Runa Capital, a new Russian VC fund that launched in August, has announced its first investment: $2 million in OnAir3G, which is described as a “voice-enabled mobile social networking platform”.
Notably, the Moscow-based startup is founded by Andrey Vasilevsky who also co-founded SmartCom, a developer of navigation software for Symbian, Windows Mobile and J2ME, which was sold to the Russian search engine and Internet juggernaut Yandex. However, little else is known at this stage as the company isn’t set to publicly launch until Q2 2011, aside from the fact that OnAir3G is in the mobile social networking space and is focused on voice communication over text.
But that isn’t stopping Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner of Runa Capital, from talking up the investment, describing OnAir3G as potentially “the next killer mobile application.”
Runa Capital is founded by Serguei Beloussov, chairman of Parallels and Acronis and is advised by Alexander Galitsky of Almaz Capital Partners. Its $30m seed fund is targeting early-stage Russian technology startups in the “rapid growth tech sectors” of cloud computing, machine learning, virtualisation and mobile/Internet applications, with the aim of helping local startups focused on these areas to “grow and compete at a global level”.
Runa Capital’s list of VC partners include Andreas Gauger and Achim Weiss, co-founders of hosting provider 1&1; Ilya Zubarev, co-founder of Rolsen and Acronis; Igor Borovikov, founder of the largest Russian software distributor Softline; Charles Ryan, chairman of UFG Asset Management; and Igor Daniloff, founder of the ‘Doctor Web’ antivirus company.
The companies that Runa Capital invests in are also supported by the Runapark business incubator.