Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 18th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
State owned VC fund Russian Venture Company (RVK), are launching a $65 Million seed fund in an aim to enhance the startup industry in Russia.
Set up in 2007, the fund is not only a fund within itself but also contribute seed capital to 6 other funds.
Igor Agamirzyan, General Director of RVK, announced at Moscow Venture Forum today that RVK will launch a “seed” fund of 2 billion Rubles (ca. $65 million), reported Vedomosti newspaper.
According tothe blog of visual search engine Quintura, RVK plans to fund 50 to 80 companies over the next 3 years and will invest up to 25 million rubles ($0.8 million) for a minimum 25% (more…)
Written on 23rd December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, especially when you’re a web professional. Not reindeers, but lists keep flying around your head. On The Next Web, we already presented the Five Favorite Apps – now it’s time to be more specific.
We have an international focus at this blog. When The Next Web launched on January 7th, we told you we wouldn’t limit our coverage just to the Valley. I think it’s safe to say we’ve kept that promise. Also when it comes to Russia. With the help of Yakov Sadchikov, we’ve covered almost every million euro deal, emerging trends, and cool start-ups coming from Europe’s largest Internet market.
Let’s celebrate that with a list of Russian start-ups that rocked the web in 2008. It’s compiled by Yakov, whose blog you should definitely check out. He’s the CEO of visual search engine Quintura and managed to get articles from his corporate blog on Techmeme, TechCrunch, and The Next Web on a monthly basis. How’s that for a successful blogger? Alright, here we go:
List by Yakov Sadchikov
- WomanJournal.ru, leading women-centric online site, raised €6 million from Ventech Capital, XAnge Capital and AGF Private Equity.
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KupiVIP.ru, online shopping club, raised several million dollars from Mangrove Capital Partners, ABRT Fund and Arlan.
- Tvigo (Tvigle.ru), online TV community and content production, raised $8 million from Moscow Venture Fund (Allianz Rosno Asset Management).
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EZtalk, mobile call-back service operator, raised $4 million from VTB Venture Fund.
- Mobile Direct, mobile internet advertising solution provider, raised several million dollars from Ru-Net II.
- MoySklad (LogneX), online inventory management solution provider, raised seed round from Ambient Sound Investments.
- MirTesen.ru, location-based social network, raised $5 million from Finam.
- JS-Kit, social application widget provider, raised $3.6 million from Altos Ventures and TEF3.
- EnterMedia, in-game advertising solution provider, raised first found from Mangrove Capital Partners and ABRT Fund.
- Evernote, provider of electronic note applications, raised $5 million from Troika Venture Fund.
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Written on 25th November 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday, I reported about a possible acquisition of Forbes by Russian investment fund ONIXEM Group. Rumors were stirred by an article from Russian newspaper Trud and spread rapidly through the blogosphere as soon as Yakov from the Quintura blog translated the article. With exciting though vague news like that, somebody needs to do some fact checking. Yet where to start?
Whenever something newsworthy occurs concerning start-ups, an email to its founder is quickly sent. But who do you contact when the news concerns major parties like Forbes and the ONIXEM Group? Why would they care to answer the call of a blogger?
Well-connected tech blogosphere
Om Malik
Luckily, the tech blogosphere as a whole is well connected. There’s always someone with an old friend at the right company. In the case of Forbes and its Russian connection, this “someone” turned out to be Om Malik.
An investor in Forbes
The famous tech blogger used to work at Forbes and sent a line to an old Forbes connection yesterday:
[..] I emailed Roger McNamee, who heads up Elevation Partners and is an investor in Forbes. His intervention got me a quick response. “Forbes absolutely denies this rumor, and has no knowledge of the source,” Forbes said in an emailed statement. “Forbes Russia is also not for sale to the ONEXIM group.”
Crowd sourcing fact checking
Behold the power of many. The tech blogosphere crowd sources its fact checking and even unravels mysteries about a Russian playboy and his desire to acquire a traditional American publishing house.
Photo credit: Thomas Hawk
Written on 24th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“When the economy is shrinking”, Yakov Sadchikov from Russian blog Quintura writes, “it’s a good time for private equity investors to buy assets at a low valuation.” Companies from his country are doing just so. News stories about Russian funds going on a buying spree frequently find their way to this blog. According to some recent reports, ONEXIM Group is about to acquire publishing giant Forbes.
Mikhail Prokhorov
The Forbes portfolio include the famous Forbes magazine and spin-offs like ForbesAutos. These publications will soon probably be in Russian hands. The ONEXIM Group, led by oligarch and playboy Mikhail Prokhorov, is one of Russia’s largest private investment funds – worth $25 billion – with a focus on mining industry, real estate, and energy.
Surviving
If the complicated acquisition will be completed, many people might dislike the fact a Russian company owns a traditional American publishing house. Yet in these harsh times, acquisitions by foreign parties might be their only way to survive.
Written on 7th November 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Rambler Media, mother company of popular Russian portal Rambler.ru, faces tough times. Their share of web searches has dropped from 15 percent in January to 8 percent now. To make things even worse, Rambler thought to receive $70.1 million in cash from Google for Begun – Rambler’s contextual advertising company – yet the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service refused Google’s application. Rumor has it that a man called Putin inspired the service.
As a result, Rambler Media has to lay-off fifty percent of its staff, Quintura reports. Sources say that divisions responsible for Rambler’s company non-core products will be hit hardest. Examples are telecom provider Rambler Telecom, photo sharing community Rambler-Foto, video sharing community Rambler Vision, and IT news site Ferra.
Written on 29th October 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
In an upcoming Internet market like Russia, it pays of to choose for the infamous European copy-cat approach (once invented by the Samwer brothers, had Freundefeed as the absolute peak). Yakov from Quintura reports that a Russian Vente-privee.com rip-off has raised a multi-million dollars round of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners and ABRT Fund.
KupiVIP.ru copied the shopping club idea of Vente-privee.com, : which has proven to be a success in several European markets. According to Wikipedia, the French company has around 5.7 million members. Award-winning eCommerce man, Founder and CEO Jacques-Antoine Granjon, employs 750 people and probably welcomed 2007’s year report with a smile (€0.5 billion turnover).
“What’s this unique shopping concept?”, I hear you ask. For starters, it’s an invite only store. If you want to join Vente-privee.com and KupiVIP.ru, you’ll have to ask an existing member for an invite. As soon as you’re among the club of happy spenders, a world of designer brand sales opens up for you. From grand cru wines to a Hermes bag, you can get it for a bargain.
So yes, consider it to be a safe choice for Russian industrial investment group Arlan to bring this unique shopping concept to a country which has fallen in love with consuming. The first round of funding is just the beginning.
Written on 30th September 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“Seriously, who’s still satisfied with Google here?”, Charles Leadbeater asked the audience of Picnic last week. The former advisor of Tony Blair told the crowd he was absolutely ecstatic when he first discovered Google in the nineties, but recently the search engine did nothing but disappoint him. One of the reasons he mentioned was the lack of context.
Had the team of Iterend been present at this presentation, they would have probably smiled since they’re developing a blog search engine which lets you search within certain time frames and categories. Isolated from each other, it’s not that interesting, but the combination leads to good results. Search in the category “Politician” and Iterend will return all articles mentioning a politician. You can then narrow down your search by clicking on the search tags left. There’s also the option to view related articles.
The idea of Iterend is good, but not original. The visual searching (tag clouds) are well executed by Quintura, Google Blogsearch uses the time aspect as well, and Technorati lets you search in related articles. Yet if you take the general function of an alternative search engine into account, Iterend does a good job with combining them and leading the way like a true pioneer.
But something tells me that the Luxembourg-based team wants to be more than just a bunch of pioneers. From their offices at the Technoport incubator in Esch s/Alzette, they probably want to build the next big search engine. I doubt whether they’ll succeed, simply because there are hundreds of developers trying to do the same. Together they’re showing Google the way, but on their own, their influence is limited.
Iterend is in private beta, so their index is not fully up to date yet, but there are still some invites left on the homepage.
Written on 5th September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Quintura’s blog often features in stories all over the blogosphere (read about their secret here), but now their product, the visual search engine, will be the talk of the day. CEO Yakov Sadchikov has just mailed me that his company has received several million dollars in bridge funding from leading European early-stage venture capital investor Mangrove Capital Partners as a part of new financing round.
The funding will help to scale the site search platform and grow monthly audience of Quintura Site Search from its current 8 million to 50 million in 2009. That’s quite an ambition, but the search engine is doing a good job already. Quintura offers its services to men’s magazine Maxim as well as tech blog ReadWriteWeb (talking about a diverse group of customers). But further growth is needed anyhow. In order to achieve this, Russian-based Quintura has hired Dennis Szerszen as US-based Chief Marketing Officer.
When I interviewed Sadchikov a while ago, he told me he aims for his product to be the “iPhone of search“. The search results already look quite good, but it isn’t such a visual spectacle as the famous shiny object yet. Sadchikov will need more money for that, that’s why he will use Mangrove’s capital for bringing in new venture capital investors as well.
Written on 25th August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yandex has changed its Roman character logo into one depicting the company name in Cyrillic. According to Yakov from Quintura, this means Yandex has become a househould name in Russia. The new logo, by design consultancy Art. Lebedev Studio must stimulate the rise of Yandex’s brand, which is on its way to becoming one of Russia’s best-known brands.
Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh
“Our technology is better suited for the Russian market,” Volozh told The Sunday Times. “We have brilliant mathematicians and programmers. We are very strong on data analysis and have developed better technology, which is cutting-edge in Russia. We are constantly inventing new programs to stay ahead.”
So there’s no world-domination tour coming up for Yandex. But why would they? Operating in one of the world’s most exciting Internet markets, the engine is attracting 8 million people per day to its site and holds a share of 55 percent. That’s the bases of their success story: the victory over Google, which only holds 21 percent of the Russian search market. Yes, Yandex is booming. CEO Arkady Volozh knows this, as he told The Times in an interesting interview that “in two years since Google opened an office in Russia we haven’t lost a single specialist to our competitors because Yandex is one of the best companies to work for in Russia.”
The Sunday Times article by Mark Franchetti proves an interesting insight in the career of Volozh, a mathematician who was 24 years old when he first saw a personal computer. Touchy subjects like goverment-supported oligarchs aren’t discussed though. Volozh only says he’s not considering a sale.
Written on 22nd August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you’ve been in Russia lately, you’ve probably seen an iPhone or two. Most of them were jailbraked, as Russia was one of a few large countries – including China – that haven’t welcomed the iPhone officially yet. According to Reuters, the number of these unauthorized iPhones in Russia will be as high as 700,000 by the end of this year.
A flood of legal iPhones is expected to hit Russia soon as well, since our friend from Quintura writes that he largest Russian mobile phone operator Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) has agreed with Apple to distribute the shiny object starting from October.
MTS is a major mobile player, it had more than 87 million subscribers at the end of July 2008, 62 million of them are from Russia. 17 million people access Internet from mobile phones in Russia, making the country ranked 4th in mobile phone penetration.
That’s an interesting country for a manufacturer of a 3G phone, why did it take so long? According to industry experts the biggest hurdle in talks with Apple was that Russian operators were not willing to give Apple a part of the iPhone revenue, in exchange for the exclusive sales rights. With that problem ironed out, Russians can almost – surprisingly quick actually – buy the fancy Apple toy.
State owned VC fund Russian Venture Company (RVK), are launching a $65 Million seed fund in an aim to enhance the startup industry in Russia.
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