Earlier this month Russia Partners, the Moscow-based private equity affiliate of global alternative investment firm Siguler Guff & Company, announced that Rakuten acquired Slice, a portfolio company in its technology fund. The details of the deal have not been revealed.
Over the past few years, the Japanese online retail company has invested several billion dollars in e-commerce projects in Asia, Europe including Russia, and North and South America. A few weeks ago Rakuten bought up cash-back rebate site Ebates for $1 billion, as reported by Venture Beat.
Slice has developed an app that allows online shoppers to track their orders, manage their purchase history and analyze their online spending.
The startup was founded in Palo Alto, California, and one of its first investors was Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The company claims it has processed more than 200 million items to date for a total purchase value of over $4 billion. In 2013, its revenue totaled $4.9 billion and net profit reached $412.6 million.
“Slice’s success is attributed to the company’s strong US-based management and a team of creative programmers based in Central and Eastern Europe,” said Roman Simonov, Managing Director of Siguler Guff.
In fact, the main part of the Slice engineering team works out of Odessa, Ukraine, as reported by Ukraine Digital News. Unsurprisingly in the current circumstances, this Ukrainian presence is not mentioned on the startup’s website.
