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16 I Companies & Markets bne June 2017 Both Cesanta and Profitero – another startup with Russian- speaking DNA – are widely regarded by analysts as the most exciting companies building product in Dublin.
Profitero, a Dublin-based provider of online insight and e-commerce intelligence for retailers and brands, raised $8m in funding in from Boston-based venture firm Polaris Partners three years ago and is rumoured to be seeking another round of investment so it can expand.
The firm monitors over 450mn prices in near real-time in 45 countries and counts retailers Boots, Waitrose, Spar, L’Oreal and Ocado amongst its customers. Its three founders Konstan- tin Chernysh, Dmitry Vysotski and Volodymyr Pigrukh hail from Ukraine and Belarus.
Gaming companies with Russian heritage, such as Playrix and Gama Games, are also trying to use Dublin as a launching pad into global markets. Retail analytics service Countbox has also relocated to Dublin, as well as the founder of Survival Russian App, a software company developing an application to teach Russian as a foreign language.
Numerous emerging Russian tech companies have left Moscow for foreign shores in the US, Singapore, Dubai, Latvia and Ireland over the past three years as the country struggles to emerge from its deepest recession since 2008. Repression of social media and fear for intellectual property has accelerated that trend.
Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, the state agency responsible for attracting foreign investment, was in Russia in last year meeting a number of companies and explaining why Ireland was the right place for them to do business.
“In recent years, we have seen increased investment from Russian companies and, as these firms grow, they have the potential to create several hundred jobs over the next few years,” Shanahan tells bne IntelliNews. “Ireland is proving to be an attractive location for Russian companies looking to expand their operations abroad and tap into the tech talent pool here.”
The Irish agency is also understood to have held talks with the Russian search engine Yandex and leading internet company Mail.ru about setting up in Dublin after Kaspersky Labs set
up its European R&D centre in Dublin last September. Kasper- sky, a global cybersecurity firm, is initially investing $5mn and
plans to hire 50 staff for its Dublin office. Meanwhile Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-controlled English-language TV sta- tion, set up a Dublin office a year ago headed by Ivor Crotty.
The appeal of Dublin for many of these tech firms is Ireland’s low corporate tax rate of 12.5%, its highly-educated work- force, ease of doing business, and greater access to markets and networks in the EU and US.
Enterprise Ireland has talked of “waves” of programmers and developers from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus relocating to work for Google, Facebook and Twitter in Dublin.
Dublin has also become a leading centre of companies involved in fintech, blockchain, traveltech and cybersecurity as the country undergoes a venture capital boom. Recent data
“Ireland is a great place for us to go international”
from the Irish Venture Capital Association shows that tech firms attracted that €900mn in funding last year, a 70% jump on 2015.
However, there are several clouds on the horizon for Dublin’s Silicon Docks. Not least plans by the US administration to lower their corporate tax rate to 15% and a desire by President Donald Trump to repatriate American tech companies and their jobs homeward.
The start-up culture is still in its infancy and it will take time to shape and to attract more serious angel and venture capital money to enable companies to achieve scale before selling out. Many start-ups laud the ease of doing business in Ireland but complain about infrastructure, such as the lack of affordable residential and office space.
“Ireland is doing good job at marketing itself and ranks well on the ease of doing business,” Alex Demenchuk, a former Rothschild banker from Moscow now advising several Dublin start-ups, tells bne IntelliNews. “Despite what already has been done, it needs further radical changes to keep up with the likes of Singapore.”
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