10 Russian start-ups that rocked the web in 2008

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

1. WomanJournal.ru, leading women-centric online site, raised €6 million from Ventech Capital, XAnge Capital and AGF Private Equity.
2. KupiVIP.ru, online shopping club, raised several million dollars from Mangrove Capital Partners, ABRT Fund and Arlan.
3. Tvigo (Tvigle.ru), online TV community and content production, raised $8 million from Moscow Venture Fund (Allianz Rosno Asset Management).
4. EZtalk, mobile call-back service operator, raised $4 million from VTB Venture Fund.
5. Mobile Direct, mobile internet advertising solution provider, raised several million dollars from Ru-Net II.
6. MoySklad (LogneX), online inventory management solution provider, raised seed round from Ambient Sound Investments.
7. MirTesen.ru, location-based social network, raised $5 million from Finam.
8. JS-Kit, social application widget provider, raised $3.6 million from Altos Ventures and TEF3.
9. EnterMedia, in-game advertising solution provider, raised first found from Mangrove Capital Partners and ABRT Fund.
10. Evernote, provider of electronic note applications, raised $5 million from Troika Venture Fund.

EnterMedia, Mangrove Capital Partners, Quintura, russia, TechCrunch, venture capital, Web search engine, Yakov Sadchikov

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Yandex IPO: forget about 2009, still on track for this year

Written on 4th September 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

The day before yesterday, rumors spread around the web about this year’s biggest tech IPO. Russian search engine Yandex wouldn’t want to go to NASDAQ this year, due to the unstable political situation in Russia. During a press conference, Russia’s most important investor sort of canceled the deal. As it turns out, it was a nice piece of wishful thinking. The Yandex IPO plan is still on track.

The Russian Internet insider news site Roem.ru reported that Finam just announced its market expectation. It wasn’t official information from Yandex. I guess things got messed up because of language barriers, and Profy got the wrong information. The high numbers mentioned in the post, an IPO of around 3 to 5 billion dollars aren’t correct either. We’re still talking about a $2 billion IPO on NASDAQ in fall 2008.

Finam, google, ipo, nasdaq, russia, Web search engine, yandex

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