GS Venture, the one-year-old venture arm of GS Group, has announced its first international investment. Set up last summer to “support entrepreneurial innovators and startup teams” in Russia, the fund decided to establish presence in Finland with a €200,000 injection into Tellyo, a Helsinki startup.
The young Finnish company has developed Share the Moment, a solution enabling the sharing of favorite TV show episodes with a single click on social networks using smartphones or tablets.
According to GS Group, the new Finnish service is already in demand from TV viewers and has been “widely employed by many broadcasters.” Nine top TV shows around the world have partnered with Tellyo, tapping into its new technology as a way of amplifying audience engagement and ensuring additional revenue streams, GS Group emphasized.
“We are excited to support this service and enable new monetization opportunities between TV and the social media industry,” said Sergey Filimonov, head of GS Venture, adding that the fund’s goal is not only Tellyo’s growth acceleration but also further adoption of the Finnish startup’s services, present and future, by GS’s “globally expanding network of operators.”
GS Venture was established to offer startup entrepreneurs a range of support services, from investment – anywhere between $15,000 and $9 million per project – to technical backing, PR, promotion, and product commercialization. Initial plans were to invest a total of $45 million between July 2013 and December 2014.
GS Group is a St. Petersburg-based industrial holding with vested interests in telecommunications. Recently it acquired an important stake in Novabase, the leading IT player in Portugal, as part of its expansion strategy in Western Europe and Africa.
