Sasha
Novakovich

When the Angel Investor Becomes the Founder

Sasha Novakovich arrived in the United States at age five, speaking no English, moving from Russia to Los Angeles with her family. Whatever frictions that kind of beginning creates, she ran straight through them. By the time she enrolled at UC Berkeley to study Political Economy, she had already developed the habit of seeing systems that needed fixing - and fixing them.

She graduated, spent three years at Accenture and Andersen Consulting as a business analyst, then did what most people only dream of: she quit and built something. In 1999, she founded GetConnected, Inc., a vertical SaaS business serving the telecom industry that also processed voice, data, and video services transactions for retailers. She ran it for over a decade. In 2010, CNET acquired it. That's a clean, successful chapter.

Most people stop there. Sasha Novakovich did not stop there. She went to Harvard Business School - where she also spent a year as Entrepreneur-in-Residence - and then shifted into angel investing, writing checks into early-stage startups with a particular eye for female-founded companies. She backed Attivio, Happiest Baby, Joyable, and Volition, among others.

The idea for Alchemy Cloud surfaced through her angel portfolio. She had invested in a project management business serving the specialty chemicals industry - and what she saw inside those labs stopped her cold. Highly educated chemists and materials scientists, people with advanced degrees doing rigorous experimental work, were stuck doing it with the digital equivalent of pen and paper. Spreadsheets. Paper notebooks. Manual data entry. Error-prone, slow, and completely disconnected from any intelligence layer.

She saw not just a project management gap but a platform-shaped gap. What these labs needed was not another task tracker - they needed an end-to-end product development platform: one that could capture experiment data in real time, connect it across projects, apply AI to find patterns humans miss, and accelerate the cycle from formulation idea to finished product. In 2017, she bought tizecloud.com, brought together a founding team, and started building.

What Alchemy Actually Does

The Platform That Runs the Lab

Alchemy Cloud's Applied Sciences Platform is the connective tissue of the modern lab. It combines a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN), Design of Experiments (DOE) tools, and an AI layer that sits on top of all the data those systems generate. The pitch is simple: if you can see all your lab work in one place, you can start automating, and then you can start optimizing.

As Sasha put it in a Bowery Capital interview: "One plus one is three - if you can see across all of your actual lab work, then suddenly you can start automating and digitizing." That is not a slogan. It is a description of what happens when connected data meets AI-powered inference. Formulation suggestions. Experiment scoring. Predictive analytics on which compounds are likely to perform. The platform turns historical lab data into a strategic asset rather than an archival burden.

The company holds AICPA SOC 2 certification and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification - the kind of credentials that matter when you are asking enterprise customers in regulated industries to trust you with their most sensitive R&D data. In 2025, Alchemy also earned an EcoVadis sustainability medal, placing in the top 35% of assessed companies.

Chemistry Is Everywhere - So Is Alchemy

The specialty chemicals market is not a niche. It is the foundation layer of consumer goods, construction, energy, and food. The companies Alchemy serves make the formulas inside your shampoo bottle, your sunscreen, the coating on your kitchen cabinet, the plastic packaging around your lunch, and the industrial adhesives holding a building together.

Time, the Only Constraint That Actually Matters

Sasha has a direct way of describing what is at stake in the labs Alchemy serves: "Time is a huge factor in whether a project gets off the ground and if you can sell something or not." In specialty chemicals, speed to formulation is a competitive weapon. A company that can iterate ten times faster than a competitor can test ten times more ideas, fail faster on bad ones, and get to market with something better.

That framing - time as a strategic resource, not just an operational concern - is what distinguishes Alchemy from generic lab software. Alchemy is not selling efficiency. It is selling the ability to develop better products faster, which translates directly into more revenue for its customers. That is an enterprise SaaS pitch that lands.

Alchemy has built its platform with an eye toward the circular economy, too. At the 2024 Rethinking Materials conference, Sasha joined a panel on AI's role in sustainable product development, arguing that ML-assisted design and AI-based traceability tools can optimize circular infrastructure and support sustainable packaging value chains. The company's $14M in annual revenue and 53-person team suggest the market agrees with the thesis.

Choose Large, Stay Flexible, Build the Team First

When asked for advice in the Bowery Capital interview, Novakovich gave three principles: select a large, underserved industry space; remain flexible in execution while holding your vision; and partner with complementary team members. These are not generic startup platitudes when you look at her history. She has practiced each one.

Specialty chemicals is a multi-trillion dollar global industry where software penetration has historically been low. That is a large, underserved space. Her co-founders - CTO Nikola Milinkovic, CTO Dusko Vesin, and the broader leadership team - bring deep technical expertise that complements her commercial and strategic background. And her pivot from a project management tool to a full product development platform is a case study in vision-holding flexibility: the goal never changed, but the shape of the product evolved as customers revealed what they actually needed.

She has also been explicit about a cause that runs alongside her commercial ambitions. On Medium, she describes herself as a "strong supporter of female founders and women in tech" - and her angel portfolio reflects that. She wrote about gender equity in startup ecosystems for the Serbian Entrepreneurs publication in 2017, arguing for actionable steps, not just conversations.