CO-FOUNDER & GENERAL partner

Serguei Kouzmine

Serguei is a serial entrepreneur, operator, and venture capitalist who has founded over 10 companies, including numerous successful financial services ventures. He has held board director positions for 4 of Fintech Ventures Fund’s portfolio companies and has also served on the board of directors for multiple other publicly traded companies in the US and Canada.

Most notably in the Fintech space, Serguei was a part of the founding team of a leading core banking operating system in Europe. He also co-founded one of Europe's largest payments and remittance platforms (with over $14 billion in annual transaction volume. spanning over 30 different European countries). As CEO of another consumer-focused company Serguei joined, he grew revenues from $5 million to $1.3 billion in 4 years.

Serguei is one of the founding investors and former board members of Affinity Bank, a community bank in Georgia with $250 million in assets. Serguei was an integral part of securing Affinity’s FDIC/state banking charters before Affinity successfully sold to Newton Federal Bank (NASDAQ: AFBI) in 2020. The transaction created a top-10 bank (by deposits) in the state of Georgia.

Serguei’s ability to identify successful business models extends beyond Fintech. In 2012, he raised $100 million to establish the first venture capital fund focused exclusively on emerging quantum computing technologies.

Serguei is also currently a majority shareholder in an animation studio that has produced content with over 5 billion views / 1 trillion minutes of view time on Youtube (making the platform a top-10 most viewed channel on the platform) and syndication deals with NBC, Netflix, and Turner Broadcasting.

Serguei received an MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, and also holds a Ph.D. in physics. He is based in Atlanta.

CO-FOUNDER & GENERAL Partner

Lucas Timberlake

Luke has over 12 years of financial services experience in various capacities, including venture capital, private equity, and investment banking. He first met Serguei in 2015, and they both quickly realized that they had a similar thesis on the future of financial services, in addition to mutual personal interests. Luke has held board director positions for 8 Fintech Ventures Fund portfolio companies, including currently serving on the board of publicly-traded IOU Financial (sold to Neuberger Berman in 2023). He is also a guest lecturer on venture capital at the Fordham University School of Law.

Before launching Fintech Ventures, Luke was one of the first external hires to the investment team with Antarctica Capital, a $1.5 billion AUM private equity firm specializing in infrastructure, financial services, and real estate investments. Publicly listed LPs on transactions sponsored by Antarctica include Highbridge (a subsidiary of JP Morgan), Munich RE, TIAA-CREF, and China Life. His tenure included executing 5 successful operating company acquisitions, which resulted in the formation of the largest parking management company in the United States. Assets from these companies were eventually sold to REEF, a cloud-kitchen startup that has raised over $1.5 billion in equity from Softbank and other leading venture/growth investors.

Luke began his career in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch during the aftermath of the merger of the two firms, where he was an integral part of over $2 billion in advisory and capital markets transactions for public sector/private clients in the Northeast. He holds a BA in economics and political science from Columbia College of Columbia University and splits his time between New York City and Atlanta.