relationship leverage.
(3)Our no-BS, strategic engagement — we invest with conviction, stay hands-on, and don’t play spray-and-pray.
What does it mean for you to win this title?
We’re incredibly honored! Winning Startup of The Year 2024 in Venture Capitalis a public acknowledgment of the years we spent quietly building trust, delivering returns, and aligning deeply with founders. It’s energizing — and a signal to keep pushing even further.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to set out for this mission?
At YOBE Ventures, we love that every team member is a builder and operator at heart. We’re not here just to write checks — we roll up sleeves, challenge assumptions, and embed with our founders. Innovation comes from trust, and we foster that by treating every founder as a long-term partner, not just a transaction.
Looking back, what milestone was the biggest turning point for your startup?
The biggest shift was reaching clear product-market fit— that is, knowing exactly which founders we serve best. Once we narrowed focus to repeat founders with strong early traction, everything aligned: our portfolio performance, our capital partnerships, and our ability to deliver value beyond money.
What’s one valuable lesson you learned this year that you’d pass on to other startups?
2024 taught us the importance of early liquidity strategies. In a world of delayed exits and unpredictable public markets, helping founders secure partial liquidity earlier creates win-wins for founders, teams, and LPs. For 2025, we’re doubling down on creative liquidity plays.
How do you envision your industry evolving in the coming years, and how will your startup stay ahead?
VC is evolving into a capital + strategy + liquidity game. It’s no longer enough to just write checks — firms need to offer global reach, layered capital stacks, and real operational edge. YOBE Ventures stays ahead by relentlessly adapting our approach to match where the founders (and markets) are going.
How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2025?
We’ll use this recognition to amplify the visibility of our portfolio founders, help bring capital and network advantages to overlooked regions, and continue setting a standard for what founder-aligned venture capital should look like.
What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2025?
- Closing our $100M Fund II
- Deepening relationships with top-tier institutional and family office LPs
- Backing 10+ high-conviction companies across our core geographies
- Driving early liquidity wins for our founders and investors
2024 has been crazy, with all the new techs, and all the geopolitics fluctuations. What are the impacts of these to your startup, and to your industry as a whole? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.
We leaned hard into flexibility and diversification— across sectors, capital partners, and even liquidity paths. Geopolitical shocks, AI acceleration, and market swings hit everyone, but the firms that stayed nimble are the ones thriving today.
We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?
HackerNoon stands out as a bold, authentic tech publication that champions not just the big names but the underdogs and rising players. We’ve loved engaging with the platform and look forward to deepening that relationship.
Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?
Stay humble. Stay resilient.
And always remember: In venture, it’s therelationships you build that compound more powerfully than any check size.
About HackerNoon’s Startups of The Year
Startups of The Year 2024 is HackerNoon’s flagship community-driven event celebrating startups, technology, and the spirit of innovation. Currently in its third iteration, the prestigious Internet award recognizes and celebrates tech startups of all shapes and sizes. This year, over 150,000 entities across 4200+ cities, 6 continents, and 100+ industries will participate in a bid to be crowned the best startup of the year! Millions of votes have been cast over the past few years, and many stories have been written about these daring and rising startups.
The winners will get a free interview on HackerNoon and an Evergreen Tech Company Newspage.
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