Runa Capital, a Moscow-based global tech-focused venture capital firm, announced yesterday the first closing of its new fund, Runa Capital II. With a target size of $200 million, the firm will continue investing in tech-based companies worldwide, focusing especially on Europe. The amount of the first closing has not been disclosed.
Investors at this first closing come from across Europe, Russia and the USA, with large commitments from investors in the previous Runa Capital fund.
While the segment focus of Runa II will be similar to that of Runa I – including cloud computing, hosted services, virtualization, mobile applications and IT-solutions for education, healthcare, social and fintech – the geographical focus is shifting to invest more in Central, Eastern and Western European regions. Investments in Turkey, Israel and other areas of the world are not ruled out, though.
Launched in 2010 by Sergei Beloussov, Ilya Zybarev and Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital I initially focused on Russia. The fund progressively expanded its scope to investing globally, following a strong invest-abroad trend among Russian financiers. Over the past few years Runa, which amassed $135 million in committed capital, has invested significantly in Californian and Western European startups.
The fund has had three exits so far, starting in 2012 with the acquisition of its UK portfolio company Thinkgrid by ColtTelecom. In 2014, USA’s StopTheHacker was acquired by CloudFlare, and French startup Capptain was acquired by Microsoft.
Runa also had its failures, such as Travelmenu, a Russo-Ukrainian startup which shut down its service last year in spite of capital injections from Runa and other investors.
Among its other portfolio companies are NGINX, Jelastic, Ecwid, Zopa, Acumatica, Mambu, Wallarm, and drchrono.
