Last week, Leta Group, a prominent Russian IT security holding, announced the launch of ‘Leta GIV,’ its corporate venture arm, along with its first investment – interactive air screen maker Displair.
“Generating projects internally is not enough to seize the opportunities offered by Russia’s booming innovation environment, so we decided to create this dedicated vehicle,” said Leta Group’s President Alexander Chachava in an exchange with East-West Digital News.
The 32-year old Chachava had just graduated from a Russian engineering university when he co-founded Leta nine years ago.
Leta GIV will invest up to $10 million each year in three or four early stage companies. The fund essentially targets Russian companies operating in the Internet, e-commerce, and software industries, in addition to IT security. “We will seek complementarities with our existing business and favor projects that are in line with our commercial expertise and capacities,” Chachava explains. “Above all, we seek original concepts with global potential.”
Displair, the much-hyped startup that manufactures next-gen interactive air display screens, was chosen as the fund’s first portfolio company. Leta has contributed the major part of the startup’s $1 million seed stage round, which will be closed in the forthcoming weeks. Among Displair’s other seed stage investors are several Russian and Western individuals, including US business angel Esther Dyson, Dutch e-marketing expert Bas Godska, as well as EWDN co-founders Alexander Baderko and Adrien Henni.
With 24 million individual customers in Russia and other countries as well as 30,000 corporate clients in Russia, Leta Group generated approximately $100 million in sales revenues last year, up 30% from 2010. Among its most recent acquisitions is Group-IB, a provider of cybercrime investigative and forensic services, which announced its North American launch last year.
