There was Easter Friday, then Easter, then Easter Monday. Finally I am back to work. Not that I did not enjoy a couple of days off – but the news kept coming in throughout the weekend.
So, here is a brief round-up of the funding deals in Russia announced last week.
Maxfield Capital, founded by Alexander Turkot and Viktor Vekselberg, bought an equity stake in the Russian hosting and cloud services enablement solution company Parallels. This is an unusual deal for the seed and early stage Moscow-based VC firm, but according to Turkot, Parallels shows attractive growth, and there are synergies with other Maxfield portfolio companies (I covered one of them - Qbaka in 2013). The deal value is over $5 million.
Russian e-learning platform Netology has raised an investment from InVenture Partners, based on $5,6 million valuation. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed, except for the fact that it is a minority stake. The startup, founded in 2011, offers interactive video courses. The company has tripled its revenue in 2013: its business model is subscription-based. Funding will be used for implementing its mobile strategy and further content creation.
Impulse VC invested $800,000 in the contextual advertisement automation service eLama. eLama helps SME advertisers manage their contextual ads on Google Adwords and Yandex.Direct. The company has more than doubled its turnover every year, and has 1500 clients.
Ukrainian VC fund AVentures Capital, a Danish business angel Torben Majgaard (founder and CEO of one of the largest Ukrainian outsourcing companies Ciklum) and another Ukrainian fund TA Venture have backed Coppertino, the developer of MAC audioplayer VOX. AVentures has invested $400K in the Ukrainian startup in 2013. The size of the investment has not been disclosed.
