Last week, the Russian edition of Forbes released a list of 10 top Russian venture capitalists whom it identified as being “the most successful.” In the last four years, these investors have earned approximately $3.6 billion from mainly Internet-related projects.
The ranking uses the same methodology as American Forbes for The Midas List, the global ranking of venture capitalists.
Exits, specifically IPOs and M&As that have taken place over the past four years, are the main indicator used to evaluate the success of venture capital investors. Earlier exits have less weight, and the size and number of exits are important, as well as the fund’s portfolio.
Data was provided by the database of PREQVECA, a Russian resource dedicated to private equity and venture activity.
The rating only includes private venture capital funds of Russian origin, regardless of the country where the fund is registered. Public, non-Russian and corporate venture funds are not considered, as well as IPO transactions during which a fund does not sell his share.
- Yuri Milner, founder of Digital Sky Technologies (DST), tops the list, with 60% of the earnings of the entire top ten combined. This billionaire is the most important Russian venture capitalist and was for a long-time the only Russian included in Forbes’ world ranking of venture investors. His first serious profit came in 2010 when he sold his shares in the Mail.ru Group for $60 million during its IPO. Worldwide fame and larger profits came thanks to his investments in Facebook as early as 2009, then in Airbnb, Groupon, Spotify, Zynga and many other global Internet companies. Milner is poised to gain even more during the upcoming IPOs of Twitter and China’s Alibaba Group.
- Viktor Remsha of Finam, a leading Russian financial group, is number two on the list. In 2012, he sold a 49.9% share of contextual advertising service Begun to the Rambler-Afisha Group. The service was bought for $900,000 in 2003 and paid $35 million in dividends over nine years until its sale. Recently, Finam’s venture arm Finam Global has started to actively invest in financial services on the Internet, such as the issuance of online credit cards or microcredit.
- Next is Leonid Boguslavskiy, whose fund ru-Net earned $70 million for the sale of a 1% share in Yandex during its 2011 IPO. In 2000, ru-Net had invested $5 million for a 35% share in the search engine. He invested a part of the money made from the sale of Yandex shares in Ozon, thus becoming the owner of a 20% stake in Russia’s largest online store.
- Alexander Galitsky, who is fourth on the list, heads Almaz Capital Partners, one of the most established venture funds in Russia backed by UFG Asset Management, EBRD and Cisco. The fund’s exits to date include Yandex, Qik, a mobile video startup which was sold to Skype in 2011, and Vyatta, a publisher of software security and networking solutions which was acquired by Brocade in November of last year.
- Number five Mikhail Chuchkevich manages Bright Capital Energy I, which invest in energy projects, and Bright Capital Digital, which invests in Internet projects in Russia and abroad. In 2013, the company sold DealAngel to OneTwoTrip.ru.
- At number six is Edward Shenderovich, who worked with the SUP Group to create Kite Ventures. In 2010, Kite Venture successfully exited from Darberry, one of Russia’s first daily deal sites which was sold to Groupon. In 2011, Rambler-Afisha bought a controlling stake gaming network Kanobu Network from Kite Ventures.
- Number seven, Ulvi Kasimov of IQ One sold 51% of shares of cloud service for business automation Megaplan to 1C but maintained a blocking stake in 2012. He is the former deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute for Innovation and is developing Sferiq Town, a city for people to produce innovation.
- Andrey Kazakov is head of Foresight Ventures and number eight on the list. Among the Foresight Fund’s founders are Andrei Kazakov of Cloudmach, and Vladislav Sviblovo of Rosbuilding.
- Headed by Marina Treshchova, Fastlane Ventures was founded in 2010 by French serial entrepreneur Pascal Clement and KupiVIP’s CEO Oskar Hartmann. Fastlane is not only a fund but a business accelerator that creates companies from scratch, inspired by Western startup models that Fastlane believes can succeed in Russia. In February 2012, the fund sold online retailer Sapato.ru to Ozon, which came as one of the rare exits on the Russian e-commerce scene.
- Sergey Belousov heads Runa Capital, a Moscow-based fund operating internationally. One and a half year after launch, the fund sold its stake in ThinkGrid, a UK headquartered enterprise cloud startup.
Russia’s top 10 VCs according to Forbes Russia
