Moscow-based social network advertising platform Hiconversion announced last week that it has received about 9.1 million rubles (almost $300,000) in seed funding from serial angel investor Igor Ryabenkiy and the Moscow Seed Fund, Moscow City’s venture investment arm.
Ryabenkiy contributed some 3 million rubles, while the fund provided the other 6 million. The company’s total valuation has not been disclosed.
A resident company of HSE Inc., the startup incubator of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, Hiconversion was founded in 2012. It claims that its automated social advertising management solution significantly increases campaign efficiency and saves time. Currently, the service works only with Vkontakte.ru, Russia’s largest social network.
“We will use the investment funds to speed up development for other social platforms,” said Hiconversion’s co-founder Anton Smirnov. “We plan to launch Target Mail, a system for targeted advertising on Russian social networks Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, in June; later on we’ll add Facebook.”
In the last quarter of 2012, Hiconversion posted 10 million rubles ($319,000) in revenue. There are approximately 12,000 active advertisements in the system out of a total of 100,000.
The Moscow Seed Fund and Igor Ryabenkiy have already made a series of joint investments, the latest of which were for SocialMart, a product recommendation service for social networks and Alytics, a startup developing contextual ad solutions. The SocialMart investment took place earlier this month, while their joint investment in Alytics happened in March.
