BubbleGab, a Russian startup developing a SaaS platform for building websites, has attracted $1 million in funding from RVC’s Seed Fund and Softline Venture Partners, the venture arm of the Softline Group.
Founded in 2011, BubbleGab is working on a platform to allow users to create personal websites and social networks based on the information from their blogs and profiles in social networks.
The company will spend the funds it has received on tweaking the main elements of the platform, releasing an API, and introducing a way to have the project’s functionality added as a built-in feature for existing websites. International expansion is also being considered.
The platform itself will be released in the first quarter of 2014, BubbleGab co-founder Roman Murazanov stated in a press release. The company expects to become profitable in 2015, while in 2016 RVC and Softline may recoup their investment.
The current financing round is the second one for BubbleGab – the company had received an undisclosed amount in seed funding in April of this year.
Softline Venture Partners – which is owned by Softline Group, a leader in the Russian software licensing market – already has experience in funding SaaS projects. In June 2013, the fund invested in an SMB startup ITMan. Softline VP is generally focusing on four segments: enterprise software for SMBs, mobile apps, e-commerce, and cloud services.
The Seed Fund of RVC, Russia’s state-owned fund of funds, has so far been investing mostly in multimedia-related startups; over the last few months it has poured $1.5 million into music analysis engine FindStream and teamed up with Sotal-Interactive for a $1 million investment in video solution developer Sotal-Cloud.
