Refine.io, a startup offering to “create and share fully functional prototypes of mobile apps in about the same time as it takes to develop a wireframe,” received seed funding from Russia’s search engine giant Yandex under the Yandex.Factory program.
The startup’s service allows iOS application developers, product and project managers to create and test HTML prototypes easily. Refine.io – still in its beta version – has been developed by Ukrainian teams, but the startup has its head office in California.
The Yandex.Factory investment program was launched last April to help finance Russian and foreign startups with seed money or earlier stage financing of up to $150,000. The first Yandex.Factory investments were in Social Market, a Moscow-based startup developing social commerce applications, and ZenMoney, a personal accounting and budget planning service from St Petersburg.
Before Refine.io, Yandex had announced investments in only two foreign startups: Face.com, a Tel-Aviv based facial recognition technology startup, and Vizi Labs, another Israeli startup focused on research and development of image processing technologies. Both investment deals took place in September, 2010. The Russian firm acquired a minority stake.
Source: Yandex
