Last week Runa Capital, an international venture fund with Russian roots, announced its participation in two startup funding deals in Western Europe.
As reported by Tech.eu, the fund led a €7 million funding round for Vehiculum, a German-founded startup which has developed a new car leasing marketplace.
Almost simultaneously, French startup Admo announced the completion of its €6 million series B funding, involving Runa Capital as well as two Paris-based investors, Entrepreneur Venture and Cap Décisif. Admo, which is an advertising analytics solution provider, intends to use the funds to enlarge its UK team and open new offices in Spain and Germany, City A.M. reported.
While venture firms with Russian backers or management have invested abundantly outside Russia since around 2011, they usually operated in such geographies as the United States, India, Germany or the UK. Cases of investment in other European countries have been less frequent – but noticeable in the case of Runa in France.
French-Russian high tech stories
This fund, which targeted essentially Russian startups when launched in 2011, quickly switched to a global strategy. While it invested mostly in US startups, Runa made its first investment in France in 2012, injecting $1.5 million in mobile analytics startup Capptain. This startup was acquired by Microsoft 18 months later.
2017 saw Runa invest in several other French startups. These included Keymetrics, which developed a SaaS monitoring service for server infrastructure, making it easier for developers to build Node.js applications.
The fund also participated in a $4 million seed round for SimpliField, a French startup which has developed a SaaS solution for retailers.
