Primary Job Title Founder | Executive Managing Director Primary Organization 
ReTool Ventures
Location London, England, United Kingdom Regions Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Gender Male
LinkedIn View on LinkedIn
Serge is a geek who enjoys finding pragmatic solutions to difficult problems. Along the way, he managed to become a successful entrepreneur with a track record of starting, growing and selling technology companies.
Serge grew up in a family of scientists and artists. Not smart enough to become a scientist and not creative enough to be an artist,
Serge chose to pursue a computer engineering degree in his hometown of Minsk strictly to avoid being drafted into the Russian Army during the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan.
Serge’s first successful exit, from a failing 70-year old startup called the USSR, occurred in 1988. Fresh off the boat, Serge joined a computer company in Queens, NY, developing software for service contractors. Architecting and supporting a system that businesses relied on allowed Serge to learn the intricacies of the commercial repair and maintenance trades and ways to apply technology to solve real-life challenges for business owners and their field technicians. In the process, Serge and the company's founder, Steven Gottfried, became friends and business partners and started to formulate plans for their next business venture.
In 1999, Steven and Serge founded a cloud-based facilities management platform, ServiceChannel, with the goal of transforming the highly inefficient multi-billion dollar commercial repair and maintenance industry. As with their previous company, which was successfully sold, Steven was the idea generator and a master salesman, while Serge worked behind the scenes as CTO to help ServiceChannel achieve a dominant position in the global facilities management marketplace. In 2016, Serge moved to London to accelerate ServiceChannel’s expansion in Europe. In the summer of 2017, Accel, an elite technology VC firm, invested $54M in ServiceChannel continuing to fuel its growth and allowing Steven and Serge to realize a highly successful exit.
Now Steven and Serge run ReTool Ventures, a technology investment firm.
