Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner

Slava Solonitsyn is a tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and ESG expert with more than 17 years of experience in designing and developing new products, mentorship, investing, and community building in Europe, the US, and Asia.

He has extensive expertise in launching and scaling up startups. His main areas of focus include hard tech, IoT, construction, and sustainable tech. Slava is passionate about tech startups with a long-lasting impact. He is currently pursuing his own impact goal by advancing the construction industry through automation and 3D printing but is also helping select founders, who have their own high-impact missions as an angel investor and advisor. He is intimately familiar with American and Singaporean markets but is currently exploring the potential of high-growth developing markets such as SEA, LATAM, and MENA, as they will be the key drivers for the future of humanity (from the standpoint of population and impact). Being a resident of Mexico, UAE, and Singapore, he is deeply plugged into local startup ecosystems.

Slava is a notable global expert who is frequently invited to present and speak at the most prominent startup and global business events, such as Collision, F.ounders, Web Summit, and the World Economic Forum. His unique experience in scaling complex startups, and solving ESG problems, as well as his VC background, make him a highly sought-after angel investor.

Slava is CEO and Co-founder of Mighty Buildings, a top YCombinator tech company that is revolutionizing the construction industry by creating beautiful, sustainable, high-quality homes by using advanced materials, and patented 3D-printing technology, and robotic automation. Mighty Buildings is headquartered in Oakland, California. The company was founded in 2017 by Slava and his business partner Dmitry Starodubtcev, and later joined by seasoned executives Russ Atassi, Rene Griemens and Chris Murphy.

Under Slava’s leadership, Mighty Buildings has raised over $100 million and established the company as a leader in sustainable 3D-printed housing. It counts among its investors' noteworthy names as Khosla Ventures, Bold Capital, Core VC, YCombinator, ArcTern Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, and others. Mighty Buildings is also included in the top YC companies (5% of YC companies).

As Solonitsyn describes Mighty Buildings: “We are working hard to find a solution for humanity to solve the double-edged climate and housing crisis. Once we identify a path, we will be able to open our platform to real estate developers to unlock the production of sustainable homes at scale”.

Being a top YC founder and having finished the main, Series A and growth programs, Slava is intimately familiar with the YCombinator ecosystem. He is an active angel investor in YCombinator startups including companies like FlutterFlow, ComposeAI, Tantl, PlusIdentity, HypperContext, Ivella, and some others. He is also an investor in the companies founded by Russian-speaking entrepreneurs like Foodrocket and ElectroNeek. More recently, he decided to focus his angel strategy on the international founders who launch their startups in SEA, LATAM, and MENA as these markets represent the highest growth potential of the model class population which is the main demand driver for startups. He already made a few investments in this model.


Another of Slava’s great achievements is co-founding Ruvento Ventures, a startup incubator and a seed capital firm in Singapore in 2012. Slava started with the incubation of 12 IoT startups, some of which raised follow-on funding and two of which were later acquired.

Between 2012 and 2017, while he served as Managing Partner, Slava raised a private fund and made 17 seed-stage investments, two of which grew into unicorn companies and two more of which crossed $500M in valuation. As a result, the fund he managed brought outsized returns to investors (MOIC 3.7x). Among the startups where he invested, there are two unicorn companies working towards high-impact goals: Boom Supersonic (making supersonic flights accessible in a sustainable way) and Solugen (bringing clean, sustainable chemistry to every industry).

These days, Slava continues to serve on the Board of Ruvento Ventures as a venture partner and is helping the firm to pursue an ESG agenda in developing markets, such as Southeast Asia.


Slava graduated from Nizhniy Novgorod State Technical University named after R.Y. Alekseev (NSTU) in 2004 with an MSc in Physics. In 2007, he earned an MBA from Imperial College London, where he studied Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. As a student, he launched several university initiatives and participated in various clubs. Upon earning his MBA, Slava focused on the commercialization of technology, working closely with Imperial College scientists on commercialization feasibility studies.

Slava is wholly committed to the mission of saving the planet, and this extends beyond his work. Moreover, he actively promotes this mission by launching eco-friendly initiatives, such as beach cleanups. Via his Twitter account, Slava frequently shares useful articles, research, and personal insights on sustainable business, climate crisis response, and impact in proptech.

Slava is an avid kitesurfer, paraglider, surfer, and snowboarder. He learned to speak Mandarin in Singapore and China, after which he chose “斯雷” (SiLei) as his nickname. He loves using this nickname in his interactions with people from all over the world.