Illustrating the invest-abroad trend among Russian VCs, Run Capital has led a seed financing round of more than £1 million to support the international expansion of UK-based satellite-driven data analytics provider Rezatec. The deal was announced in late April.
The Harvard Business School Alumni Angels also took part in the round along with Rezatec’s existing shareholders. Rezatec will use the capital secured “to expand its sales and marketing teams worldwide as it continues to expand its global customer base.”
Rezatec helps businesses better manage their land-based assets by making use of the increasingly sophisticated but complex array of Earth observation (EO) imagery and data available. The company has developed a landscape intelligence platform aggregating large amounts of diverse data from satellites, airborne and ground instruments, applying relevant modelling to provide critical decision support for our customers.
Amongst its solution sets, Rezatec enables yield optimization for commodity crops in agriculture; water catchment pollution and soil erosion forecasts in the water utilities sector; and pipe bursts and subsidence movements in the energy and utilities sectors.
“We believe the company is well placed to capitalize on its leadership position in this fast developing data analytics sector. The rapid growth in the availability of satellite raw imagery combined with Rezatec’s proprietary technology offers up substantial commercial opportunity in a number of markets worldwide,” commented Andrey Romanenko, Managing Partner of Run Capital.
Run Capital was launched in 2014 by Romanenko and other executives from Qiwi, a major Russian payment company. The fund has invested in such companies as Russian booking service Weatlas, California-based mobile marketing platform AppInTop, international news aggregator ANews, and others.
