Since early 2015 O1 Group — a Cyprus-based Russian holding company which had thus far made investments essentially in the Russian real estate and financial sectors — has injected no less than $20 million in foreign tech startups at the pre-IPO stage. These moves were revealed last week by Igor Mints, the son of managing director Boris Mints, in an exchange with Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Boris Mints’s personal wealth has been estimated by Forbes at some $1.5 billion.
Among the O1 Group’s new portfolio companies are IHS, an African company involved in telecom infrastructure projects, Pathway Genomics, a Californian company which offers precision medical diagnostic apps, and Palantir Technologies, another Californian company providing software and services for data analysis.
O1 Group has also invested in Prosper, a San Francisco based peer-to-peer lending marketplace. This past summer, this startup also received $13 million from Target Ventures, another Russian investor.
O1 Group invested from $2 million to $3 million in each company, said Igor Mints.
In addition, O1 Group is a limited partner in Buran Venture Capital, a Moscow-based venture fund which targets tech startups across Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Turkey and Israel.
Russian businessmen from traditional sectors are showing a growing interest in technological investment. Meanwhile, foreign startups are often regarded as the most attractive, as shown by massive invest-abroad trend among Russian VCs, which has been reported repeatedly over the past few years.
