Skolkovo Foundation, the well-funded initiative of Russian government, with $4 billion allocated to accelerate country’s innovation development, has announced funding commitments from Bessemer Ventures and Cisco, as reported by TechCrunch.
Ukraine is planning to build a similar project called Bionic Hill, expecting to create 35 000 jobs and $1 billion annual revenue in IT and high tech sector. Real estate developer UDP is an investor.
Ukranian TA Venture continued to back Western startups, as it announced today. The latest addition to their portfolio is Inbed.me, a social network which allows people to book their travel accommodation and meet other travelers staying in the same hostel online. TechCrunch covered the investment announcement here. TA Venture joined a group of international business angels in the $1.2 million funding round.
Sarah Lacey at PandoDaily wrote a long piece on Russian Internet, focusing on Mail.ru and Ozon.ru. Here is a quote from the Russian private equity executive Elena Ivashentseva (Barings Vostok Capital Partners, early backer of Yandex and Ozon): “It’s just easier to make money elsewhere in Russia” on why the private equity firm did not create early stage venture fund to find more seed investment opportunities.
Yandex in the meantime is challenging Dropbox in Russia by offering 10 gigabytes of spaces to the users of Yandex.Disk, according to today’s story by Ingrid Lunden on TechCrunch.
Fast Lane Ventures sold its stake in Shopping Live (TV and Internet shopping channel) to the German Home Shopping Europe GmbH.
Polish educational app developer Next is Great has launched apps to learn to play chess, to program and to understand how machines work.
Poznan-based accelerator Huge Thing has been covered on EastIst, as Zuzana Fedorkova joined its mentor community.
Estonian GrabCAD raised some more money from Matt Mickiewicz, co-founder of 99Designs; Doron Reuveni, CEO of uTest and Ahti Heinla (Skype, Ambient Sound Investment). What’s more, to inaugurate its new office in Boston GrabCAD team will be joined by the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves (he does have a LinkedIn profile surprisingly, and I am only one connection away via Allan Martinson).
Enterprise Estonia applied for and won the contest to host MIT Global Startup Workshop (the last one in March 2012 was hosted in Turkey).
To wrap it up with, here is a video of an Estonian iPad band “Padman”. Nicely done, but why are they not singing into the Skype iPad app instead of a microphone? Happy Easter holidays, back to business on Tuesday the 10th of April.
