Hivext secures $500,000 from Runa Capital for its Cloud dev platform

Hivext, a cloud-based application development platform, has secured $500,000 of funding from Runa Capital, the Russian VC fund that launched in August.

It follows Runa’s first investment announced last month: $2 million in OnAir3G, which is described as a “voice-enabled mobile social networking platform”.

Hivext, currently in Beta and 2 years in the making, is designed to give developers of cloud applications a “low-cost, independent means to create complex web applications” while at the same time significantly reducing time to market. It can be considered as a programming language-agnostic alternative to the likes of Microsoft Azure, Google Apps Engine and Heroku (acquired by SalesForce last week).

Scheduled for a full commercial release in Q3 (July to September) 2011, along with pre-configured infrastructure, Hivext’s platform will also offer a components library (authentication, user rights management, file storage, etc.), application templates and services library.

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”.