TechRepublic, an international publication aiming to identify technologies and strategies for IT companies, has highlighted five top Russian startups.
“Although Russia’s economy has been tumultuous and the tech landscape is largely associated by Westerners as hacker-centric, a strong technological and entrepreneurial culture has developed in the country over the past half decade and produced a number of fast-growing startups,” TechRepublic’s Senior Writer Dan Patterson notes justly.
The five companies selected by TechRepublic (advised by Russian tech evangelist Maria Podolyak) are the following:
- Instant messenger Telegram, which was founded by Pavel Durov in 2013 and recently made the news due to its high traffic and use by terrorist groups;
- FindFace, an award-winning facial-recognition technology which claims to be able to identify one person in a billion photos in less than one second — but has also been used to harrass young women;
- Nginx, an open-source web server publisher, based on a technology created by Igor Sysoev in 2002 and has become since then one of the most popular webservers in the world;
- Ecwid, one of the most widely used e-commerce shopping application in the world, which was founded by Ruslan Fazlyev, an entrepreneur from Ulyanovsk in the Urals in 2009;
- Appodeal, which serves programmatic ads through its fast-growing network of mobile apps.
With the exception of FindFace, these mature companies can hardly be characterized as “Russian,” but rather as international companies with Russian roots and, in most cases, Russia-based R&D teams.
