Yesterday Life.SREDA, a Moscow-based venture fund focusing on mobile and online fintech startups, announced plans to launch a second, internationally oriented fund of $100 million.
Existing Life.SREDA backers have already provided one fifth of the target amount, or $20 million, for the new fund. Further fundraising talks are being held with several large banks and telecom operators, including Chinese, Hong Kong and Singaporean organizations.
Following the invest-abroad trend among Russian investors, Life.SREDA II will focus on US and European fintech projects with just around 10% of the funding allocated to Russian projects. The average check for each investment is expected to be in the range of $5-10 million.
It is assumed that the backers of Life.SREDA II will not only provide funding but will also contribute to the international development of its portfolio companies.
Life.SREDA was launched in September 2012 with an initial capital of $10 million as the venture arm of Life, a Russian financial group comprising sizable Russian banks. In two years, the fund has invested over $40 million into a number of fintech startups from Russia and other countries.
Life.SREDA’s first investment went to Instabank, a financial mobile startup. Then the fund invested $1.5 million in My-Apps.com, a Russian mobile apps builder for laymen; $2.6 million in Russian mobile acquiring startup Life-Pay in December 2012; and $2 million in Moven, a New York based money-management service, in August 2013. In December 2013, the fund also invested $730,000 in myWishBoard.com, a platform enabling online private fundraising by friends and families for fulfilling personal wishes.
Several other deals followed, including, this past summer, a $1.5 million capital injection in Advice Wallet, a Ukrainian startup which develops a mobile payment service called Settle.
Life.SREDA celebrated its first exit in March 2014, when Spanish bank BBVA acquired Simple, an innovative banking app operating on the US market, for no less than $117 million. Life.SREDA announced a 180% return on investment in this operation.
“By launching Life.SREDA II, we are aiming at large banks that want to transform themselves to keep up with the increasingly innovative technological marketplace. It is more profitable for them to acquire a fully baked fintech startup rather than create innovations on their own. We’re seeing a truly global opportunity in finfech, starting in the USA – as Simple proved – and then spreading throughout the world,” Life.SREDA Managing Partner Vladislav Solodkiy stated.
“As far as Asia is concerned, the level of retail bank services and their innovation in China, Singapore and Honk Kong can be compared with Russia; the banks require further technological and service development,” he added in a bid to attract Asian partners to the new fund.
Among the other investors on the Russian fintech scene are Ocean Bank and QIWI, two major payment operators that have launched their own corporate venture investment programs last year.
