Last week, investment firm Siguler Guff announced the sale of Slice, a company in its portfolio, to Japanese online retailer Rakuten. Slice has developed an app that allows online shoppers to track their orders, manage their purchase history and analyze their online spending.
The project maintains a direct connection to Ukraine, as the main part of the Slice engineering team works out of Odessa, as reported by Ukrainian tech blog AIN.UA.
Unsurprisingly in the current circumstances, this Ukrainian presence is not mentioned on the startup’s website, and the investor’s press release mentions vaguely an engineering base “in Central and Eastern Europe.”
Judging from a job posting placed two weeks ago on a Ukrainian job site, the company currently seeks a senior manual QA tester at its Odessa location.
Revenue for the company totaled $4.9 billion and net profit exceeded $412.6 million in 2013. Slice was founded in Palo Alto, California, and one of its first investors was Google chairman Eric Schmidt.
The details of the deal between Rakuten and Slice have not been revealed. Over the past few years, the Japanese firm has invested several billion dollars in e-commerce projects in Asia, Europe, and North and South America.
