THE ENTREPRENEURS
PABLO CASILIMAS, 31,
JUSTIS MENDEZ, 31
Co-Founders and Managing Partners
OneSixOne Ventures
When Pablo Casilimas and Justis Mendez met at the University of Florida in 2016, they were 21-year-old students trying to build their own startups. “We couldn’t really find mentors or investors. We didn’t know what we were doing,” says Casilimas. “So we started hosting events to help ourselves get connected and to learn, but then also to help other people who were in a similar position.”
Those initial events were hardly glamorous — think backyard meetups with beer, pizza and folding chairs. But students came, and the meetups grew. A UF mentor became a regular. Then seasoned founders, tech executives and investors began showing up. The gatherings grew into workshops, roundtables and conferences.
“We weren’t trying to make any money off it. It was all a passion project for us,” Casilimas says. When the pandemic hit, idling their offline engine, they launched a startup accelerator over Zoom. The results surprised them: “We helped 40 companies raise over $13 million in two years, and then one of them got acquired.”
That success led them to wonder how they could start to receive equity in these companies. Their initial attempts to seek scout fees for sourcing deals didn’t fly. “We said, well, all right, let’s just raise our own fund,” Casilimas says. The problem? They had no track record, no institutional background and no experience managing capital. Still, the duo (of then 26-year-olds) believed they had something special: deal flow, relationships and relentless hustle.
The firm’s name was inspired by 1.61, known as the golden ratio that naturalists claim is the most efficient ratio for growth to occur.
The process was grueling. They sold their cars, Mendez couch-hopped and Casilimas walked dogs on Rover, but in early 2022 they launched OneSixOne Ventures’ Fund 1, becoming among the youngest Latino general parters in the venture industry.
OneSixOne’s first investment was Miami-based Betr, what they call the “most intuitive sports betting platform for consumers.” Its founder, Joey Levy, was a high school friend of Casilimas who sold his previous startup to DraftKings. Early bets also included Ease-Alert, a startup born at UF to make firefighting safer; and Airia, a New York startup that uses AI-powered spatial analytics to improve energy efficiency, space utilization and safety, starting with university campuses. Airia later secured multimillion-dollar Department of Defense contracts.
Today, OneSixOne manages $5 million across 30 portfolio companies. More recent investments include Bookster AI of Miami, a mobile app with more than 500,000 users in Latin America that provides summaries and key insights from thousands of books and podcasts. OneSixOne also wrote Knowlify’s first check in early 2025. The startup, born at UF and now in San Francisco, uses AI to convert training materials into videos.
Mendez points out that many of OneSixOne’s strongest startups emerged directly from its own programs. At UF, OneSixOne runs the annual Startup Launch Competition for engineering students. “We help them with everything from ideation to ... talking to customers and pitching,” Mendez explains.
Their events have become their core competitive advantage. “At the end of the day, we do one thing exceptionally well, better than most people on Earth — hosting these highly curated events,” Mendez says. In 2025, OneSixOne hosted more than 70 events across 13 cities, including one in London featuring prominent venture capitalist Harry Stebbings. More than 10,000 founders and investors have attended their events.
The approach offers a unique advantage in overlooked markets. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, one of the country’s top engineering schools but geographically isolated, OneSixOne hosted an event for 80 student founders, met a startup called Tandemn, and wrote the first check before the team’s $1.7-million funding round opened. “We got in at a fraction of that,” Casilimas says, referring to the valuation.
After their investments, they continue to create value so their portfolio companies can grow faster. For instance, Casilimas spent three days at a conference with two portfolio companies, pulling executives from AMD, IBM and Salesforce over to meet the teams, and spun up a pop-up event for the companies.
Looking ahead, OneSixOne is preparing to roll out Fund II this year, and plans to grow its team, expand its data-driven event engine and help founders in even more markets. While OneSixOne typically invested $50,000 to $100,000 in companies through Fund I, the co-founders say the check sizes in Fund II will be bigger.
Florida — with its world-class universities, big customer bases across many industries, a welcoming startup culture and global momentum led by Miami — will always be home for OneSixOne, its co-founders say. They believe the missing ingredient is simply more entrepreneurs choosing to stay, to build, to mentor, to invest — and they believe they can help change that.