Is Russia set to be the next Eldorado for Western startups? As Russia emerges as a new hot spot on the global IT scene, companies have begun seeking new partners, clients and even investors.
Among them is Capptain, a Paris based startup with solutions allowing mobile app and game developers to manage and serve their user base more efficiently. On the last day of his Moscow trip earlier this month, Capptain CEO Laurent Lathieyre said that winning new a client in Moscow made him “as happy as when [he] got his first client in France.”
Lathieyre described his productive visit. In a mere few days, he met a dozen local players – including major app and game developers and a major Internet group – and hopes to close deals with some of them in the coming weeks.
“Capptain got a very good reception from the people we met. I guess this has also to do with the common engineering and software culture in France and Russia,” Lathieyre notes.
Three meetings with Russian venture funds also went well, Lathieyre says. “In France, there is a lack of funds for early stage investment. There is more money available in the US, but the market is so competitive that it is hard to even get attention from venture funds unless you move there. It is pleasant to see that renowned Russian funds found time to study our proposition seriously and consider investing in our company.”
mScriber, a startup from Manchester, also has its Russian love story. Between a trip to India and another to China, Nicky Singh, the CEO, visited Moscow last month to present his firm’s mobile solutions to secure and share data stored on mobile phones.
Not only did Singh meet Russian mobile operators – one of which started to test his solutions – he also met a major Russian venture fund which could potentially take part in mScriber’s forthcoming first round of financing.
“Over the last few months, we’ve witnessed a sharp rise in the interest of Russian investors in foreign tech companies,” says Vasily Bargan, publisher of Venture-News.ru, a website specializing in the Russian venture market.
The trend towards investing abroad and in foreign companies was initiated in 2009, when DST acquired a stake in Facebook. Since then, the high profile Russian venture fund has invested in such global Internet companies as social game maker Zynga, daily deal site Groupon and Chinese B2B platform Alibaba.
Other Russian investors have followed. This year alone, Yandex invested in US mobile app startup Refine.io as well as in US search engine Blekko. US business software publisher BigTime, UK based web business information company AiHit and Vietnamese e-commerce project MJ Group, to name just a few, have also received funding from Russian investors Runa Capital, VTB Capital and Ru-Net, respectively.
