Invest-IQ

If you thought the investment landscape was drab and dreary, how about a mash-up between Facebook and Farmville? Farmeron, a Croatian company developing software for keeping profiles of farm animals, has just bagged a round of investment from 500 Startups. The company’s web-based farm management application helped them be a finalist at this year’s Seedcamp [...]

In what could turn out to be a nanotechnology-driven investment spree, RUSNANO this week led and closed a USD 79 mln round of investing in Quantenna Communications. The round was participated in by another new investor, Bright Capital. Other participants are all older investors: Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Sigma Partners are among six other [...]

American energy company SunEdison has just received EUR 155 mln in funding from three top organizations – World Bank Group member IFC, Overseas Private Investment Corporation and UniCredit Bank, Austria – to build a solar plant in Bulgaria with a capacity of 60.4 MWp, at Karadzhalovo. The site has been identified as being in Plovdiv [...]

nScaled, formerly called LegalCloud, has raised USD 7 mln from multiple investors including Almaz Capital and Doughty Hanson in a series A round of financing. The cloud-based ‘Recovery-as-a-Service’ (RaaS) provider will use the funding to increase its data center presence across the world, as well as for software development and sales initiatives. Peter Loukianoff, one [...]

California-based cloud computing firm Eccentex has secured USD 7.5 million in Series-A funding from a group of investors led by Russian investment company VTB Capital. Eccentex will use the money to expand the company’s operations in new geographies and continue developing case management capabilities for a broad set of industries. The investment was made by [...]

Super angel fund Speedinvest, based out of San Francisco, California, and Vienna, Austria, has already made four significant investments since its inception just over six months ago. The diverse investments range from online entertainment services to social media to VoIP vendors. In total, the company has pumped in about EUR 1 mln in these startups. [...]

San Francisco headquartered SaaS-based website security firm StopTheHacker has secured USD 1.1 million in Round-A funding from public and private investors, including early stage Russian venture capital firm Runa Capital and former Bluecoat chief executive Brian NeSmith. StopTheHacker (www.stopthehacker.com) StopTheHacker is a highly specialized web security and malware detection start-up founded by security specialists, industry [...]

State-owned Russian Venture Capital (RVC) is strengthening its position in the U.S. market with a USD 10 mln investment in the U.S.-managed Trident Capital, a USD 400 mln VC fund that operates in the technology domain. RVC has also invested in DCM VI, a fund managed by DCM, which is based out of Menlo Park, [...]

EPAM Systems Inc, Eastern Europe’s largest software development company, successfully completed its initial public offering of common stock at a price of USD 12 per share on Tuesday, Feb 7.  The company sold a total of 6 million shares to raise USD 72 million, falling short of the targeted 7.4 million shares at a price [...]

Troika Ventures, the venture capital arm of leading Russian investment bank Troika Dialog that is now part of Sberbank, has sold its stake in California based document software development Evernote. Troika had invested USD 4.5 million in a round A funding in 2009 and has sold its stake at over 10 times the original investment [...]

Eugene Kaspersky, the Russian tech entrepreneur who runs the world’s fourth largest and Europe’s largest antivirus company, will buy back the shares of Greenwich, Connecticut based private equity firm General Atlantic. Kaspersky Labs had sold a 20 pc stake a year ago for USD 200 million to General Atlantic when it was planning to launch [...]

British insurance major Aviva has sold its life insurance and pensions business in Romania and life insurance business in Hungary and the Czech Republic to MetLife Inc. The businesses had combined assets of EUR 57 million at the end of H1, 2011. The deal is expected to be completed before the end of 2012, subject [...]

Summify – a Romanian start up that uses social analytics data to create personalized news aggregation service for individual users, has been acquired by microblogging site Twitter. According to some analysts, this can be termed as talent acquisition by Twitter rather than a business purchase since Summify stopped accepting new users immediately after and will [...]

EPAM Systems, a global software development company with delivery centres across the Central and Eastern Europe region, announced the launch of its initial public offering. The company plans to offer 7,400,000 shares of its common stock at a price range of between USD16 and USD18 per share. Existing shareholders will sell about 5,882,353 shares while [...]

Networking vendor Vyatta has recently added to its board of directors Sun Microsystems ex-Chief Networking Officer Geoffrey Baehr. The move is assumed to be part of their strategy to enhance their cloud business, which is one of their three offerings to clients – cloud, physical and virtual networking. Baehr was formerly with Sun Microsystems for [...]

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has co-invested USD 1.4 million in US based technology startup company Flotype. Milner along with Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce, Ignition Partners and Y Combinator provided the seed capital to the startup that offers a suite of technologies for real-time communication between any platform and any device.

Russian venture capital RTP Ventures made investments in four US based companies in the last two months, including two series-A funding and two seed investments. RTP is the US subsidiary of Russian venture fund Ru-net and typically invests between $1 million and $10 million in target companies. Gridgain – developer of middleware application for Real [...]

Strategic Value Partners – a US based distressed assets investment specialist, has exited Polish personal care chain operator Polbita, five years after it had acquired Polbita’s parent company IWP International. The Polbita sale marks the third and final round of divestment of the IWP portfolio. The US alternative investment group had invested EUR 90 million [...]

Warsaw based leading operator of cardio-vascular treatment units – American Heart of Poland S.A. (AHP), has attracted global private equity firm Advent International for fresh capital infusion. The amount of investment in AHP remained undisclosed . As a precursor to the deal, AHP’s legal status was changed from a “Limited Liability Company” to a “Joint [...]

Russian search engine company Yandex is the largest investor (USD 15 mln) in a USD 30 mln round of financing for another search engine – Blekko.com.