RTP Ventures, the recently created US arm of the Russian venture fund Ru-Net, announced yesterday it made no less than four investments in the last two months, including two infusions of seed funding and two Series A investments.
RTP Ventures invested in Tinfoil Security, a website security solution provider, Cake Health, which offers solutions to manage healthcare expenses, Koding, which provides programmers with an improved, cloud-based development environment, and GridGain, which developed an application middleware platform for building Real Time Big Data applications.
The investment deals in RTP’s pipeline for the next quarter is “full and getting fuller,” according to the venture fund, which focuses on Internet, SaaS and cloud computing companies. While details of the amounts of these four recent investments were not disclosed, the fund typically invests between $1m and $10m in each startup.
The Russian fund also announced it recently became an investor in the Star Power Fund of TechStars, a major US business incubator, which will allow RTP to gain easier access to investment opportunities in U.S. cities such as New York, Boston, Seattle, Denver, and San Antonio.
Following the lead of DST, which has been acquiring stakes in major international web properties since 2009, Russian high tech funds are showing a growing interest in foreign companies. Among these investors are Runa Capital, Russian Venture Company and VTB Capital, not to mention the search engine giant Yandex and mobile content publisher i-Free, companies whose investment and acquisition programs are equally open to Russian and foreign companies.
