The Runa Capital seed fund, established by Parallels founder Sergey Belousov, has been increased by $20 million — from $30 to over $50 million — and plans to finance 8 or 9 start-ups this year.
The anchor investors of Runa Capital are Sergey Belousov, BoD chairman of Parallels and Acronis, and Alexander Galitsky, head of the Almaz Capital Partners investment fund. Dmitry Chikhachev, formerly the HR director at Ericsson CIS, is the fund’s managing partner.
New partners in Runa are Andreas Gauger, founder of the 1&1 hosting provider, Achim Weiss, CTO of 1&1, Ilya Zubarev, founder of Rolsen and Acronis (with Belousov), Igor Borovikov, founder of the Russian software reseller Softline, Charles Ryan, BoD chairman of UFG Asset Management, and Igor Danilov, founder of the Dr. Web antivirus software provider.
The involvement of professional investors, including Edward Nicholson, former CEO of Brunswick UBS Bank for Russia and CIS, led to the increase in the fund.
In 2010, Runa Capital received hundreds of applications from start-ups, but only invested in OnAir3G, a voice social network service (with required investments totaling $2 million), and Hivext.com, a platform for creating web services ($500,000).
