i-Free, a global Russian mobile, digital finance and micro payment company, announced last Thursday the launch of its own internal venture fund to invest in IT startups. The new fund will provide financing as well as training and mentor support for seed stage projects – even to projects with “non-obvious monetization schemes” – and early growth …
St. Petersburg high tech company to fund Russian and foreign startups Read More
Palo Alto based Garage Technology Ventures is partnering with Moscow based incubator Digital October to invest in Russian high tech startups with international potential. The news was reported yesterday by Russian business daily Vedomosti based on exchanges with Digital October General manager Dmitry Repin and Garage Technology Managing Director Bill Reichert.
BIT, the most important national innovation contest in Russia, will hold its finale this Friday on the premises of Moscow business incubator Digital October. BIT — short for Business of Innovative Technologies — is an entrepreneurship competition organized each year to help innovative projects emerge from across the country. BIT selects “not only innovative ideas, but …
Through its PepsiCo10 program, multinational beverage and snack maker PepsiCo will offer £10,000, approximately $16,000, along with consulting services from leading specialists in the company and its partners to ten digital technology startups in 2011. Launched in the US in 2010, the PepsiCo10 angel investment program has been extended this year to cover Europe and …
PepsiCo extends angel investment program to Russian tech startups Read More
Rambler, the once prominent but now second tier Russian search engine, has announced on company blog on Thursday the establishment of a new venture fund named Rambler-Fund. The fund has been set up in partnership with media firm Afisha.
VTB Capital Asset Management announced last week it has invested in COMDI, a leading player on the Russian video conferencing market. Founded in 2009, COMDI specializes in web conferences as well as online training and broadcasts. Before this round of financing, COMDI was funded by its founders and an undisclosed business angel.
YEES 2011, a collaborative Russian-US forum dedicated to modern entrepreneurship and innovation techniques took place in Moscow last week. The forum gathered over 50 speakers from venture funds, scientific circles, government agencies as well as tech firms and Internet startups. Among them were high level representatives from Cambridge University, Google and Intel Capital as well …
Russia now has its own collaborative content discovery service for the Web, SurfingBird.ru. The site, inspired by the StumbleUpon concept, appeared just weeks ago and is still in the beta phase. Its distinctive ‘share’ button has begun spreading among Russian websites including some important ones like RuTube.ru, the top Russian video hosting service.
Prominent Russian venture fund Almaz Capital Partners has provided a round of financing for Tallinn based online dating service Flirtic, the latter reported in a news release yesterday. The undisclosed amount will be used for the development of Flirtic in Russian and English speaking communities.
Yandex announced earlier this week it will finance St. Petersburg-based Zenmoney.ru, a personal accounting and budget planning service. This seed financing round of an undisclosed amount will be made under Yandex.Factory, an investment program launched last April to help startups finance their product, prototype, or project development at the seed or early stage.
AlterGeo, a Russian startup inspired by the Foursquare concept, announced yesterday it has closed a third round of financing with Intel Capital, prominent Russian venture fund Almaz Capital — sometimes called the Almaz-Cisco fund, and U.S. angel investor Esther Dyson, who is involved in several Russian IT projects.
Russia’s leading online shoe retailer Sapato.ru announced today that it has raised $12 million in a third round of financing. Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment fund, led the investment round along with earlier investors in the project – Direct Group, a Western investment company operating in Moscow through its incubator FastLane, eVenture Capital Partners, the …
