Flint Capital, a $30 million high-tech investment fund based in Moscow, has invested in SailPlay, a solution provider for retailers building loyalty programs. Neither the amount of the deal nor the valuation of the startup have been disclosed.
SailPlay’s solution has many similarities with that of US startup 500friends. Intended for online and offline shops, FMCG companies, banks and media-portals, it uses game mechanics, social media marketing, targeted SMS and e-mail marketing to increase customer retention and average spend.
SailPlay was founded in November 2012 by Leonid Shangin, a former McKinsey consultant, and Yakov Philippenko, previously a Yandex project manager and CTO at LinguaLeo. Shortly after its launch the project caught the interest of serial angel investor Igor Ryabenkiy.
SailPlay now works with 450 stores, serving half a million users through its loyalty programs.
Few competitors in Russia, better exit prospects abroad
In an exchange with East-West Digital News, Shangin said that SailPlay’s technology has no direct competitor on the Russian market, aside from a few solutions with partial similarities (including Flocktory and Magictab) and those of major software publishers such as Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce, whose integration may be difficult and costly.
Flint Capital’s money will fuel SailPlay’s further functional development and international expansion. “There are better exit prospects on the global scale,” Flint’s PR Director Daria Golikova told EWDN – without elaborating on which countries could be targeted by the Russian startup.
Flint itself has recently expanded its geographic scope: it now targets “scalable projects” focused on “major fast-growing markets, including the US, Latin America and Eastern Europe.”
Flint’s investment in SailPlay is another illustration of the appeal of the online marketing segment to Russian venture capitalists. East-West Digital News has reported on a dozen seed-stage or Series A investment deals in this segment over the past twelve months.
The latest such move was a $5 million capital injection in March by Klever Internet Investments in CityAds Media, a Moscow-based international affiliate marketing and performance advertising platform.
