Russian Mobile Software Startup to Receive $2 Million from Runa Capital

Based in Moscow, Russia, Runa Capital has announced on November 24, 2010, that it has planned to invest its first seed funding to OnAir3G, which is a Russian based mobile software startup. The investment is for $2 million for the company which is developing a voice enabled mobile social network.

Runa Capital was launched in August of this year and has had the goal of offering over $30 million in seed capital to promising Russian startups in the tech and software industries. Some of the sub-sectors in these industries include cloud computing, mobile technology, and software.

According to the managing partner of Runa Capital, Dmitry Chikhachev, the innovation that is going on in the mobile industry alone is good enough reason for investment opportunities in this sector. These new innovations have the potential to meet the unmet needs of mobile device users and a high ROI for Runa Capital. It is exactly for this reason why it is critical to provide seed capital to promising startups to allow them to prosper and enhance Russia’s tech industry.

The cofounder of OnAir3G, Andrei Vasilevsky has had a history of entrepreneurial endeavors. He founded SmartCom and then in 2007, sold it to Russia’s largest search engine, Yandex. SmartCom is an innovative mapping program that is used by millions of people to avoid traffic jams in most of Russia’s major cities. With OnAir3G, Mr. Vasilevsky aims to repeat the success of SmartCom and believes that the mobile social network that this new company is developing will go far.

To that, Mr. Vasilevsky stated that the current state of the global economy, the economic woes of large numbers of people may pose a challenge to new startup companies, such as OnAir3G, especially whith the development of new technologies. Runa Capital is absolutely amazing by being able to bring the needed seed funding to the company in such a short amount of time and has helped greatly. Furthermore, the fact that Runa Capital is able to bring a large amount of experience to the global stage in the tech, software, and internet industries and Mr. Vasilevsky also states that his company looks forward to work together with Runa Capital and is also proud that his company has been named the first to receive seed capital from Runa Capital.

OnAir3G will launch its operations in Russia in the second quarter of 2011, which falls somewhere between April and June of next year.