Startups Category: Startups

Qualcomm

Qualcomm could invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Russian tech companies

By East-West Digital News / May 15, 2012 / 1 Comment

Qualcomm, a leading US-based international provider of wireless technology and services – with a particular emphasis on chipsets for smartphones – is ready to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Russian tech companies, Senior VP Anastassia Lauterbach told the Russian business daily Kommersant.

According to its strategic plan adopted in late 2011, Qualcomm will pursue four goals in Russia, said Lauterbach: help operators develop their networks; develop an ecosystem of Internet services; make the smartphone more accessible to the population; and invest in technology and science.

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Flirtic

Dating site Flirtic.com launches in Russia

By East-West Digital News / May 15, 2012

Flirtic.com, a dating and matchmaking site that began operating in early 2011, chose Russia as its first step to international expansion beyond its native Estonian market.

A beta version of the service is being launched this week to serve  users in Moscow, but Flirtic.com has plans to cover St Petersburg, Kiev, and other Russian-speaking cities later this year, explained Andres Susi, the site’s Executive Director, in an exchange with East-West Digital News.

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Kommerstate

Fast Lane launches online commercial real estate service

By East-West Digital News / May 14, 2012

Fast Lane Ventures, the Moscow-based serial startup developer, has launched an online service called Kommerstate.ru to help commercial real estate market players lease, purchase and sell properties.

Started last week, the site is the first of its kind in Russia, according to Fast Lane, and is more than a property database: it “converts a user interested in a property into a real business lead.”

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France-Russia

Russian fund to invest €20 million in French startups as Russian-French tech ties grow

By East-West Digital News / May 09, 2012 / 1 Comment

The Russian high tech fund New Generation Investment (NGI) announced last week that it will launch a €20 million division dedicated to French startups, the French business daily Les Echos reported. “We are focusing on telecoms, web technolgies and tech-oriented media,” said NGI shareholder Leonid Reiman.

France will serve as a testing ground for one of NGI’s most ambitious projects –  a VoIP and video conference service that would compete with Skype.

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Pinme.ru

Pinterest.com considers Russian-language version – as local copycat reaches 250,000 members

By Adrien Henni, East-West Digital News / May 07, 2012

Pinterest.com, the much-hyped social network that defines itself as “an online pinboard,” announced last week its first steps in translating its service into other languages, starting with French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Pinterest is also pondering other languages, including Russian – which is mentioned between Malay and Swedish on the site’s second priority list.

Whereas the US startup was starting its crowdsourcing experiment, Pinme.ru, a Russian copycat, has announced impressive results just five months after launch: a monthly audience of 4.5 million unique users and 250,000 registered users.

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Avito.ru

Avito.ru secures $75 million from Accel Partners and Baring Vostok

By East-West Digital News / May 02, 2012

Avito.ru, Russia’s leading classifieds site by brand awareness and number of users, announced today that it has received $75 million in new funding from Baring Vostok Private Equity Fund IV and Accel Partners as well as from existing investors Kinnevik and Northzone.

The valuation has not been disclosed, but Avito’s press service told East-West Digital News that it was “considerably higher” than the $158.73 million figure of last year, which was revealed in the latest annual report of Vostok Nafta, another shareholder of Avito.

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Tricider.ru logotype

German startup falls victim to Russian copycat

By Tony Ellis, Siliconallee.com / Apr 27, 2012 / 1 Comment

The curse of the copycats has risen up once again, this time with a new twist – one of the most blatant clones of a German company from abroad. Berlin-based startup tricider (dot com) has been copied by a Russian firm called, wait for it, tricider (dot ru).

The German tricider is a free web service for brainstorming, decision making and voting online. Founded almost a year ago, it wasn’t until yesterday morning, while browsing the company’s Twitter page, that co-founder Stephan Eyl came across a tweet linking back to Russian website tricider.ru – a domain not registered by or affiliated with the Berlin-based platform.

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Jelastic

Java application cloud-based hosting platform Jelastic completes $2 million round

By East-West Digital News / Apr 27, 2012 / 1 Comment

Earlier this week, the Ukrainian-Russian-American startup Jelastic, which offers a cloud-based hosting platform for Java application developers, announced it has secured an investment of $2 million from Almaz Capital Partners and Foresight Ventures.

This ‘Series A’ funding round brings the startup’s total financing to $2.5 million. In December 2010, Jelastic received seed funding from Runa Capital, a Moscow-based fund that operates internationally. Jelastic recently celebrated reaching the 15,000 unique users milestone only seven months after its beta launch.

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Expanding To Russia With Love by Fabernovel

Report: “Google, the US Yandex”

By FaberNovel, East-West Digital News / Apr 20, 2012 / 2 Comments

In association with East-West Digital News, faberNovel, a French innovation consulting firm with offices in Paris, San Francisco and Moscow, has just released an eye-opening presentation on the Russian Internet and innovation system.

The report features the latest data on the Russian market and its key players, of course, but then goes further, providing useful insights on the country’s innovation model in a historical perspective: from rocket pioneer Tsiolkovsky to cosmonaut Gagarin and on to such notable startups as Displair, Good Roads and ResumUp – which faberNovel sees as having a disruptive value proposition.

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Path

Milner takes part in Path’s $30 million investment round

By East-West Digital News / Apr 18, 2012 / 1 Comment

Yuri Milner, co-founder of the prominent Russian Internet fund DST, is among the investors in Path, the much-hyped ‘mobile-centric social network’ launched in 2010. The investment round, which amounts to at least $30 million, was led by venture firm Redpoint Ventures, CNet reported on Monday, with entrepreneurs Richard Branson, Mark Pincus and Jerry Murdock, as well as investment funds Kleiner Perkins, Allen & Co. and Greylock Partners.

Milner has invested in a number of US startups. Among his recent targets over the past year were iPad medical publisher DrChrono, video chat service Airtime, and Flotype, a startup that offers realtime messaging technologies for cloud and mobile applications.

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East-West Digital News is published with the support of:
  • Higher school of economics
  • The Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge
  • Russian Venture Company
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  • Territory of tomorrow foundation