Who are Facebook’s new investors, and more importantly, who’s investing in them?
Written on 27th May 2009
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Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Yesterday, Facebook confirmed Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian based investment company, had invested $200 million into the social network in exchange for 1.96%.
The investment values the company at a measly (sarcasm) $10 billion, $7 billion MORE than its previous valuation in April.
So who is DST and more importantly, who are the individuals behind the company?
Digital Sky Technologies has up until focused primarily on Russian-speaking markets. Its holdings reportedly hold over 70% of all pageviews in the Russian speaking internet, with a potential audience of over 300 million people. Its companies hold the #1 and often also the #2 and #3 positions in all CIS states, including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia.
Formed in 2005, DST was founded by Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, both of whom are majority owners of Russia’s Mail.ru, Russia’s most popular free email service and second most visited website and . DST is also sole investor in vKontakte, Russia’s most popular social network. Facebook is No. 59 in Russia and has roughly 200,000 users in the country, but it has 200 million users worldwide.
Yuri Milner is CEO and Founding Partner of DST. He was a Russian physicist who graduated from Moscow’s state university, and subsequently conducted research at the Institute of physics in the Russian Academy of Sciences between 1985 and 1989. In 1990, he left to study for an MBA at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Back in Moscow, Milner joined Menatep, followed by the World Bank where he was involved in the development of the financial sector in Russia.
In 1996, he was responsible for the first tender offer for a public company in post Soviet times. Yuri subsequently started investing in the Internet sector in 1999.
Yuri has held various management positions in Russia since, including the CEO of Mail.ru between 2001 and 2003, Currently, Yuri serves on the board of directors of Mail.ru, vKontakte and Forticom.
Gregory Finger graduated from the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering in 1988 with a specialization in automated control systems. Between 1992 and 2005 Gregory was the head of the Moscow office of New Century Holdings (NCH), the largest Western financial investor in the Russian speaking and Eastern Europe markets. (more…)
Written on 23rd September 2008

There’s a new loner in the wild west of Russian search engine land, where millions of dollars are spent and 



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