Leading Russian payment company Qiwi, which launched an in-house venture activity in early 2013, announced earlier this month its first investment. The group invested in Carbay.ru, a web and mobile service created in May of this year to help professional car dealerships place classifieds on a variety of third-party online resources, including social networks.
“Not only does Carbay seem very interesting to us in its current form, but its approach could be applied to other segments,” said Ksenia Vasilieva of Qiwi’s press service to East-West Digital News
The amount of the deal has not been disclosed, but Vasilieva said that the founders, who are Russian individual entrepreneurs, have kept a controlling stake.
Qiwi has also invested in other companies but would not disclose these transactions for the moment. “We will announce them once they have been launched, as agreed with the founders,” Vasilieva said. “One of these projects is scheduled for launch before the end of the year,” she added.
More than 200 startup entrepreneurs have approached Qiwi so far. The payment company, which had initially specified that it would focus on projects that are closed to its business, has now enlarged its scope to “virtually any field,” Vasilieva said. Particular attention will be offered to e-commerce, advertising, mobile, and customer base management services, as well as to aggregators in the financial and Internet sectors.
A leading provider of cash and online payment services in Russia and Kazakhstan, Qiwi also operates in 20 other countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Qiwi claims that more than 65 million consumers use its network at least once a month.
The operator dominates the Russian cash payment terminals market with more than 120,000 payment processing machines across the country. Over the last few years, the company has gone online, providing 11 million users with electronic wallets and offering new products in partnership with VISA.
This past May, the operator raised $212 million in a successful NASDAQ IPO.
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