Runa Capital II

History

2014: Creation of Runa Capital II venture capital fund

The volume of the venture capital fund Runa Capital II is $200 million. Investors of the first fund intend to form half of its capital, the second part is planned to be attracted from new investors.

Runa Capital II will make investments in technology companies and will focus on a later stage than the first fund - on round A up to $10 million. The expected volume of one investment will be from $3 million to $5 million. The fund will be led by Dmitry Chikhachev co-owners Parallels Acronis Belousov Sergey and Zubarev Ilya, a native of Goldman Sachs and UBS Bliznyuk Andrei, as well as American Peter Bauert, who previously worked at Parallels^[1]

The composition of investors in Runa Capital II will be similar to the first fund - it will include IT entrepreneurs from Russia, the USA and Europe. In addition, it is planned to attract several institutional investors, Dmitry Chikhachev told CNews.

The first Runa Capital fund was created in 2010. Its founder, along with Chikhachev and Belousov, was the founder of the Almaz Capital Partners fund, Alexander Galitsky.

Initially, the fund was $30 million, subsequently it was increased to $75 million, and then to $135 million. Among those who invested in Runa Capital were the founder of the hosting company 1 & 1 Andreas Gauger, the chairman of UFG Asset Management Charles Ryan, the founder of Softline Igor Borovikov, the founder of Dr.Web Igor Danilov and others.

On average, the first fund invested about $1-3 million in startups. Over the four years of its existence, about 40 startups worth about $100 million were invested.

The first Runa Capital fund will not carry out investments in new projects. The remaining money is reserved for additional investment of existing portfolio companies.

Among the startups in which the first Runa fund was invested are the developer of the popular Nginx web server, the e-commerce platform Ecwid, the developer of PaaS technology for Java Jelastic, the LinguaLeo English learning platform, the Дневник.ру educational platform, etc.

During its existence, the fund made three exits from investments: in 2012, Colt Telecom bought the British startup ThinkGrid, in 2014 CloudFlare acquired the StopTheHacker portfolio project, and Microsoft bought Captain.

Runa did not disclose the amount of funds received as a result of these transactions, specifying that the money was distributed among the fund's investors.

Dmitry Chikhachev explains the creation of Runa Capital II and the refusal to further increase the first fund by the fact that funds with increasing capital face the problem of assessing the value of the portfolio for the entry of new investors.

Successful funds, according to Chikhachev, are mostly serial: "Venture funds have been investing for four years, then raising funds in a new fund."

Most often, according to him, three funds are under management: one from which they are investing at the moment, the second in which the investment period has ended and exits have begun, and the third from which the main exits are already being made.

The investment strategy of the second fund Runa Capital will continue the current one: the focus will be on cloud computing, virtualization, mobile applications and IT solutions for education, healthcare, financial and public services.

The geographical focus of the fund will remain global, but priority will be given to the regions of Central, Eastern and Western Europe, as well as Turkey and Israel.

About 60% of the investments of the first Runa fund were made in Russia. In the second fund, the share of foreign projects will grow to half or even to 60%.

Notes