CommIT Capital, the venture arm of Russia’s national telecom operator Rostelecom, has teamed up with tech fund Leta Capital to invest in Brain4Net, a provider of advanced SDN/NFV solutions. The capital injection amounted to 120 million rubles (approximately $1.75 million at the current exchange rate), of which CommIT Capital contributed 100 million rubles.
The news was reported last week by RBC, a Russian business publication, based on an exchange with Brain4Net’s founder and CEO Oleg Shchapov.
Based in Moscow and Cambridge (MA), USA, Brain4Net provides enterprises and service providers with a “comprehensive network orchestration & control solution” for multi-vendor network infrastructure. The company also offers SDN controller functions and a set of virtualized network functions (VNFs).
This approach aims to help organizations “bring agility to the network, improve network service chaining and reduce both CAPEX and OPEX for network infrastructure deployment and operations,” Brain4Net claims.
“Our mission is to disseminate a new vision of building agile, scalable and easy manageable networks. We believe that SDN and NFV concepts provide the best approach of how next generation networks should look like.”
Next-gen SDN in Russia and beyond
The Russian company is in discussion with operators from Russia as well as from Europe and North America. Shchapov told RBC that he expects its first deals in these regions to be signed this year.
Rostelecom itself is planning to use Brain4Net solutions, while CommIT Capital has made this investment with the aim of providing the company with “a strategic technological advantage.”
Just weeks ago, the first investment of Comm IT Capital, which launched last year, went to Raidix, a data storage solution provider.
Leta Capital is the venture arm of the Russian IT security holding Leta Group. Established in 2012, the fund has already invested in air screen maker Displair, social app Budist, bank software publisher Double Data and other startups essentially in Russia.
