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, …
Darknet forums and Telegram channels have started selling databases containing the personal information of Russians who purchased fake COVID-19 vaccination certificates and forged PCR test results. Journalists at Kommersant spoke to one vendor who offered to sell them a database with 1,000 lines of information for $120. The file contained people’s passport numbers, insurance policy numbers, telephone …
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
The minimum amount to be deposited to Telegram’s new advertising cabinet is €2 million. But instead of global brands, the first ad messages promoted channels about cryptocurrencies, random news and stock exchange trading courses. The Russian-speaking audience and channel owners turned out to be dissatisfied and even outraged about the “innovation” – in their opinion, the ads, on the contrary, look …
Russian users outraged by first official ads appearing in Telegram 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 …
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the most popular multiplayer first-person shooter games around, and the unofficial CS:GO world title now belongs to Natus Vincere (NAVI), a team based in Kyiv (Kiev) comprising Russian and Ukrainian players. In the final game of the latest Major Championship tournament (held in Stockholm over the past two weeks), …
Russian-Ukrainian eSports team claims world title in Kiev Read More
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
The pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on retail and delivery markets. In Russia, e-grocery was among the most impacted industries: the number of orders in this segment increased by 174% y-o-y in the first half of 2021, according to Data Insight. Fast delivery has become one of the main trends in the food sector …
How the pandemic has impacted retail, logistics and delivery in Russia Read More
