VTB Capital Asset Management announced last week it has invested in COMDI, a leading player on the Russian video conferencing market. Founded in 2009, COMDI specializes in web conferences as well as online training and broadcasts.
Before this round of financing, COMDI was funded by its founders and an undisclosed business angel.
The funds, of an undisclosed amount, will be spent on upgrading COMDI’s technology, making it available through mobile devices and promoting it in Russia and other former Soviet republics.
COMDI claims to serve over 300 international and Russian clients, among which are Microsoft, BMW, telecom group VimpelCom and accounting software publisher 1С. In 2010, COMDI hosted over 10,000 online events involving 1.5 million people.
Estimates for the thriving worldwide video conferencing market in 2010 vary from $2.2 billion (Infonetics) to $3.5 billion (Gartner). According to Wainhouse Research, the Russian market could reach from $40 million to $60 million in 2010 with an annual growth of 20%, reported Tdaily.ru, a Russian site covering the telecom market.
An international portfolio
VTB Capital is the investment arm of VTB Group, a leading Russian state controlled financial group. With offices in Moscow, London, Singapore and Dubai, VTB Capital arranges operations in debt and equity markets, advises clients on ECM, DCM and M&A deals in Russia and abroad, and develops private investment as well as operations on the global commodities markets and asset management.
Through its investment funds, VTB Capital has financed a number of Russian and foreign small and mid-sized IT companies.
“Our criteria are fairly standard: a clear business idea, big markets or new markets with impressive growth potential, an outstanding entrepreneurial team and significant competitive advantages of the product or technology in comparison with competitors,” Aidar Kaliev, Head of Venture Investment at VTB Capital, told East-West Digital News.
VTB Capital owns a 30.74% stake in Russian Navigation Technologies (RNT), the largest manufacturer and integrator of telematics systems in Russia.
Questora, a company with offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Saratov, operates worldwide in the field of highly scalable software platforms. “Using the latest advancements in grid and cloud computing, our customers turn monolithic applications into scalable services and static, underutilized server clusters into virtualized compute clouds,” per the Questora website.
In the international portfolio of VTB Capital is Returnil, an international provider of security solutions.
The Russian fund also owns a stake in Beau Laboratories, a company that claims to be developing “a revolutionary software [to] capture real world environments digitally, escalating the capacity of 3D environments and opening a new realm of possibilities.”
Beau has two development centers: one in Moscow and the other in Los Angeles.
