Yesterday Runa Capital, a venture investment firm operating globally from its offices in Moscow, London and San Francisco, announced that it has closed its second fund, Runa Capital Fund II, having raised $135 million. As a result, Runa has $270 million under management, taking into account its first fund, which also amounted to $135 million.
The firm declined to disclose any information about the new fund’s backers.
Focusing on Series A and B investments in the USA and Europe, Runa Capital Fund II targets “companies with high ambitions on the global market,” essentially in the fields of complex enterprise software and cloud applications, education, public services, finance and health.
“The new fund logically follows our development over the past years. While Runa Capital I dedicated a part of its means to early-stage series, now we fully focus on more mature companies. We will support those who aim to gain significant shares on highly competitive markets,” said Dmitry Chikhachev, Managing Partner at Runa Capital.
Runa Capital Fund II — which began operating two years ago — has already made 13 investments, coming in addition to the first fund’s 30 portfolio companies.
From Russia with love — and venture money
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 venture capitalists.
Over the past few years Runa — which Dow Jones Venture Source ranked among the top three European funds in 2015 — has invested significantly in Californian and Western European startups.
Most recently, Runa led a $5.6 million round for SchoolMint, a leading provider of mobile and online enrollment systems for US public, charter and private schools. Runa had already invested in the company at an earlier stage, in 2014.
Among Runa’s other portfolio companies are B2B-Center.ru (Russia), Brainly (Poland), Citizr (France), DrChrono (USA), Ecwid (Russia), Mambu (Germany). Several companies — such as Acumatica, Jelastic, Ngnix and Wallarm — have Russian origins but are established in the USA.
The fund has had several exits so far, starting in 2012 with the acquisition of its UK portfolio company Thinkgrid by ColtTelecom. In 2014, US startup StopTheHacker was acquired by CloudFlare, French startup Capptain was acquired by Microsoft while Metabar, a Russian developer of browser applications, was bought by Yandex.
Runa also had its failures, such as Travelmenu, a Russo-Ukrainian startup which shut down its service in 2013 in spite of capital injections from Runa and other investors.
This story also appeared in VentureBeat, a syndication partner of East-West Digital News.
