Runa Capital, a Moscow based venture fund, announced yesterday it has invested in ThinkGrid, a UK headquartered global cloud company which defines itself as “a channel-focused vendor providing turnkey worldwide infrastructure and a control panel platform that allows IT solution providers to become cloud service providers and to offer IT services from the cloud in real-time.”
The amount of the investment has not been disclosed, but a Runa representative told business daily Kommersant Ukraine that it was “somewhere between $500,000 and $5 million,” a glib indicator than the investment is in line with the fund’s strategy. He also acknowledged, perhaps more telling, that Runa had only obtained a minority stake.
Founded in 2008, ThinkGrid operates nine data centers around the world and serves over 10,000 users accessing services on a day to day basis, with a network of 150 partners who deliver and resell services, packaging them for different vertical markets, the company’s web site claims. ThinkGrid has its main R&D facility in L’viv (Lvov), Ukraine.
The investment will be used to scale sales and development teams and open more data centers. In particular, ThinkGrid plans to enter the Russian cloud service market, now embryonic but which is widely expected to witness strong growth in the forthcoming years.
While successful in Western countries, ThinkGrid’s current model – based on a long tail partnering strategy – could be less relevant on Eastern European markets, a local expert told Kommersant Ukraine. Demand is limited on this particular segment, he said.
Founded in mid-2010, Runa manages $75 million in capital and share assets. This year, the fund invested in Metabar, a Russian startup offering customizable toolbars, in Travelmenu, a Russian-Ukrainian site offering a suite of travel products, in US SaaS provider BigTime, and in open source web server publisher Nginx. The fund has also invested in residents of Skolkovo, the state-sponsored innovation hub currently under construction near Moscow.
