Luxembourg based fund Mangrove Capital Partners and Russian fund ABRT sold their stake in Russian search engine Quintura earlier this month, letting its founders Yakov Sadchikov, Alexaner Yershov and Rustam Gafurov take back full control of the company.
Quintura was created in 2005 and positioned itself as the world’s first search engine with a tag cloud approach to find texts, images and videos. Initially supported by ABRT, the startup raised funds in 2006 from Mangrove, who took over 50% of the company, while the founders kept about 30%, reports Russian business daily Kommersant.
“A total of $7 million was invested in the company,” Kommersant quoted Sadchikov as saying. “Our revenues amount to approximately $20,000 per month.”
Vedomosti, another business daily, reports that David Waroquier of Mangrove admitted that his fund did not receive any return on its investment.
Now that it is fully Russian-owned, Quintura is aiming to participate in the state-supported project for the creation of a national search engine. Kommersant reports from undisclosed sources that Quintura is holding discussions with Alexey Kuzovkin, chairman of the board of Armada, a Russian IT company. Kuzovkin and Russian Technologies are co-owners of Alt Linux, a software publisher that could be involved in the national search engine project.
Sadchikov did not elaborate on the issue, but indicated that further technical development in this direction would be costly. “It will require the creation of dozens of data centers and an indexation of the Russian Internet, all costing no less than $100 million,” Sadchikov said.
Four Quintura search apps have just been made available on Amazon’s application store for Android devices, including recipe search (Q Cook), web and image search (Q Search) and kids-friendly search (Q Kids).
