About us
Most of the team first met back in 2006. It didn’t take long for them to realize they had, at least what they believed, just the right amount of things they agreed on and, more importantly, the perfect amount of ‘agrees to disagrees’. The idea of working together again was always hovering in their minds and was finally realized in 2017 as all of the team members have now built their respective careers. Working with people with integrity and the people you love spending time with was and is the cornerstone of the company to this very day. And it just feels right. When bringing in new clients, investing in or restructuring a company the goal is to seek for quality individuals with the right skillsets.
Our own approach is to be transparent, to keep things simple and fast while offering or sharing our real-world and financial experience with all of the parties involved.
Always having our own skin in the game is an icebreaker that enables us to build relationships more quickly and move faster towards the mutual goal and, hopefully, in the end, share success and memories. This approach has been kind to us and works well as dealing with problems is faster, more efficient and frankly, easier.
Our inner trader feels the right approach to the SEE region is to be asset class/stage agnostic. As we take our role as stewards of our investors’ capital, we approach each investment with true passion while asking for integrity and accountability from the other side.
Experience thought us these points are important in order to grow long-term. Be it public markets, private equity or VC investments, the goal is to find the like-minded leaders/founders to invest in or actively seek for change in leadership when due. Besides, it easier to make friends if we feel comfortable with each other.
Our Values
We invest our own funds into each Fund we manage or each investment we like together with our investors. This way we make sure that our motives are precisely aligned with all of the parties involved.
Times and circumstances change but we strongly believe the principles should remain the same.
Our interests are vastly different while our unalike backgrounds and knowledge additionally enrich us as a team. These are the very things that brought us together in the first place.
You may fool someone once, perhaps twice yet this wouldn’t make much sense if we are all here for the long ride. We won’t paint a rosy background if the skies are grey.
Humbled by the markets many times, we strive to keep both feet on the ground while always trying to learn and improve as much as possible.
Short-term volatility can be a friend or a foe while short-term results can often be deceiving. In the long run, sound investments produce the desired success.
Key people behind our success
Our philosophy of backing excellent teams is something we take to heart and implement internally.
Throughout his career Dominik managed at least 6 investment management companies as it is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep track of his endeavors. By the age of 26 he became the member of the management board of an investment management division of the second largest bank in Croatia, to our knowledge the record yet to be broken.
Since, he was in charge of pension funds, equity funds, bond funds, alternative investments funds, real estate funds, you name it. He has also built 3 investment management companies from scratch so it comes to no surprise that Dominik takes on each challenge with reassuring calmness. It is quite difficult to catch this guy by surprise yet it may surprise you that aside accomplishing all of the above, Dominik was able to raise 4 children along the way. Quite a feat.
Jasmina jumped right in at age 19. She was given the chance by the former employer as she has been hustling since early age, something they were able to recognize.
The decision has proven itself accurate and today we are thankful for their wisdom. Jasmina climbed through the ranks with stellar speed because of her meticulousness and her ability to learn quickly. Since, she made her way through all of the positions you can think of in an investment management company and was at the helm of the back-office department and the compliance department in multiple management companies.
In 2018, she became the member of the management board of SQ Capital and it’s anyone’s guess who she’ll outgrow next. Pure will. No wonder her hobbies are relentless hiking and cycling.
Janko’s career is a bit different. Before getting his degree in the field of dental medicine, Janko was trading on his own since finishing high school. He developed a strong interest for activist investing and every so often was not taken seriously because of his age back then. He attended a firm’s general assembly sometimes instead of a lecture in Anatomy but was able to pursue both passions. He worked as a doctor for 5 years while parallelly getting his formal education in finance and economics before meeting and joining the team.
Today, Janko manages hedge funds and is always on the lookout for turnaround opportunities which he simply can’t resist. As he was an underdog in the industry himself, he also loves finding and helping the underdogs of the startup world which are, to be fair, all underdogs in the beginnings. Let’s get it on.
Ivan first started as a portfolio manager, hired by Dominik. It was clear from the get-go that Ivan, while doing research, was often surprised by the inefficiencies he was able to pinpoint in the financial management sectors of most of the companies he looked at so, obviously, he decided to try it for himself. He then joined JGL as a financial director where he was able to sharpen his skills and later he became the CFO of Apios. A rapidly scaling, capital intensive business needed someone to help navigate and Ivan was the perfect fit.
Today, Ivan enjoys working with startups because he loves nothing more than solving liquidity problems which are always near the top of the urgency list for financially inexperienced founders. Naturally, he manages a financial advisory company as well. The latter, unlike helping startups, he charges. He is a financial expert after all.
Tomislav started as an FX dealer and was so good at it that Croatia finally decided to enter Eurozone to keep Tomislav from making so much money. All jokes aside, as an experienced FX expert he covered the topic pretty solidly and switched later on to asset management. He was the head of the investment management department in a bank, the role he took over after Dominik established his own management company. A few years down the road, he reunited with Dalibor, Jasmina, Dominik and Ivan to start his own thing where he took on the role of the head of the Supervisory Board to give himself a bit more time and space to tackle the challenges of Eonex. As a director in Eonex, which deals with extreme precision metal products both in industry and medicine, he learned to tackle the everyday struggles of a real sector company and helped it grow by multiple fold. As there is no margin for error while dealing with currencies, especially using leverage, this is something Tomislav feels comfortable with.
What people say about us
Beyond access to capital, Janko and the team are true partners before anything else – providing guidance and support across key domains, and significant network value throughout our journey.
Sasa Janicijevic
founder & CEO of Codemap
%20(1).jpg)
Matija Nakic
Founder & CEO of Farseer
Ivan Klaric
Founder & CEO of Sportening
Founder & CEO of Codemap
Marko Kovac
Co-founder of Repsly
Ready to Explore Working with SQ Capital?
Our philosophy of backing excellent teams is something we take to heart and implement internally
