Russian seed and early stage venture fund Runa Capital has invested $1 million in Metabar, a Russian startup allowing websites to customize a toolbar to adhere to their features, news, and other applications.
“Our platform allows website owners to transform casual visitors into regular audiences,” said Mikail Ushakov, Metabar’s CEO.
Metabar’s model is inspired by Conduit, an US-Israeli company founded in 2005 which now claims over 260,000 publishers and 200 million subscribers from 180 countries.
Runa Capital was founded in mid-2010 by Sergey Belousov, BoD chairman of Parallels and Acronis, and Alexander Galitsky, head of the Almaz Capital Partners investment fund. The fund said to EWDN that it has been increased twice since the beginning of 2011: by $20 million in January and by $10 million last week.
Runa Capital now manages nearly $60 million in capital and share assets.
Runa’s first investments were OnAir3G (Telefir.ru), a voice-enabled social network platform, and Hivext.com, a cloud-based application development platform.
