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bne June 2017 Companies & Markets I 15
con Docks due to the presence of many of the big US technol- ogy firms.
The fund is open to start-ups from all around the world, but more than a third of its hundreds of applications comes from Russia or Russian-speaking countries like Belarus and Ukraine.
“We try to attract entrepreneurs from international markets to come and set up in Ireland and we have had quite a lot of success with Russia,” Tom Early, senior investment adviser at Enterprise Ireland, tells bne IntelliNews at a recent Rus- sian iCham investment forum in Dublin.
So far, Early says the fund has attracted 12 start-ups from Russia. Of those, three have received the full funding package of €250,000 while the other nine are heading towards that level after receiving the initial €50,000 grant. A further five Russian companies have secured funding in the latest round.
One of those companies is EiraTech Robotics, a robotic picker for warehouses. The founder and chief executive Alexei Tab- olkin decided to relocate to Ireland after his Moscow friend Dmitry Simonenko moved his company InnaLabs, which makes sensors used in the aerospace industry.
InnaLabs, which relocated from France, is based in the same building as EiraTech in the Dublin suburb of Blanchard- stown, home to the European HQ of the online auction giant Ebay. InnaLabs hardly qualifies as a start-up any more. The company is firmly established with over 50 employees and
“We have had quite a lot of success with Russia”
in April secured a €1mn contract from the European Space Agency to produce a gyroscope-based system for satellite con- trol systems that will be used in future space missions.
Tabolkin says EiraTech has secured funding from private Russia-based investors, as well as the Irish state. The compa- ny’s robots, which are rigorously tested at its Dublin ware- house, shuttle up and down aisles selecting requested items from racks in a 500 square-metre simulated environment.
“Our robots transfer the burden and mundanity of stock pick- ing into a key competitive advantage,” Tabolkin explains to bne IntelliNews in an interview. “So not only does it slash costs for the customers but it also boosts productivity of personnel and improves their motivation and job satisfaction.”
Tabolkin is confident of closing the firm’s first orders after piloting their robotic system for retailers in the UK and Spain. And once the deals materialise the company should easily be able to raise further capital from both Enterprise Ireland and private investors, he says.
“Ireland is a great place for us to go international,” says Tabolkin. “It’s neutral, English-speaking, 30% cheaper than the UK and there’s a good pool talent with all our hardware guys from Ireland and all our software guys from Russia and Eastern Europe.”
The big US tech giants in Dublin, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Amazon, are providing a rich training ground for the burgeoning start-up ecosystem.
Google, for instance, has over 3,000 permanent employees at its Dublin office. More than 10% of those are Russian-speaking coders, engineers and sales execs and some of those are now leaving to set up their own companies.
“Google doesn’t encourage people to leave but they don’t seem to mind too much when it happens,” Alexander Belenky, a former Google executive in Dublin who recently left to join EiraTech as an adviser to the CEO, tells bne IntelliNews. “At
a certain point, it starts to feel like golden handcuffs. There is a fine line of how entrepreneurial versus corporate one can be even at Google.”
Cesanta is a company making waves with a play on the “Internet of Things”, developing software to enable network communication between devices or domestic appliances using secure connectivity. Their open-source operating system Mon- goose OS “democratises” microcontrollers’ programming by making software available to millions of developers for free.
The start-up’s founders, Russian Anatoly Lebedev and Ukrai- nian Sergei Lyubka are ex-Googlers in Dublin who hatched a plan to set up their own startup while at the US search giant. Another product called Mongoose Web Server Library is already widely used by companies like Intel, HP, Dell, Sam- sung, and even the US space agency Nasa.
Lebedev says the company, the offices of which look over Grand Canal’s Silicon Docks, is committed to staying and growing in the city even after securing funding from top US investors, such as Eventbrite founder and Airbnb advisor Kevin Hartz. The company even spurned a chance to move from Dublin to sunnier Silicon Valley due to the higher cost of living in California.
Cesanta initially lured six staff from Google – most of whom were native Russian speakers – as well as business developers from Twitter and Hubspot.
“The best engineers in the world are from Russia, so we had to hire the guys from Google,” Lebedev tells bne IntelliNews in an interview. “But it wasn’t always the way. When I came in 2007, there was less than 10 Russian speakers at Google.”
While he was at Google, Lebedev says everyone was constantly talking about leaving to set up their own thing. “You know the story about two guys in a garage – everyone desires it but not everyone goes for it,” he says.
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