Immigram

Immigram is a British immigration startup founded by Russians Anastasia Mirolyubova and Mikhail Sharonov (they moved to Britain in 2016). The service helps IT professionals get a Global Talent visa, move to Britain, find an apartment and open a bank account.

History

2022: Winning the Helsinki start-up competition and revoking the award due to the company's owners' ties to Russia

In November 2022, Immigram won the Slush 100 pitching competition (held in Helsinki), thanks to which the company was supposed to receive 1 million euros from investment funds Accel, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA and Northzone, but this may not happen. The startup founded by the Russians was going to spend the funds on the development of its business in Britain.

Meanwhile, a message about checking the activities of the winning company was published on the event's Twitter blog. According to the organizers of the forum, Slush decided to annul their victory "in light of new information about the scale of the activities of the winners of the Slush 100 Pitching Competition  in Russia."

We had to check all contestants more carefully before allowing them to participate. Slush apologizes for this gaffe, it said .

Also, the organizers of the competition appealed to all investment funds that were supposed to transfer money to the project with a request to withdraw these funds.

Founder of Immigram Anastasia Mirolyubova

Immigram also announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy from the competition - he did this even before the announcement of the cancellation of the victory.

After winning, a huge amount of negativity, hatred and even personal threats fell on us - we consider this unacceptable. In this regard, we made and published a decision to withdraw from the competition before Slush's official statement. Despite this, we are proud of our performance and our victory, - said in the company

According to its own data, Immigram helped move more than 200 IT professionals by mid-November 2022. They got a job at the largest IT companies: Meta (recognized as extremist in Russia), Google, Samsung, Revolut, Atlas, Badoo and others.

In April 2022, Immigram raised $500,000 from Xploration Capital with the participation of PandaDoc founder Mikita Mikado, Joint Journey Ventures fund Sergei Dashkov, and business angels.^[1]

Notes

Шаблон:Remarks