Life.Sreda, a Russian VC fund, announced last week that it has invested $730,000 in myWishBoard.com, a platform enabling online private fundraising by friends and families for fulfilling personal wishes. With this P2P service, users can contribute to a present for someone, and when a required amount is collected it is wired to the beneficiary’s e-account.
The project was initially inspired by US startup Smartypig.com, but the Russian developers have altered this model significantly.
Launched this past July, myWishBoard by now built a portfolio of more than 500,000 user wishes, with over 21,000 already fully funded.
The latest investment will be used to upgrade the service’s functionality, develop Android and iOS adaptations and aggressively promote the service through events.
Established in September 2012 with an initial capital of $10 million, Life.Sreda is the venture arm of Life, a Russian financial group comprising eight sizable Russian banks. Its first investments went to Instabank, a financial mobile startup, My-Apps.com, a mobile apps builder, and Life-pay developing mobile payment solutions.
In July 2013, the fund injected $2 million in Moven, a three-year-old New York-based banking startup developing “a world-class mobile solution to the problem of the next-generation bank account.”
According to Alexander Ivanov, the Life.Sreda CFO, the fund has decided to diversify beyond fintech project classics and see how receptive people may be to unobtrusive involvement in financial services.
