This article was published on July 31, 2015

Your monthly dose of tech news from Eastern Europe: July


Your monthly dose of tech news from Eastern Europe: July

Eastern European entrepreneurs, investors and other ecosystem players didn’t seem to spend much time relaxing under the bright sun this month, but worked hard to make it to the headlines of tech media across the world.

We’ve compiled the most significant ones in one handy round-up to save your time, so that you could actually enjoy the weather.

If you think something is missing, or would like to draw our attention to an important story, feel free to ping the author on Twitter (@shlema) or by e-mail at [email protected].

Startups, funds, accelerators

Funding deals and M&A

  • Russian tech media group Rambler & Co has acquired a 51% stake in RCO, a major software publisher and service provider in the field of computational linguistics and unstructured data analysis
  • Lithuanian Practica Capital has invested €200,000 in the new fashion platform Newstory, accelerated in Startup.lt
  • Estonian smart home startup Comfee has raised €125,000 in seed funding
  • Russian-born Trucker Path has raised $20 million in funding to claim the Uber For Truckers moniker
  • Polish reward-card platform startup ZenCard has picked up €2 million from local investors
  • Estonian coModule has secured €500,000 in seed funding from High-Tech Gruenderfonds to bring mobile connectivity, data analytics and Internet of Things to the world of electric vehicles
  • First investment of Macedonian business angels has gone to WeLrn
  • Polish UXPin has raised $5 million in Series A funding
  • Estonian-founded Fits.me has been sold to Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten
  • Two Moscow entrepreneurs have raised no less than $2 million to “uberize” beauty industry in Russia and beyond
  • Latvia-based Adaplab has attracted its first investment of €50,000
  • Russian startup RetailCRM has raised a $600,000 Series A funding round from Edison.VC
  • Slovak company Infinario has concluded its indie game competition Get Funded: Fun 2 Robots and TinySOFT received €50,000 in funding each from LRJ Capital
  • Israeli social analytics startup Klear (a.k.a. Twtrland) has secured $1.5 million from Altair and TMT Investments, two international venture funds with Russian backers
  • Ukrainian online tutoring marketplace Preply has raised $120,000 in funding from TechStarts Berlin
  • Russian-born micro-learning startup Coursmos has announced it’s raising a $3 million Series A funding round
  • Ukrainian-Dutch startup GitLab has raised $1.5 million in seed funding Khosla Ventures, 500 Startups, Crunchfund, and others
  • Almaz Capital has invested in Californian startup MakeTime to “revolutionize US manufacturing
  • Slovakia’s Neulogy Ventures has invested in Meet’n’learn
  • Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has invested $100 million to find intelligent extraterrestrial life
  • New Russian fund B2B Lab will invest $2 million in B2B solutions until the end of 2015
  • Russia’s iTech Capital, Georgian Co-Investment Fund and DRW Venture Capital invested $20 million in BitFury
  • Russia-connected venture funds Titanium and TMT have invested in Israeli mobile “techy concierge” startup Drippler
  • Horizon Capital has invested an undisclosed amount in leading Ukrainian e-commerce site Rozetka
  • Russian-born fund iTech Capital has injected $3 million in social fintech platform TradingView
  • Russia’s Target Ventures has opened office in San Francisco, invested $13 million in P2P lending platform Prosper
  • Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich has invested in Israeli startup Anyclip Media
  • Russia-based Maxfield Capital has invested “up to $500,000” in California-based farming data platform OnFarm
  • Slovak Neulogy Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in SEAK, “an established lighting control company and an emerging player in intelligent LED lighting and energy saving”
  • CarPrice.ru has raised $40 million to develop online used car brokerage in Russia and beyond
  • German Internet services giant United Internet has bought Poland’s home.pl for €135 million
  • Czech antivirus company Avast has acquired Remotium, a virtual mobile infrastructure startup

Laws and governments

  • Russian taxi companies are seeking the imposition of restrictions on Internet-based taxi providers such as Uber
  • Russia has set out moon landing ambition, leaving Mars plans to NASA
  • YouTube has been given just days to respond to copyright infringement complaints or face blocking measures in Russia that for some could take down the whole site
  • Firms rethink Russian data centre strategy, as data sovereignty law nears activation
  • The U.S. Justice Department has won the case to seize $300 million in alleged bribes by Russian telecoms giants
  • Estonia and Finland will be the first two nations in Europe to develop a joint data exchange platform
  • Censor the censor: Facebook has targeted Russia’s Roskomnadzor official over hate speech
  • Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has unveiled a new public health program to reduce deaths and injuries caused by people taking dangerous selfie photos
  • Russian parliament has approved Internet privacy bill that would require Internet search engines to remove users’ personal information from their results, similarly to EU’s “right to be forgotten”

In other news

  • GlobalLogic, product development services company with R&D offices in Ukraine, Slovakia and other countries, has opened a new engineering centre in Krakow, Poland
  • Yandex has announced its financial results for the second quarter of the year, reporting a 14 percent rise in revenue but a massive 82% drop in net profit compared to the same period last year
  • Yandex also has launched Yandex.Delivery, an aggregator of service providers delivering goods from Moscow and the Moscow Region to any Russian region
  • Hewlett Packard has announced its decision to suspend production on the outskirts of Russia’s city of St. Petersburg
  • Russia’s largest classified website Avito.ru has reported $28.3 million in revenues in Q2’2015, growing 47 percent compared to the same period last year
  • Yota Devices has denied the widespread news that its next devices are going to run Jolla’s Sailfish OS; in other news, it has concluded its Indiegogo campaign raising $295,000 for its dual-screen smartphone YotaPhone 2
  • Intel has launched IoT Lab in Russia focused on smart buildings, smart cities and retail
  • Russia’s most popular social network VKontakte has launched a rival to Instagram

Good (long) reads from around the Web

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