Kabakov Alexander Vladimirovich

Kabakov Alexander Vladimirovich

Alexander Vladimirovich Kabakov (April 8, 1987) - Russian entrepreneur, investor, media manager, expert in the field of communications.

Education

Alexander Kabakov graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy, Lomonosov Moscow State University with a degree in Political Science. Political Management and Public Relations. "

Biography

2006-2011

2006 - manager and producer of projects at the Internet company Newmedia Stars. With the participation of Alexander Kabakov, such projects were implemented as the launch of the business newspaper Vzglyad, the first video chat Preved.ru in Runet; Publishing house "Popular Literature," online game "Watch" based on the book of the same name by S. Lukyanenko.

2010 - Alexander Kabakov with partners created the Agency One digital communications agency, which in subsequent years implemented more than a hundred large projects and served such clients as Russian Railways, Aeroflot, Deutsche Bank, VTB. The agency participated in the election campaign of presidential candidate Mikhail Prokhorov and created the website of the Federation Council, noted by Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov among the best Internet sites of state authorities.

2011 - became a mentor and investor in the YouDo.com service, which received the Runet 2012 Prize a year later and was included in the TOP-50 of Russian startups according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Digital October.

2013-2015

2013 - Alexander Kabakov became the managing partner of the Typhoon Digital Development venture fund.

2014 - became the mentor and producer of the Russian crowdingvesting platform StartTrack, with the help of which 28 Russian companies raised 507 million rubles from private investors (as of August 25, 2016^[1].

2015 - co-founded NTechLab, which develops facial recognition algorithms based on neural networks. In the same year, the startup won the World Facial Recognition Championship The MegaFace, organized by the University of Washington. A year later, on the basis of the NTechLab algorithm, the well-known FindFace service was launched, which searches for people by photos on the VKontakte social network.

2018-2021

In 2018, NtechLab sold a minority stake to the Ruben Vardanyan Foundation and Rostec subsidiary RT-Business Development.

February, 2019 - Alexander Kabakov became an investor in the Ansaligy cosmetic project owned by Tina Kandelaki. Acquired a share of 30%.

In 2020, when the Emirati investment fund Mubadala and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) also became NtechLab investors, the founders lost a controlling stake in the company.

In 2021, after the next investment round at NtechLab, the shares of the founders in the company eroded and became smaller than the size of the blocking package.

As a result, in December 2021, the co-founder of the company, Alexander Kabakov, left the board of directors of NtechLab. Soon after him, the head of the neural network laboratory, Artem Kukharenko, left the organization.

2022: Leaving NtechLab due to executive disagreements

The founders of the Russian AI solutions company NtechLab, Alexander Kabakov and Artem Kukharenko, resigned due to disagreements with management and investors. This became known on March 30, 2023.

In an interview with Reuters, Kabakov and Kukharenko said they intended to close the Russian office of NtechLab and transfer all employees of the company to branches in other countries. At the same time, one of the founders of NtechLab left the Russian Federation in December 2021, and the other in March 2022, shortly after the geopolitical situation changed. At the same time, the company's management insisted that it continue to develop its business in Russia.

Kabakov and Kukharenko began to discuss the possibility of curtailing all projects in Russia after the appearance of information about the poisoning of one of the opposition leaders

Most of the shareholders supported the management, so we had no choice but to leave the company, "Kukharenko said.

The founders of NtechLab noted that they began to discuss the possibility of curtailing all projects in Russia after the appearance of information about the poisoning of one of the opposition leaders Alexei Navalny in August 2020. This event provoked an international and all-Russian resonance, and Kabakov and Kukharenko thought about changing their place of residence. The founders of NtechLab did not disclose any other details about their resignation.

Information about the departure of the creators of NtechLab first appeared in July 2022, but then the details were not disclosed: it was only said that this was due to questions regarding the company's further development strategy. The comments by NtechLab's two founders came after Reuters published a special report on law enforcement's use of facial recognition to search for and detain protesters and opposition activists. NtechLab's FindFace is one of the tools that allows you to implement this functionality.^[2]

Notes