Many tech entrepreneurs from Russia and neighboring countries tend to establish their startup abroad – in the USA, the EU, or Asia – as they reach a certain level of maturity, or even from the very start. The reasons for the startup drain include the limited size of the domestic market, the lack of locally-available funding, the scarcity of qualified human resources combined with a variety of social or personal emigration motives.
While moving abroad is not always synonym to success, there are many examples of Russian-founded startups having established themselves firmly on European soil. Revolut, the London-headquartered banking app, is one of them: this unicorn was founded by Nik Storonsky from Russia and Vlad Yatsenko from Ukraine.
Online publication EU-Startups has offered a snapshot of several other European startups founded over the last five years by people from Russia. The list includes:
- Anna (stands for ‘Absolutely No Nonsense Admin’), a Welsh startup founded in 2017 by a mainly Russian team;
- Compass Pathways, a UK startup founded in 2016 by Ekaterina Malievskaya and her husband George Goldsmith;
- Crypterium, founded in 2017 in Estonia by Russian duo Gleb Markov and Vladimir Gorbunov;
- Endel, founded in Germany in 2018 by Oleg Stravitsky (Russia) and Kirill Bulatsev (Ukraine);
- Humaniq, founded in 2016 by Alex Fork, who also founded a fintech startup accelerator in Russia;
- iFarm, a Finnish startup founded in 2017 by Alexander Lyskovsky, Konstantin Ulyanov and Maxim Chizhov;
- Kewazo, founded in Germany in 2016 by an international team including Russians Artem Kuchukov and Ekaterina Grib;
- Marine Digital, whose Russian founders left their home country to set up the startup in Riga, Latvia in 2019;
- Novakid, a Polish startup founded in 2017 by Maxim Azarov – which recently raised funding from Russian and South Korean investors.
