Several venture funds emerged over the past few months with a specific focus on Eastern-European tech entrepreneurs operating across the world — offering new opportunities for Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs to develop their projects internationally.
Thus The Untitled, an established Russian venture firm, has raised €100 million for a new, London-based vehicle that will typically invest in startups with Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian founders.
“Russia and neighboring countries feature world-class programmers and high quality startups,” The Untitled co-founder Igor Lutz said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “Our new fund will take them to new markets, facilitating the creation or development of a Western legal entity, helping them attract Western investors, and supporting their business development.”
The fund will invest from €500,000 to €2 million in startups from such segments as artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, agritech, medtech, and data management.
On its side, Moscow-based Leta Capital is in the process of attracting $100 million for a new fund with a similar target — Eastern European tech entrepreneurs across the world — with plans to start investing by the end of this year.
According to Leta Capital’s in-house research, “more than 17,000 Russian-speaking and Eastern European IT entrepreneurs and start-ups are active in the UK, Europe and the USA.”
“These entrepreneurs are among the most dynamic and technically skilled in the world,” says Leta Capital — and their startups “often generate significant cash when it comes to ARR.”
Established this past spring, a new fund called NRG Ventures (‘New Russian Generation’) has the same interest in Eastern European entrepreneurs operating in foreign juridictions — essentially the USA and the EU. NRG plans to invest $500,000 on average in some 50 companies, from pre-seed to Series A.
An older generation of VC firms have also made funding available to Eastern-European tech founders globally — but without such an exclusive focus on this community. These firms include Almaz Capital, Gagarin Capital Partners, LVL1, Runa Capital and Target Global, to name just a few big names with Russian roots, as well as AVentures Capital and TA Ventures, which are based in Ukraine, and Acrobator Ventures, a Western-managed fund.
Additional private and public venture initiatives could be announced soon, targeting the region, East-West Digital News learned from industry insiders.
