This past Friday Buran Venture Capital announced that it has invested $3.5 million in ivi.ru, a major online video streaming platform operating in Russia and neighboring Russian-speaking countries. The details of the transaction have not been disclosed.
The capital injection will allow ivi.ru to “further development its video platform and strengthen its position on the mobile and SmartTV markets,” Buran Investment Associate Dmitry Smirnov told East-West Digital News.
ivi.ru now offers more than 65,000 content items, including movies, TV shows, cartoons and music videos, claiming to be the largest online library of licensed content in Russia. The platform attracts some 20 million monthly users generating 150 million views.
While claiming that its subscription revenues increased fourfold in one year, the company does not disclose its financial indicators. Smirnov declined to specify whether or not ivi.ru is profitable.
In 2012, two years after its creation by Oleg Tumanov, the platform raised $40 million from Baring Vostok Capital Partners and its initial investors. These include Leonid Boguslavsky’s fund ru-Net, US fund Tiger Group, Russian media holding ProfMedia and Russian fund Frontier Ventures.
Buran Venture Capital typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million (including follow-ons) in companies “with proven business model” in the fields of e-commerce, online media, mobile Internet, SaaS and Internet of things (IoT). With offices in Moscow, Budapest, Tel-Aviv and Istanbul, the fund targets Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union as well as Israel and Turkey.
