Exclusive - Yandex, the Russian search and online services giant, has become the first corporation to join the list of angel and institutional investors currently backing Seedcamp, Europe’s leading early-stage micro seed fund and mentoring programme. Yandex, which is one of the largest companies in Europe’s biggest Internet economy, has invested in Seedcamp’s second, 5 million euro fund.

The company thus gains an indirect stake in all the companies Seedcamp has already backed with the fund (20 existing ones to date) and all the startups it will back in the future, at least out of this fund.

Current Seedcamp portfolio startups include fledgling companies from all over Europe, like Vox.io, Milk.ly, Mopapp, Erply, TransferWise, Holvi and Checkthis.

Other investors in Seedcamp include business angels like Anil Hansjee, Alex Hoye, Lars Hinrichs and Pawel Chudzinski, as well as institutional investors like HENQ, Index Ventures, GIMV, Eden Ventures, NESTA, Atlas Ventures and Atomico.

Reshma Sohoni, co-founder and co-manager of Seedcamp, tells me:

Seedcamp is thrilled that a tech heavyweight like Yandex is backing us and is so dedicated to the European startup ecosystem.

We always hear about stories of US leaders and the active role they play as buyers, partners, dominators … so it’s fantastic to see Yandex being nimble and active in startup world, especially because it’s a homegrown European leader.

Companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft also support Seedcamp in a variety of ways, mostly by sponsoring, but this is the first time a major Internet company has directly invested in an early-stage fund / startup accelerator.

Neither Yandex or Seedcamp wanted to say how much the Russian Internet giant has invested in the fund, exactly, but a Yandex representative told me they invested the maximum amount Seedcamp would let them. From what I can gather, institutional investors pumped an average of 250,000 euros into the London-based early-stage investment firm for its second fund.

Now that Yandex has invested in Seedcamp, it will actively participate in the selection and advisement of startups, and help them (as well as Seedcamp proper) better understand the Russian market and identify market opportunities.

In addition, Yandex will occasionally make direct follow-up investments in Seedcamp portfolio startups, the company said in a statement to The Next Web.

In 2011, Yandex also kicked off its own seed investment program, called Yandex.Factory. The company says over 2,000 teams have applied for investment since the start of the program, and has so far backed about 5 of them.

There’s probably not a single person on the planet who thinks foreign-currency transfers are cheap, or even priced reasonably, unless he or she works for a bank.

Yet surprisingly, there hasn’t been that much innovation in the space so far. A new European startup co-founded by one of the people who joined Skype when it was still a cute little baby company aims to change all that, and they’ve received backing from some heavy-hitters who would like to see them succeed as well.

TransferWise, as the Estonian company is called, is today announced seed funding to the tune of $1.3 million for its crowdsourced money transfer service. The capital injection is one thing, but in this case it’s also worth noting who invested.

Backed early by Seedcamp, TransferWise has received new funding from IA Ventures, Index Ventures, PayPal and Slide co-founder Max Levchin in addition to a group of unnamed ‘strategic’ angel investors (including the people behind household names in the financial tech industry, such as Wonga, Betfair and PayPal).

Seedcamp participated in the funding as well, along with early-stage investment firms Kima Ventures and The Accelerator Group.

TransferWise’s mission is, or sounds, deceptively simple: to make moving money from one place to another securely and quickly at a minimal cost.

It employs a peer-to-peer model to get the best foreign currency exchange and transfer rate for end consumers, bypassing banks, and has already saved its early users over half a million pounds since its launch in January 2011.

All TransferWise money transfers are handled according to the real mid-market exchange rates that traditional, big banks receive on the interbank market, only they will charge a heap more for (often hidden) ‘services’ rendered.

Instead, TransferWise uses the mid-market rate, and charges only a low, nominal flat fee on small transfers (just £1 on transfers up to £300).

Currently, the startup only supports payments through its digital platform between the UK and eurozone countries, but they are obviously looking to expand to other currencies in the near future.

Importantly, TransferWise is licensed by the UK Financial Services Authority as an Authorised Payment Institution.

A video embedded below shows you how it works.

TransferWise’s early-adopting users include expats, international students, pensioners who moved abroad but also, increasingly, small to medium-sized businesses looking to steer clear of the red tape and high cost involved with money transfer today, the startup tells us.

TransferWise was co-founded by Taavet Hinrikus, who played an instrumental role in getting Skype off the ground back in the day after working as a product manager for Joltid, the company that basically invented the P2P content delivery network that is still the foundation of Skype today.

The other co-founder is Kristo Kaarmann, a financial services expert who previously spearheaded strategic efforts with Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The startup has set up shop in East London at TechCity UK.

Roger Ehrenberg, founder and managing partner at IA Ventures, will join TransferWise’s board of directors. Which makes sense:

Ehrenberg used to be president and CEO of DB Advisors, Deutsche Bank’s internal hedge fund trading platform, before becoming an angel investor, and later a venture capitalist. He’s invested in companies like bitly, Buddy Media, Clickable and TweetDeck and serves on the boards of Datasift, Metamarkets and Simple.com.

With this kind of backing, it’ll be interesting to see how far TransferWise goes in its quest to bring transparency to the world of foreign money exchanges and transfers.

Exclusive: Mopapp, a mobile analytics startup founded by – gasp – Italian entrepreneurs and backed by Seedcamp, has secured €1.5 million in funding from an unconventional investor, we’ve learned.

Mopapp basically helps mobile app developers and publishers get a better understanding of how their apps are doing performance-wise (in terms of installs, sales, upgrades, in-app purchasing behavior and more) across a variety of mobile platforms, application stores and devices.

Its solution is particularly useful to developers of cross-platform applications; Mopapp helps its customers track performance on iTunes, Android Market, RIM App World, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Amazon Appstore, GetJar and more.

The London-based startup has just closed a €1.5 million round with a company called CRIF, which delivers credit reporting, business information and related services to primarily financial institutions and insurance companies worldwide.

So why CRIF and not your traditional VC for the follow-up investment?

Explains Alessandro Rizzoli, CEO of Mopapp:

“The integration of CRIF’s expertise in the development of decision system algorithms in the finance sector will help us improve performance and speed up our analytics platform even more.”

As part of the deal, CRIF has signed a service agreement with Mopapp on the basis of which it will provide the startup with specialized personnel and know-how to accelerate its growth.

If you’re interested in watching – or participating in – the disruption of the financial sector through technology right before your very eyes, register for startup accelerator Seedcamp’s next Seedhack event, which focuses on ‘fintech’ or financial technology. You can also go just to have some fun, of course.

The hackathon-themed event is happening on the weekend of 30 March at Google Campus, the search and advertising giant new hang-out in Tech City, East London’s fast-growing technology hub. In fact, it’ll be the first event held at Google Campus.

For this Seedhack event, Seedcamp’s second of the sort, the European business accelerator is partnering with Anthemis and PayPal.

Says the organization, hoping to entice you to sign up:

We’ll help you on the way to becoming the next big thing by providing a load of APIs to hack on, a great set of mentors and engineers from the Financial industry, and some inspirational thinking courtesy of Sean Park, founder of Anthemis. We’ve planned every aspect of the event to create the perfect environment to innovate.

Participating speakers, APIs and startups include Anthemis, The Currency Cloud, Archivme, Bilbus, Holvi, Transferwise.

➤ Seedhack FinTech