Page 22 - bne IntelliNews Georgia country report November 2017

Eastern Europe
November 11, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 22
Here are the most notable cases, by alphabetic order, as reported by East-West Digital News over the past six years:
Airbnb — In 2011 this startup raised $112 mn in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participa- tion from DST Global, which brought $40mn in the deal.
Alibaba — In 2011, DST Global led a consortium that invested $1.6bn in exchange for a less than 5% stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant. The fund sold a portion of the Alibaba stake in 2015 — estimating the return on his investment at 500%- 600% — and entirely divested its stake in late 2016.
Clearspring Technologies (AddThis) — In 2011 the Russian state-owned fund of funds RVC par- ticipated indirectly in a $20mn round in favor of Clearspring Technologies. This US company (later rebranded to AddThis and ultimately acquired by Oracle) facilitates content sharing through social and news networks. It processes a huge volume of data about what content is viewed, shared and clicked on by users. The 2011 investment was made through Institutional Venture Partners XIII (IVP), a later-stage venture capital and growth eq- uity firm which was joined earlier by a fully owned UK subsidiary of RVC.
Dropbox — In 2011, the popular US data storage service secured $250mn investment, a fraction of which came from Russian state coffers. The money also came through Institutional Venture Partners XIII (IVP).
Gawker Media — In early 2016, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, a California-based venture fund controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, acquired a minority stake in this company, one of the larg- est media players in the USA. Gawker owns seven media brands covering politics, technology, sports, car culture and other topics. The com- pany needed to strengthen its financial reserves as it was preparing for a costly privacy lawsuit. Vekselberg is a prominent and openly Kremlin- connected Russian billionaire. In 2010 then presi-
dent 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, includ-
ing Californian farming data platform On-
farm 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 obvioulsy Krem- lin-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 fund- ing from Russian investors several times in the past: once last year from the Russian sovereign fund RDIF and three times from Dagestani busi- nessman Ziyavudin Magomedov, through his fund Caspian VC Partners (CVC).
Rocket Internet — DST Global injected several hundreds ofmn $ in this German startup incu- bator, 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 In- stitutional 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.