Page 18 - bne IntelliNews Country Report: Russia Dec17

president Dmitry Medvedev appointed him to head the Skolkovo project, an international tech hub now under completion on the outskirts of Moscow.
Mr. Vekselberg is also a backer of Maxfield Capital, a venture fund, which has invested in numerous startups across the world, including Californian farming data platform Onfarm and Boston-based online security startup nCrypted Cloud . Among this fund’s portfolio companies is also NFWare , a startup with Russian roots that develops virtualization solutions for network infrastructure with the obviously Kremlin-inspired goal of entering the European and US markets.
Groupon — In 2010, this social commerce company secured a $135mn round of financing led by DST .
Hyperloop One , the Californian startup which aims to commercialize next-gen transportation technologies, has just received an undisclosed amount of Russian and Chinese state money via the Russia-China Investment Fund (RCIF). The Californian startup had already received funding from Russian investors several times in the past: once last year from the Russian sovereign fund RDIF and three times from Dagestani businessman Ziyavudin Magomedov , through his fund Caspian VC Partners (CVC).
Rocket Internet — DST Global injected several hundreds ofmn $ in this German startup incubator, becoming its second largest backer after Swedish AB Kinnevik.
Shazam — In 2011 the Russian state-owned fund of funds RVC participated indirectly in a $32mn round of financing for this famous London-based startup. The investment was made through Institutional Venture Partners XIII (IVP). Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as Shazam’s earliest investor, DN Capital, also participated in the round. In 2015, a privately-owned Russian fund contributed $8.5 mn to another Shazam funding round.
Spotify — In 2011 Spotify raised no less $100 mn from a consortium of investors which included DST, Kleiner Perkins and Accel.
Uber — The shareholder structure of this startup is a nest of Russianbnnaires, namely Alisher Usmanov, who discreetly invested several dozens of mns of US dollars in 2015 , Ziyavudin Magomedov, whose fund CVC presents the Uber stake as its “ first trophy asset, ” and Mikhail Fridman, which made a “strategic investment”of $200 mn in the company via his fund Letter One in early 2016. But not only that. In Putin’s homeland, the infamous US startup is making friends with two top Russian companies. One of them is Sberbank, the national savings bank, with which Uber agreed “to explore the co-development of financial technologies with global potential” some time ago, prior to accepting a capital injection from Sberbank’s corporate fund SBT Ventures. Uber’s second Russian accomplice is Yandex, the local Internet search giant which belongs to its founders and NASDAQ investors but not yet, most suprisingly, to the Russian state. The two companies have plans to merge their taxi businesses in Russia and several neighboring countries.
18 RUSSIA Country Report December 2017 www.intellinews.com