Messaging service Parler, popular among the far right and ex-US President Donald Trump’s more radical supporters, was removed by the Apple store and blocked by Amazon earlier this month. But it bounced back this week with a Russian accent. Parler’s return is at least partially due to the work of Russian IT firm DDoS-Guard, whose …
How a Russian IT company saved US far-right app Parler Read More
Just days after Alexey Navalny’s arrest in the Moscow airport and the publication of his killer video on “Putin’s palace,” a digital rebellion is underway in Russia, involving millions of teenagers and elder users of social media. As of Jan. 21, the investigative video on the luxury mansion had broken all records, garnering more than 50 million …
TraceAir, a construction software startup with Russian roots, announces the completion of its Series A $3.5 million round. It was led by London-based XTX Ventures with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, GEM Capital, GPS Ventures, Andrew Filev (CEO Wrike), Metropolis.VC (which invested in a previous round) as well as US construction industry majors Independent Construction and ENGEO. TraceAir has developed a cloud platform to help construction companies …
Last month, according to media reports, Russian DNA testing company Genotek raised $4 million in a funding round led by Yandex. No information was disclosed about the other investors or the terms of the deal, and Genotek did not answer EWDN’s media inquiries. The company, founded in 2010, says it partners with “leadings Russian and European research institutes in the field of genetics and …
Sber, Russia’s state-controlled financial and tech giant (previously known as Sberbank), is considering the acquisition of Citilink.ru alongside some other assets of the Merlion group. The discussions were reported by business daily Kommersant but not confirmed by the parties. Selling electronic appliances and a variety of other products, Citilink is among the top Russian e-commerce sites. It was number two …
Sber said to be in talks with Merlion on major e-commerce acquisition Read More
Wildberries, the number one Russian e-commerce company, announced yesterday its launch in Germany in the latest stage of its international expansion. Through a localized interface, German online shoppers can access more than four million products — from fashion items, to electronic and household appliances, to books, to sports items, to cosmetics and more. The Russian company …
Russian e-commerce leader Wildberries launches in Germany Read More
Telegram now serves more than 500 million active users, its Russian co-founder Pavel Durov announced Tuesday. Twenty-five million new users joined the platform in the previous 72 hours alone. “We’ve had surges of downloads before, throughout our seven-year history of protecting user privacy, but this time is different,” Durov emphasized. The surge comes as rival platform WhatsApp changed its …
Amid explosive user growth, Telegram considers raising more than $1 billion in debt Read More
An award-winning fintech startup from Moscow, APIBank, has attracted 120 million rubles in Russia (some $1.6 million at the current exchange rate) from the Russian-Belarusian Investment Fund (RBF Ventures). As reported by CNews.ru, this is the first external capital infusion — in the form of a convertible loan — in this startup launched in 2018. The money will be used “to develop products for payment aggregators and marketplaces, and …
Open banking startup secures $1.6 million from Russian-Belarusian state-backed fund Read More
A Russian hacker was sentenced to 12 years in a US prison Thursday for consumer data theft worth $19 million from 100 million customers of over a dozen financial service companies, the Justice Department said. Andrei Tyurin, 37, pleaded guilty in 2019 after his extradition from the country of Georgia the previous year, admitting to computer intrusion, wire fraud, …
Following amendments to the Russian tax code which were adopted in July 2020, Russian software developers may, starting from Jan. 1, benefit from significant tax cuts. The new tax regime provides: Reduced rates on the taxes on profit: from 20% to 3% for federal taxes and to 0% for regional taxes; A reduced rate on social security …
In late December VEB Ventures (formerly VEB Innovations), a venture fund backed by state development agency VEB.RF (Vnesheconombank), announced an investment of 990 million rubles ($13.4 million at the current exchange rate) in Zyfra. This Russian company develops AI, IIoT-based solutions and robotic mining equipment to digitize the heavy industry. These solutions are intended to provide “objective data analysis” for industrial companies …
In the last days of December Deliver announced it secured 500 million rubles (nearly $7 million at the current exchange rate) from VEB Ventures (formerly VEB Innovations), a venture fund backed by state development agency VEB.RF (Vnesheconombank). An internationally successful Russian online freight service, Deliver has set for itself the mission of “solving the inefficiencies of the logistics market by applying modern …
