The man with the regulated appetite.
Andre Bliznyuk sits on the side of the venture table that most investors avoid. Fintech, where every transaction has a regulator. Edtech, where every customer answers to a school board. Digital health, where every product passes through HIPAA before it ever reaches a user. The categories nobody pitches at a Tuesday demo day. The categories he writes checks into.
As a General Partner at Runa Capital, he leads the firm's North American practice. He arrived at Runa in 2011 and never left, which is itself unusual in a profession where partners shuffle decks every other cycle. Brainly, Mambu, Lendio, Smava, Zopa - his deal sheet reads like a syllabus for anyone trying to build software inside compliance walls.
Before any of that, he was on the sell side. Ten years moving billions through public markets. Twenty-plus IPOs and follow-on offerings. The kind of resume that usually leads to a managing director chair in London, not a venture seat aimed at first-money-in. He took the seat anyway.
The strange specific that tells you something about him: his graduate degree is in Cross-Cultural Communications. Not finance. Not computer science. Linguistics, in effect. When a partner spends years brokering Russian companies onto the London Stock Exchange and then American startups into a Luxembourg fund's portfolio, that degree starts looking less academic and more operational.