Startup Community in Russia and Ukraine
SC
Russian Hot Startups List
The most outstanding startups with Russian roots, some of these companies are extremely successful, others are on their way to become stable and profitable tech businesses.
Type: Booking.com for tours and activities
About: Travelers and locals alike can connect with private guides and tour companies all over the world to find, personalise and book their own individual experiences and activities.
Key Facts: Winner of the TechCrunch Moscow 2012, 7000+ listings worldwide, 900+ cities, 120 countries, 16 employees.
Location: Munich, Moscow, Bari, Barcelona
Type: Collaborative browser-based white board.
About: Instead of the limiting framework like in Google Docs, you can use this to do almost anything while working on your ideas, concepts, design, project management.
Key Facts: Winners of the "Startup of the Year 2012".
Location: Perm, Russia
Type: Mobile app constructor for iPhone and Android
About: Free wordpress for apps.
Key Facts: Got the $1,5M investments from Russia's Life Group (Techcrunch info).
Location: Moscow
Type: Russian GILT (online shopping club)
About: Discounts of up to 70% off boutique prices.
Key Facts: 10M users, largest shopping club in Russia, $160M in revenue in 2011 (Bloomberg info), Total venture funding - $120M.
Location: Moscow
Type: Online game production
About: Entertainment and gaming company best known for developing the hit game Cut the Rope, which has been downloaded more than 250 million times by users around the world since its release.
Key Facts: The company has released three award-winning games to date: Parachute Ninja, Cut the Rope and Cut the Rope: Experiments. These games can be enjoyed on Android and iOS, HTML5, MacOS and Chrome. ZeptoLab was founded in 2010 by self-taught twins Efim and Semyon Voinov, who have been making games since they were ten (Venturebeat info)
Location: Moscow, London
Type: Russian KAYAK
About: Oktogo is the leading Russian online hotel reservations agency. Designed specifically for Russian travelers, Oktogo.ru offers over 4,000 hotels in Russia and over 250,000 hotels worldwide.
Key Facts: The Oktogo.ru website attracts over 1 million unique visitors each month. $15M in funding.
Was funded by leading European funds, Mangrove Capital Partners and Ventech Capital and angel investors, including Javier Perez-Tenessa, founder and CEO of Odigeo, Fabrice Grinda, founder of OLX, and Jose Marin, founder of IG Expansion.
Location: St. Petersburg
Type: Russian Facebook
About: Popular among Russian-speaking users around the world. It is especially popular in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Belarus, and Israel. VK has at least 195 million accounts. VK is ranked 25 in Alexa's global Top 500 and VK is second the most visited website in Russia, Ukraine. VK had an average of 43 million daily users.
Key Facts: Founded in Sep 2006, history of development is very similar to Facebook. Pavel Durov (CEO) is the Russian Mark Zuckerberg. Trying to aquire more users from Europe and US. VK canceled their IPO after unsuccessful Facebook XP. Crunchbase info
Location: St. Petersburg
Type: Russian StumbleUpon (discovering web pages)
About: Among a variety of social recommendation concepts, SurfingBird offers registered users an application to discover new sites based on declared interests and hobbies as well as on the ratings of like-minded members of the community.
Key Facts: Raised $2.5M in equity Funding, was founded in 2010.
Location: Moscow
Type: Online travelling booking site
About: Successful in Ukraine and Russia.
Key Facts: $10M in funding.
Location: Russia, Ukraine, USA
Type: Cloud-based service - makes free customer-service phone calls through web browsers
About: Zingaya offers this seamless voice calling capability to website operators – whether it’s a huge e-commerce enterprise or a startup company.
Key Facts: $1.15M in funding. Among the top 10 most innovative companies in Russia (Fastcompany website).
Location: Moscow, London
Type: Service to learn English online
About: Very popular and easy to use webservice.
Key Facts: $3M in funding, Award as the Startup of the Year 2013 in Russia.
Location: Moscow
Type: Russian Booking.com
About: Ostrovok.ru provides Russian consumers with hotel booking services and is Russia’s fastest-growing online travel company.
Key Facts: Has 200 employees. $13.6M in funding Ostrovok.ru is backed by a consortium of investors including General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, Niklas Zennstrom (Atomico), Peter Thiel (Founders Fund), Mark Pincus (Zynga), Esther Dyson (Yandex) and others.
Location: Moscow
Type: Online air travel booking site
About: Very popular in Russia, Ukraine and other CIS countries. captured 35 percent of the Russian online air ticketing market. It sells 100,000 tickets with a monthly turnover of $36 million (The NextWeb).
Key Facts: $9M in funding. Founded in May 2011.
Location: Moscow, London
Type: Social educational platform
About: The first social educational network in Russia that aims to create a single platform for all participants (teachers, students and their parents) in the education process.
Key Facts: More than 80% of Russian schools using any IT system use Dnevnik’s platform.
Location: St. Petersburg
Type: Social network game platform
About: PixAPI is a high-end social network game platform which allows quick launch of basically any game in major social networks. Pixonic published more than 40 games developed by 17 studios of 7 countries in 9 social networks via PixAPI platform. PixAPI allows to make the game ready and launch it in major social networks in 5-7 days.
Key Facts: $10M in funding.
Location: Moscow
Type: Location based voice message app
About: Talkbits is a fast and simple way to talk in realtime and be heard here and now.
Key Facts: $2M in funding from Runa Capital, Award as the Best mobile App 2013 in Russia.
Location: Moscow
Type: Russian Airbnb
About: TravelRent.com is an online booking service for short-term rental of private realty. The company helps travelers to find a place around the world for short stay and order it safely and quickly directly from the site.
Key Facts: $2M in funding from Fast Lane Ventures.
Location: Moscow
Type: "hologram" interactive screen
About: Displair air technology puts multimedia content in the air. Image (drawing, picture, video) is physically penetrable. The basis of image is thin cold stable air flow with tiny particles of water protected from the wind, produced by cavitation method. Displair is also empowered by the function of interaction with mobile devices that enables users to exchange files.
Key Facts: Displair is looking for partners in Silicon Valley, participated in CES 2013 in Las Vegas. Covered by TechCrunch, Mashable, BBC, Discovery, Wired, PCWorld. Displair also got is in top-5 technical projects of Plug&Play in Silicon Valley. $1M in funding.
Location: Moscow
Type: Mobile/social gaming company
About: Produces free-to-play games for such platforms as Facebook, iPad, iPhone, Android, Amazon, and Windows 8. The company has more than 400 employees and has numerous internal development studios that produce first-party game titles, and also publishes games from external developers.
Key Facts: Game Insight has released more than two dozen mobile/social titles to an audience of more than 120 million users in 24 languages, and has made its games available in more than 140 countries, including the USA, Russia, Japan, and Korea. The company has developed 15 active social games, 6 iOS titles, 6 Android titles and a fast-growing gaming platform andis looking to reach annual revenues of $150 million in 2012.
$25M in fundings.
Location: Moscow
Type: Yelp for dishes
About: Dish.fm lets you find the best dishes in any restaurant with confidence. It is a discovery engine for dishes powered by analysis of millions of reviews across the web.
Key Facts: $300K in funding from imi.vc, 3 month old, Best design award 2013 in Russia. Focuses on the US market. Now supports NYC and SF, but plans to cover entire US market.
Location: Moscow, San Francisco
Type: E-commerce widgets
About: Ecwid is free full-fledged shopping cart from the makers of X-Cart. It is a widget, so it can be easily integreted with any existing store and takes less than 5 minutes to set up.
Key Facts: $1.5M in funding, currently has over 100,000 customers in 174 countries, but given that about 40 percent of its customers are located in the United States. Currently has 18 employees, wants to open office in Mountain View, CA Techcrunch info , Crunchbase info
Location: Ulyanovsk, Russia
Type: Visual resume creation tool and career planning service
About: ResumUP generates a step by step career path based on your professional aspirations, network and experience to help you achieve your career goals.
Key Facts: ResumUP currently analyzes profiles for over 7.2 million people, founder and CEO Eugene Barulin, a Stockholm School of Economics’ graduate (The NextWeb).
Location: St. Petersburg
Type: Airbnb for logistics. freight and trucks matching service for b2b logistics
About: Carriers, shippers and forwarders exchange offers and work online. They give tools to manage lots of freight and trucks online from anywhere.
Key Facts: Founded in 2011. $1M funding from Runa Capital.
Location: Moscow
Type: Video time-tagging service
About: Users can collect, share and search most relevant video moments of online video placed on most popular platforms on Internet.
Key Facts: $2.7M in funding, 7 employees.
Location: Moscow
Type: First official online employer
About: Workle integrates into the internet new professions that one could not perform online before. A peculiarity of the project is dividing users into those who have work experience and into novices: the first group is tested before getting access to the Internet office, and the second can take specially developed integrated distance education courses. The courses consist of online lessons, tests, webinars, training exercises and adaptation system.
Key Facts: More than 80,000 of Russian residents have already been working with Workle. By 2015 Workle plans to provide jobs for 1.5 million of Russian people.
Location: Moscow
Type: Music discovery engine
About: Online music sharing platform that allows you to listen to music online for free, share it with friends through Facebook and/or to synchronise unlimited music with a phone or laptop - all for $5/month. (Financial Times)
Key Facts: 2M users with word of mouth.
Location: Moscow
Type: Siri-like for iPhone and Android, Windows Phone
About: The Speaktoit Assistant is a virtual buddy for your smartphone that answers questions in natural language, performs tasks, and notifies you about important events. The Assistant saves you time and makes communication with gadgets and web services easier and less stressful.
Key Facts: Crunchbase info
Location: Kazan, Russia
Type: Keep promises mobile app
About: PromiseUP is a mobile application for iPhone, which gives one an opportunity to bet one’s friends to keep their promises to you or dare them to fun and cool activities, giving them PromiseUP dollars if they keep the promises they make, and making them pay if they break the promises they make.
Key Facts: Founded in March 2012, $150K in funding.
Location: Moscow
Type: Web stock charts plus a community of investors
About: TradingView is an online community for investors and people who want to learn about the markets.
Key Facts: Founded in Sep 2010.
Location: Westerville, OH
Type: Image search, visual search
About: KUZNECH has invented technology to index and compare billions of images online by 150 parameters, including composition. Business strategy is to implement the technology in a number of vertical applications (as well as provide API to third-party developers) with primary focus on in-image advertising, e-commerce and social communications.
Key Facts: Founded in August 2011, $1.2M in funding, 20 employees.
Location: Sunnyvale, CA and St. Petersburg, RUS
Type: Family social network
About: Familyspace.RU is Russian family network with more than 700K users and online digital library of genealogical records. Familyspace allows:
- build online family tree
- store family photos
- remember family events and important dates
- communicate with relatives
- discuss and get feedback in blogs
- search in genealogical archives
Key Facts: Crunchbase info
Location: Moscow
Type: Russian Uber
About: Wheely is the minicab booking app for central London and Moscow. Has a fully-secure cashless payment system and free Wi-Fi in most cars.
Key Facts: $25K in funding from Yuri Milner and Pavel Durov.
Location: Moscow, London
Type: Social network about interesting places in different cities all over the world.
About: On Advizzer you can communicate with friends, explore new places, using your friends recommendations, comment and recommend each other new and really interesting places.
Key Facts: Crunchbase info
Location: Moscow
Type: Travel planning service for independent and experienced travelers
About: Plan your trip, share your travel stries with friends, find the best trip advices. Video
Key Facts:
Location: Moscow, Kiev
Type: Mobile app for tagging brands on the photos (Pose.com-like)
About: Very popular in Russia. TagBrand provides people with tools for tagging brands on their photos (even from social networks). We call this tag - brand-in (by analogy with check-in). Besides, people can ask each other what they should buy, wonder what things are on the photo and where to buy them, create their own online wardrobes and wish lists and much much more. TagBrand includes powerful web service and mobile apps.
Key Facts: Launched May 2011, $100K from Glavstart (Arkady Morenis). Participated at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012
Location: Moscow
Type: Inbound calls counter for any website
About: It is web-based, no-install and easy-to-start calltracking service that lets you know everything about phone callers:
- how many and what quality calls does your site bring to you.
- which marketing channel, Facebook, Google Adwords or… whatever, works for you and which doesn’t.
- which site pages are hot, bring you maximum calls.
- which search engine keywords give you maximum calls.
- which referrals work to generate calls.
Key Facts: Founded in 2010, Beta version. Funded by The United.
Location: Moscow
Type: Collects and analyzes JavaScript errors on your site
About: Developers are unaware of front-end problems that happen a lot in production. Errors lead to customer and money loss. Most users don't tell about problems, they just switch to another service. When somebody contact customer support on the problem, it is a real pain to get information. You have to ask a lot of technical questions. Qbaka automatically collects errors without user interaction. Whenever error happen, it is collected by Qbaka and developers get maximum helpful data to fix the problem.
Key Facts: $45K in funding, founders were developers in companies like VK.com, Yandex.ru, Qbaka won DeveloperWeek 2013 Award in San Francisco: JavaScript Top Innovator! (Info), Totally collected 20M errors, have several millions users.
Location: Moscow
Type: Audio-visual speech recognition
About: Technology that enables to recognize the movements of the lips thus simplifying the speech recognition. Interraction with every device with (iPhone, Skype, Smart home, smart car). Possible implementation in avia, space industries. Better than any voice recognition. How it works - Youtube video
Key Facts: Grant from Skolkovo Innovation Center on $165K.
Location: Kazan, Russia
Type: Virtual fitting room
About: VIPodium is a unique innovative retail technology designed to cope with the customer’s FIT/SUIT dilemma. Body scanning technology connects consumer’s measurements with a retailer’s inventory to offer detailed personal apparel recommendations. This “body” information helps you define your customer’s preferences to offer them what they really want and need.
Key Facts: Founded in the beginning of 2011, 25 employees.
Location: Moscow
Type: iPad app presenter tool
About: Penxy is an iPad app that allows the effortless creation of "talking slides" during real events. Wirelessly switch slides, broadcast them synced with your voice and then share your voice-enhanced decks with anyone.
Key Facts: $235K in funding, winner of the Web Ready 2012 Award (info).
Location: Moscow and USA
Type: Personal content curation tool for social media
About: Likehack is a personal content aggregator for active internet users, who spend too much time searching, filtering and reading content and want to never miss or lose cool links they are interested in. Very useful and free tool.
Key Facts: $150K in Funding.
Location: St. Petersburg
Type: software for trading on financial markets
About: In autumn 2008 the company entered the market for the Russian stock traders offering its line of products, During 2013, CoFiTe plans to enter new markets with the support of Seed Fund of the Russian Venture Company and Venture Partner "Minerva Capital Partners".
Key Facts:
Location: Moscow
Type: Develops and supports technical solutions for multiplayer browser games
About: Its proprietary Flash-3D engine, GUI and high-performance server technology allow developers to create unique browser games and applications for social networks, two areas where smart money and developer attention are focused.
Key Facts:
Location: Perm, Russia
Type: Geolocation sharing app
About: how it works - Youtube Video
Key Facts:
Location: St. Petersburg
Type: Monopoly for mobile
About: Cashsquare is an exciting new location-based gaming app that brings the most loved board-game features into the real world on your mobile phone and lets you experience an entirely new way of entertainment.
Cashsquare allows you to buy a tremendous variety of real venues from foursquare and earn rent as people check in at your venues in real-time! Cashsquare.
Key Facts: $125K in funding
Location: Moscow
Type: Social alarm app and service
About: The very first social alarm clock in the world. Social network of hundreds of thousand people who anonimously call each other in the morning, wake up and wish a wonderful day. Extremely popular in Russia and Ukraine.
Key Facts: $25K grant, 15 employees, want to expand to the US market using the name Wakie (http://wakie.com/), 51M registered users from CIS countriesю Won the Award as the Best startup from Forbes Russia and Runet Prize in Russia Techcrunch info
Location: Moscow
