Since 2019, cities across Russia have been testing ways to disconnect the Russian segment of the Internet (known colloquially as “Runet”) from the wider global network. Most tests go unnoticed by users, and are only announced post-factum. Russia Beyond explains how Russia is preparing for its own “sovereign Internet” and how the new system differs …
Crunchbase and East-West Digital News are teaming up to cover key tech and venture trends from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, with a column by EWDN Chief Editor Adrien Henni highlights the most notable industry facts and trends across the region. The second quarter of this year was marked, in particular, by the emergence of SPACs …
Academy of Changes (Академия перемен), a Russian edtech platform intended for women, has closed a 242 million ruble ($3.3 million) round of funding, some 18 months after inception early last year. The funding was provided by TMT Investments, a London-based fund with Russian connections, and by the corporate fund of MTS, the Russian mobile major …
Women’s e-learning platform from Russia raises $3.3 million to go global Read More
The Russian company Cognitive Pilot intends to sell its agricultural drones across North and South America, including the US market. To this end, it has registered a subsidiary, ‘Cognitive Pilot Corp.,’ in Texas, reports Vedomosti. Cognitive Pilot CEO Olga Uskova said the flying engines will initially be sold in Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, where no license is required …
Russian Cognitive Pilot aims to sell agricultural drones in challenging American markets Read More
Last week a Russian court fined Google’s local subsidiary 3 million rubles (around $41,000 at the current exchange rate) for violating Russia’s personal data storage law, reports TASS news agency. While the US digital giant had previously been fined for refusing to remove censored information and for abusing dominant position, it is the first fine …
Moscow court fines Google for breaching Russia’s personal data storage law Read More
Earlier this month Green Grey, a Russian-founded publisher of mobile games and apps, announced the launch of NPU Games. This new casual games studio offers co-investment opportunities to back the development of casual games. An initial capital injection of $800,000 was brought by Green Grey itself to develop a pilot project, Cook’s Voyage — a casual …
Russian-founded mobile game publisher launches co-investment vehicle, displays IPO goals Read More
OCSiAl, the Russian-founded global graphene nanotube leader, has inked an investment and business cooperation agreement with Japanese giant Daikin Industries. The companies disclosed OCSiAl’s valuation (“about $2 billion”) but not the terms of the share subscription deal. Pronounced ‘Oxial,’ OCSiAl refers to four chemical elements: oxygen (O), carbon (C), silicon (Si) and aluminum (Al). Touted as the …
Baring Vostok, the Russian PE/VC giant, Winter Capital, a Moscow-based international fund backed, in particular, by billionaire Vladimir Potanin, and Goldman Sachs have invested $50 million in GetCourse. This Russian edtech startup allows its customers — more than 20,000 schools, trainers, coaches and bloggers — to create, deliver, promote and sell their own educational content. The service, which …
Yandex, in collaboration with Oxford and Cambridge Universities and as part of the NeurIPS conference on machine learning, is launching the global ‘Shifts Challenge’, a three-pronged competition track designed to tackle the problem of distributional shift in ML that features the largest autonomous vehicle (AV) dataset in the industry to date. This dataset contains 600,000 scenes (or more than 1,600 hours …
When a group of international investigative journalists and researchers broke the news that spyware called Pegasus, produced by the Israeli NSO Group, had helped repressive governments across the world spy on journalists, activists and lawyers on an unprecedented scale, the question emerged: Where was Russia? Russia’s government bodies — the secret services — are known …
Could a company from Russia, or with strong connections to Russia, ever be targeted by a SPAC? The question remained open until very recently, given the small numbers of international IPOs from Russia — the latest example in the digital field being Ozon in November last year. Such a player has now emerged, with Nexters …
A Russian action film with coded references to Russian politics became Netflix’s most-streamed film last week. The hero of ‘Major Grom: Plague Doctor’ is incorruptible cop Igor Grom who does battle with a mass-murdering IT billionaire bearing an uncanny resemblance to Telegram messaging service founder Pavel Durov. Netflix released ‘Major Grom: Plague Doctor’ — their …
