Six Russian startups have attracted about €25 million in investments, said Ruslan Sarkisov, head of the Voskhod venture fund.
Businessman Vladimir Potanin of Interros, with the support of the russian state, created in 2021 the Voskhod venture fund, and the volume of its investments there will exceed 10 billion rubles over 5 years. Also he commits $1 billion for investments in high technologies.
Investments were attracted by: a company offering solutions for the development of hard-to-reach oil fields – “Lex”; a project on research and development of artificial intelligence for the analysis of medical images (tomography, X-rays and others) – Sciberia. A representative of Sciberia told the Russian business daily RBC that the money raised will be used “to expand the product portfolio and obtain the necessary certification”. Sarkisov notes that most of the companies in the assembled portfolio are already operating businesses with fairly large revenues, while Sciberia is “an earlier project, its solutions are only being piloted in Russian hospitals”. For example, the company has developed two diagnostic modules for lung and brain tomography image analysis, which detect COVID-19, lung cancer, signs of ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. The company is also working on products to detect breast cancer;
Project’s Qummy the name is derived from three English words – quick, quality and yummy, “quick, quality and yummy”). The company is positioning itself as “antifast food”: the foodtech startup launches “smart” cafes on the area of 2 square meters without cooks or kitchens, equipping them with ovens and freezers with frozen food (such solutions are offered, in particular, for hotels and gas stations). In March, Qummy CEO Evgeny Pisarev said that last year the startup received about $1.6 million in investment and tried to relocate a team of three or four people to the United States around that time: “Our product is more interesting to developed markets. We replace manual labor, which means we are useful in countries where it costs more. That is why it is more profitable for us to work in the U.S. and some European countries. In a conversation with RBC, Pisarev noted that the company plans to “grow fourfold in Russia over the next year” and “start exporting its products from Russia to Dubai and other countries” with the funds received.
Voskhod is focused on stakes from 10 to 49% with “active participation in strategic planning, corporate management, and business development,” Sarkisov points out, “In a number of areas in the new market conditions, we believe in the venture builder model and are working on launching projects and consolidating engineering teams on this model.” Among such directions he mentioned the market of new mobility, where “there are a lot of developments but no business.
Now the key areas for Voskhod venture fund investments are robotics (service and industrial), new mobility (drones, fuel cells, etc.), biotechnology and medicine, agricultural technology, “green” technology, microelectronics and optoelectronics, foodtech.