Ukraine has been on my mind lately. The outsourcing industry is clearly suffering the consequences.
Russian Firrma reported that the shares of Russian outsourcing companies Epam and Luxoft lost $750 million in market value because of the events in Ukraine. According to my undisclosed sources large Ukrainian outsourcers are looking to diversify geographically. It is likely that we will see some acquisitions in other parts of Eastern Europe happening soon.
The startup scene has been relatively quiet, although Russian analogue of StumbleUpon Surfingbird has raised $2,5 million in Series B financing at the valuation of $10 million pre-money.
With $100K less, Bulgarian Flipps has just raised $2,4 million. I love this smart phone app that allows you to stream any video content aggregated by the app onto your smart TV screen. This is the future of the video content distribution in my opinion, and with 9 million installs Flipps is well-positioned to participate in that growth.
In Czech Republic Credo Ventures backed real-time TV rating startup TVbeat.Together with Episode1 the fund invested $2 million into the startup founded by a Slovenian entrepreneur Robin Farazin. TVbeat uses live data from connected set top boxes and other connected devices, turning millions of customer interactions into actionable insights. The platform can process data received from any TV platform, including cable, satellite, VOD and OTT, as well as IPTV.
That’s about all main news that came from the Russian and Eastern European startup scene in the past few days. I certainly notice the evening out of the startup activities. A few strong teams continue to grow but fewer and fewer seed-stage startups hit my radar screen. Quite possibly it is the realities of the region – going global from Eastern Europe is really not so easy as Latvian Ask.fm that has just hit 100 million users – makes it seem.
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