AlterGeo, a Russian startup inspired by the Foursquare concept, announced yesterday it has opened a representative office in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where it already counts 60,000 registered users. The Moscow based company has also opened an office in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city, as well.
The Kiev office is the company’s first presence outside Russia, Altergeo VP of Sales & Business Development Evgeni Agronik told East-West Digital News, declining to comment, however, on further plans for international expansion.
Founded in 2008, Altergeo now claims 800,000 registered users – up from 700,000 in June – from Russian and Ukrainian cities. Only a fraction, however, are considered active users.
The location based social networking service is integrated with leading Russian social networks Vkontake.ru and Odnoklassniki as well as with popular blogging platform Livejournal.
In April 2011, AlterGeo launched a mobile advertising campaign in association with Svyaznoy, a major Russian mobile retailer. The ads aimed to promote Samsung’s new Galaxy Gio handset to AlterGeo users approaching some of Svyaznoy’s physical retail outlets.
More recently, mobile marketing campaigns were organized with Moscow café chains Coffee House and Coffeebean.
In June of this year, Altergeo closed its third round of financing with Intel Capital, Almaz Capital, a prominent Russian venture fund, and US venture investor Esther Dyson. The company was then estimated to be valued at $20 to $25 million. The startup was financed at seed stage in 2008 by AddVenture, a dynamic Moscow fund, and shortly thereafter received $1 million from Kite Ventures, another Russian fund, in 2009.
Another local competitor of Foursquare – which launched its Russian version only in September of this year – is Ogorod.ru, a service operating in Moscow and St. Petersburg in partnership with Afisha, the leading Russian city entertainment magazine. In September, Ogorod.ru attracted $1 million from Russian media holding RBC.
