Earlier this week Runa Capital, a venture fund with Russian roots operating globally, and Alven Capital, a Paris-based fund, announced an investment in Keymetrics. This French startup has developed a SaaS monitoring service for server infrastructure. making it easier for developers to build Node.js apps.
Keymetrics raised $2 million in total in this round, including $1 million from Runa and $1 million from Alven. The details of the transaction have not been disclosed, but the startup’s founder and CEO Alexandre Strzelewicz told East-West Digital News that his company was valued at “somewhere around $10 million” pre-money.
Previously Keymetrics had raised $150,000 from with Kima Ventures (in August 2014, just one month after company launch), then $120,000 from TechStars in 2015 as part of an acceleration program which took place in New York City in 2015.
Launched in 2010 by Sergei Beloussov, Ilya Zybarev and Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital initially focused on Russia. The fund progressively expanded its scope to invest globally, following a strong invest-abroad trend among Russian venture capitalists. In 2015 the fund was ranked by Dow Jones Venture Source among the top three European funds. Last year Runa launched a second, $135 million fund with a clear focus on US and Western European startups.
Runa is one of the rare Russian tech investors in France. In 2012, it invested $1.5 million in mobile analytics startup Capptain — which was acquired by Microsoft two years later.
Among Runa’s portfolio companies in France are also Predictive Objects and Citizr.
When and how did you start this project?
When I was in Shanghai a few years ago [under a student exchange program], I worked at Wiredcraft where I improved my skillset in software programming, mainly with Node.js language. Node.js was a young (three-year old) technology at that time and hadn’t been even tried by large companies. I launched PM2 (Process Manager 2), an open-source application manager that takes care of keeping your Node.js application online, making it faster and allowing to administrate it very easily.
PM2 took only a few months to get recognition from the Node.js community. Downloads and contributions were increasing every month, making PM2 better and better. PM2 has been downloaded nearly 20 million times since then. Among its users are such companies as Paypal, Alibaba, Apple and many others across the world.
In such circumstances, a business model could be found. In 2014, I created Keymetrics to offer a SaaS product that would serve as a dashboarding and monitoring system for PM2.
What about competition? What are your distinctive advantages?
In the US, there is New Relic or AppDynamics. The latter was recently acquired by Cisco at around $3 billion. Our main advantages are that we provide high-scale, real-time dashboard and action monitoring system, including auto remediation and diagnostics. PM2 is also a great asset to push monitoring to the next level.
How did you get in touch with Runa? What did you like in this fund and what do you expect from them?
I first got in touch with Alexander Vidiborskiy in 2015. I really liked their investments and expertise in high tech companies. A few months later, I met Dmitry Chikhachev and explained to him the Keymetrics technology in a Paris café. Afterwards met multiple times and once I felt ready to bring Keymetrics to the next level we circled up a co-investment with Alven.
Yes, first we need a few months to structure and scale the company, in terms of hiring, offices, management, processes, strategy. Once things are on track, our investors may bring more than just money. Alven is bringing expertise and network to scale up SaaS businesses. Runa has a strong technological dimension and experience in ramping up open source project for enterprises.
Even though I haven’t had difficulties to find great investors in France willing to fill the whole desired round, I believe that the French VC scene still lacks sharp, tech-oriented VCs like Runa.
Why did you invest in Keymetrics?
First, Alexandre [Strzelewicz] is a smart, resourceful, technical founder. He built the widely-used open source Node.js process manager PM2 with limited resources and then figured out a way to monetize it. And he recruited some of the top developers from Ecole42.
With our deep tech background, we also believe in the power of open source. We’ve already invested in a number of great companies in this field, including Nginx and MariaDB, and we believe that Keymetrics has the potential to be next in line as a leader in Node.js. With its 16,790 stars on Github and 19.5 million downloads to date, PM2 stacks up well against many of the world’s top open-source projects.
What do you think of the French startup scene?
France has great engineering schools, from École Polytechnique to other Grandes Écoles, tech universities and, more recently, the remarkable Ecole 42. The ecosystem enjoys strong government support, as shown by the creation of Bpifrance, a $7.4 billion startup fund as well as such other initiatives as La French Tech and the recent startup visa program. We’ve made several investments in the country, partnering with French funds like Ventech, CapHorn and Partech.
Why are there so few Russian investors in France, in contrast with their presence in the US and Asian markets?
There are not many foreign tech investors in France in general. The French ecosystem has remained quite French so far… with many good local VCs fueling it. But it is getting more and more open; and the quality of French startups is being acknowledged by many now. I’m very happy that Runa is one of the one of first foreign players active on the local scene. And I love French cuisine and wine, which is a nice bonus!
