In the past few months, Russian Internet major VK (previously Mail.ru Group) demonstrated a strong appetite for online education — both in Russia and abroad. In August the group, partnering with Alexander Galitsky, integrated its properties Skillbox and GeekBrains into a holding called Skillbox Limited. In October, VK completed the move by merging SkillFactory, …
VK acquires edtech businesses in Russia and Brazil Read More
Auchan has inked with SberMarket — a delivery service owned by Sber, the state-controlled financial and digital giant — a “strategic cooperation” agreement in the field of e-commerce. The agreement will be in force until 2028, according to a Sber press-release. The partnership aims to “accelerate the development of Auchan’s ‘phygital’ commerce in Russia. The parties …
Auchan partners with Sber to accelerate ‘phygital’ commerce development Read More
The ‘Fund for Technological Investments,’ a newly registered startup investment vehicle, made the news in Russia last week. This was due neither to any impressive investment capacity (just around 3 million rubles, or $40,000, per deal), nor to any special investment thesis. What is less common is the identity of one the instigators of this …
Yandex’s most powerful supercomputer ranks 19th in the global TOP500, showing the best results for high-performance computing systems in Russia and Eastern Europe. Named after one of the greatest machine learning theorists, Alexey Chervonenkis, Yandex’s fastest supercomputer has 199 nodes and produces 21.53 petaflops, that is, 21.53 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. The other two Yandex TOP500 entries, …
US open source software platform Grafana Labs has acquired a Russian-founded startup called Amixr. Launched in 2019, this company has developed an incident management platform that allows DevOps and SRE engineers to “optimize channels, recipients, and content” and solve IT problems more rapidly. Grafana Labs provides a monitoring solution for databases, featuring “beautiful, flexible dashboards” to “create, explore and …
Russian-founded incident management tool Amixr acquired by US major Grafana Labs Read More
Sber, the Russian state-controlled financial and digital giant, is joining a Council of Europe technology partnership program. “The parties are set to exchange information, opinions, and best practices while developing interaction and partnership in high-tech fields,” Sber stated. The agreement was inked on Nov. 10 during Sber’s international AI conference, Artificial Intelligence Journey — in which Bjørn Berge, Deputy Secretary General of …
Russia’s Sber joins Council of Europe technology corporate partnership program Read More
Kek Entertainment, a Moscow and Cyprus-based “gaming video creator,” has attracted $3 million in pre-seed funding to develop mobile action games. This is “the largest pre-seed round ever in a gaming startup from in Russia or neighboring countries,” the participants in the deal claimed. The company started in September and is hiring. It was founded by two former …
Cian, a leading online real estate classifieds platform in Russia, began trading on the New York exchange on Friday, Nov. 5, with a secondary listing on the Moscow exchange announced as imminent. At a company valuation of $1.1 billion, Cian shares had been oversubscribed 10 times by investors, a source in the financial market told Reuters. In their debut on the Nasdaq, the …
Earlier this month Tizzi, a Russian “sexual wellness” startup founded in 2019, announced the completion of its second investment round, attracting 80 million rubles (around $1.1 million). The funding was provided by Mikhail Ryvkin — a business angel who already invested in such projects as ‘Gym-Gym’ and ‘Bright Kitchen’ — alongside an undisclosed “international family office.” Tizzi …
International family office invests in Russian sexual wellness startup Read More
Sber, the Russian financial and digital giant, is preparing to open an R&D center in Berlin — its first one in Western Europe. These plans were announced by Sber’s Executive Vice President and CTO, David Rafalovsky at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. This initiative aims to attract high-class IT developers, architects and specialists. “Our center is …
Sber to open R&D center in Berlin “to expand horizons in machine learning” Read More
On October 17, Russia’s Team Spirit triumphantly lifted the Aegis of Champions. The team of five youngsters – the oldest of them only 23 years of age – looked somewhat out of place, dwarfed by Romania’s biggest stadium. The International 10 is no ordinary sporting event: it is the world championship for multiplayer online battle …
Russian team with mysterious backers wins world’s biggest eSports prize Read More
Softline, an international IT solution and service provider with Russian roots, started trading today on the London Stock Exchange with a secondary listing in Moscow. New shares worth $400 million were sold at $7.50 apiece, valuing Softline at about $1.5 billion, according to a company statement cited by Bloomberg. The company initially targeted a valuation of around $2 …
Russian IT major Softline raises $400 million in London IPO Read More
