• The Geek Ventures fund was launched in December 2021 by the Belarusian angel investor Ihar Mahaniok and the founder of 3DLOOK, Vadym Rogovskyi. The fund is registered in the USA, and is focused on immigrant founders since its launch.
• Since 2021, the firm has invested in 35 companies, including Filmustage, Nomad Data and Spice AI. Four of them are Ukrainian startups Competera, V-Art, Propertymate, and Spokk, which were added to Geek Ventures’ portfolio during 1.5 months of the full-scale war.
• Geek Ventures Fund I will focus on immigrant tech founders at the pre-seed and seed stages. The amount of each investment will be from $50,000 to $1 million, the fund told TechCrunch.
• Geek Ventures founders began fundraising for the new fund back in October 2021, and planned to raise only $15 million. In June 2023, they managed to close Fund I at $23 million from over 70 LPs. One Way Ventures, Unshackled Ventures, BGV, and PandaDoc founders Mikita Mikado and Sergey Barysiuk are among them.
• Now, the team aims to use its first $23 million fund for one or two companies a month and is targeting 60 total investments.

Details

At the beginning of March, LLC Flo Health Bel changed its owner. Instead of the American company Flo Health, Inc., which owned 100% of LLC Flo Health Bel since August 2018, the Belarusian company is now privately owned. The company itself did not comment on the information about the withdrawal from Belarus.

At the same time, in March, according to devby.io, Flo’s Belarusian employees were asked to resolve the revocation issue by March 14, as well as were disabled access to corporate resources for those still in Belarus.

On the company’s website, there was no mention of the Minsk office for a long time. Also, there are no openings in Belarus. In the last few months, Flo has been actively expanding its team in Lithuania. During June-September, the staff of the Lithuanian office doubled to 245 people.

About the company Flo

Flo Health is a company with Belarusian roots that develops a popular app in the women’s health segment. It has headquarters in London, representative offices in the Netherlands and the USA, as well as development offices in Minsk (former) and Vilnius.

At the end of 2021, its number of employees was expected to reach 400 people (nearly 200 in Minsk). In the fall of 2021, Flo closed a Series B investment round. The total amount of the investment was $50 million, the company’s valuation reached $800 million, therefore Flo was about to become the next unicorn with Belarusian roots after PandaDoc.

The Flo app has been the most popular app in the App Store in the Health&Fitness category for the past three years. According to the company, the app already has more than 250 million unique users worldwide.

• Ciklum was founded in 2002 by the Dane Torben Mygaard. In 2006, he opened a subsidiary in Belarus called Ciklum Bel LLC (ТАА «Сіклум Бел»). A year later, it became one of the first residents of the Belarusian Hi-Tech Park, a special tax and legal regime for IT companies. As of 2019, Ciklum Bel LLC (ТАА «Сіклум Бел») employed 171 specialists.
• When the process of Ciklum Bel LLC liquidation will be completed, the Belarusian economy will lose not only a part of tax revenues, but also a large investor, George Soros. His Ukrainian Redevelopment Fund has owned a controlling stake in Ciklum since 2015.
• In Ukraine, Ciklum has development centers in Kyiv, Odesa, Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Lviv. According to the ranking of the 50 largest IT companies in Ukraine by the number of specialists, as of July 2022, more than 3,000 specialists work at Ciklum.
• Ciklum is currently expanding the geography of its presence in Europe. The company has recently opened delivery hubs in Romania and Bulgaria.

• Founded in 2017 by Riivo Anton and Gerri Kodres, Specialist VC is often the first institutional investor to its portfolio companies, investing alongside top local angel investors and unicorn founders. Previously, the fund supported mainly the startups from the Baltics region, but now it is expanding.
• Specialist VC focuses primarily on pre-seed and Series A rounds in B2B, SaaS, fintech, platforms, software-enabled hardware, Web3, and deep tech verticals. Its ticket size ranges from $250,000 to $3 million.
• Fund II will make over 40 investments in startups from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland. Furthermore, the new fund will also start investing in founders from Ukraine and Belarus who are building their businesses in the Baltics and Finland.
• In 2018, the previous Fund I made over 45 investments. Its portfolio included the unicorns Bolt and Veriff, as well as Starship, COMODULE, Monese, and NFTPort.
• Specialist VC is planning to have the final close of Fund II in May 2022.

• Founded in 2015 by Yuri and Dmitriy Gursky from Belarus, Flo’s solution combines an AI-powered menstrual and ovulation calendar, a women’s health feed, and anonymous chats. Besides, Flo offers pregnancy tips.
• In 2021, Flo had about 16 million unique downloads, surpassing the competitors, Keep with 12.5 million downloads and Fit with 10.5 million downloads.
• According to the company, in September 2021, it closed a $50 million Series B financing round, bringing its valuation to $800 million. Its investors include SDVentures, Flint Capital, Peter Thiel, and Natalia Vodianova.
• Flo entered the top 10 services originated in Belarus by revenue at the end of 2021. It amounted to $54 million, which is 80% more than the year before.
• As the company states, it has over 200 million installs, 43 million users, and more than 350 employees.

• Founded in 1993 by Arkadiy Dobkin and Leo Lozner, EPAM Systems is now the world’s leading provider of digital transformation and product development services for various organizations, educational, and healthcare sectors to make the interaction experience more comfortable for users.
• The company’s teams operate in more than 40 countries across five continents.
• According to Crunchbase, EPAM Systems Inc. is valued at $493.5 million. The acquisition of ENGINIETY follows the deal in December 2021, when EPAM acquired a Spanish provider of digital platform engineering and software development services, Optiva Media, for an undisclosed amount.
• Founded in 2009, ENGINIETY is a Gliwice-based company that provides commercial technology to the European market. ENGINIETY specialists help evaluate, select, and implement e-commerce solutions to create a consistent, flexible, and future-oriented system architecture.
• ENGINIETY’s clients include such companies as Vision Express, Nikon, Play, and TUI.
• The deal will allow EPAM to expand its capabilities to deliver end-to-end solutions for building e-commerce services and platforms for global organizations.

• Founded in 2018, Wizart develops a B2B2C platform for online DIY retailers and their customers based on computer vision/AR solutions. It helps users choose and visualize finishing materials and the company to shorten the transaction cycle and increase sales.
• Wizart’s €1.1 million funding was led by the Untitled Ventures, a venture capital fund financing early-stage companies. Fores Ventures, Advance Capital, Joint Journey Ventures, and Smart Partnership Capital also participated.
• Currently, the company provides over 1 million renders for some 100,000 users every month. The main sources of revenues are the US and Western Europe markets — about 55%; Eastern Europe — 20%, with the rest coming from South America, the Middle and the Far East, and Australia.
• Wizart isn’t alone in using AR. IKEA app, a pioneer in the market, and Austria’s Wikitude provide competition for the company. Thus, the company is taking a new approach — employing self-learning neural networks to continually improve its offer.
• The fresh funds are meant to strengthen Wizart’s position in the growing market and increase its presence in Europe.

1. Reduction in the VC investment activity

The investment support of Belarus was decreased by 21.8% and amounted to $36 million. The major part is taken by incoming investments, which increased by 45% to $32.1 million in 2020.

Meanwhile, the main increase in investment was driven by a $30 million funding round closed by PandaDoc, a San Francisco-based developer of software for the full cycle of the sales documents automation, in August 2020.

2. Deterioration of the investment climate

As explained by analysts, the deterioration of the investment climate in Belarus was caused by several reasons. On the one hand, the pandemic has significantly decreased business activity in the country. On the other hand, the political crisis in Belarus has caused an outflow of qualified personnel and growth of investors’ disinterest in its market.

3. IT is the leader of VC funds raising

In 2020, most financial deals were closed by startups and companies from the IT sector. They have totally raised 85% of venture capital investments, which is over $30 million. 

The leading position of IT in the structure of raising the VC funds is due to the high level of its development and resilience in the face of pandemic accordingly. The growing demand for IT solutions in 2020, as well as the variety of internal sectoral directions also played a huge role.

PandaDoc, $30M

Document automation solution PandaDoc has closed a $30 million Series B round led by One Peak Partners with participation from Microsoft’s (М12) Venture Fund, Savano Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners, and EBRD Venture Capital Investment Programme.

Founded by Mikita Mikado and Sergey Barysiuk, San Francisco-based PandaDoc company develops software for the full cycle of the sales documents automation from proposal to electronic signature and payment.

VOCHI, $1.5M

AI video editor VOCHI has received $1.5 million in a seed funding from the Ukrainian-based VC fund Genesis Investments.

VOCHI is an application for adding motion effects to videos. Users can select individual objects in Full HD and apply different effects to them easily in a real-time environment. The tool is available worldwide and supports 12 languages. 

EduDo, $170k

EduDo has secured a $170,000 pre-seed investment from private investors including Maksim Mikheienko and members of investclub.vc, an international club of business angels and VC funds that are interested in working with software early-stage startups from Eastern Europe.

EduDo is working on a mobile application with educational video content concerning various fields of knowledge for Generation Z. The project was launched in May 2020 by the Yury Shlaganov, and the product is planned to be released in autumn 2021.

Easy Bloggers, $150k

The Easy Bloggers startup has received $150,000 in a pre-seed funding from the members of investhub.vc.

Easy Bloggers develops an influence marketing full-cycle platform that is aimed to simplify work with opinion leaders. The platform helps businesses resolve their pain point – finding suitable bloggers for building a successful advertising campaign. 

GamePad, $65k

GamePad has raised $65,000 from the residents of the international early-stage club of business angels and VC funds investclub.vc including Volat Capital investments company.

GamePad develops the platform that launches full-fledged games with graphics written on the HTML5 in the Telegram messenger. All of them are working on external servers but displayed in the Telegram browser through the API.

AIN.TECH decided to find out what is happening with IT industry of Belarus right now. 

ІT before the elections 

Mutually beneficial tolerance – that is how relations between IT and the state can be characterized before the elections. The Belarusian tech sector is one of the key sectors in terms of its impact on the country’s economy and its place on the international scene. For Lukashenko, it is about 6.5% of GDP and foreign investment, and for the tech community it means non-intervention of the government.

In 2005 the state stimulated the creation of the country’s main IT platform – High Technologies Park, a special tax and legal regime that provides companies with benefits and special working conditions. HTP residents throughout the country are exempt from corporate taxes until 2049, including VAT and income tax, for example. The relocation of IT companies to Belarus and the employment of foreigners have also been considerably simplified. As of 2019, more than 750 companies were registered in the park, and their export value amounted to $2 billion.

The conditions created for the industry contributed to making Belarus the large outsourcing and product development centre which is known for its high-level specialists and relatively low prices. Such HTP residents as EPAM Systems, Wargaming, Viber, MSQRD, which was acquired by Facebook in 2016, and PandaDoc have only strengthened Belarus’ reputation as a country with a favourable environment for IT development.

But, as the architect of Decree No.8 “On the development of the digital economy” Denis Aleinikov emphasizes, Hi-Tech Park has been developing all this time rather due to the “implied agreement on the untouchability of the industry” rather than to the real government support. This “ecosystem balance” between the tech sector and the state was irretrievably disrupted on election day.

ІT after the elections 

On August 9, the problems with both mobile and fixed Internet arose all over Belarus. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook were blocked, Telegram worked through a combination of Wi-Fi and VPN only. There was no access to some information resources, websites of human rights organizations, including the independent observation site zubr.in and the Golos IT platform, and the search engines Google.by, Yandex.by worked intermittently.

While Lukashenko confidently denied the government’s involvement in the Internet shutdown, Belarusians started to go out with peaceful actions against rigged elections. The authorities reacted by beating up the participants, detaining and arresting them, and searching. In just four days of protests, more than 160 employees of IT companies were detained, and Minsk offices of Yandex and Uber were sought through by the representatives of theOrganized Crime Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for unknown reasons. After that, other companies transitioned employees to work remotely being afraid for the safety of their employees. This is what Viber and Wargaming have done.

The events over the last month made many Belarusian companies and specialists decide to relocate. This is not only about the financial losses of business, although they are enormous, but also about the absence of the supremacy of law and unpredictability in the country. All of the mentioned above demoralizes people forcing them to leave Belarus. Game development company Gismart has already made a decision in favour of temporarily relocating employees to its Kyiv office, Dmitry Lipnitsky, CEO and co-founder of Gismart, told AIN.UA in his interview.

PandaDoc case

The founder of the PandaDoc startup Mikita Mikado, together with the Belarusian Solidarity Fund, launched the Protect Belarus financial initiative to help law enforcement officers who want to leave the job. The project beganto gain momentum and within a month 942 people applied for support, 132 received payments for a total amount of € 198,000.

The government decided “to punish” PandaDoc for initiativity, although the company itself has nothing to do with the project. Two weeks after its launch, the Financial Investigation Department searched PandaDoc’s Minsk office, detained 7 people, some employees were searched in their houses. After that a criminal case was initiated against 4 PandaDoc employees for embezzlement of budget funds. They were placed into custody for 2 months, according to the SavePandaDoc website.

“Watching this hundreds, of Belarusian tech companies are opening offices abroad and moving. Tens of thousands of Belarusian tech workers are planning to move out. Thousands already have. This case is not only about saving four innocent people. It is about saving Belarusian IT sector. #savepandadoc = #savebelarusit”, summarized Mikado.

«Paradise for IT talents»

While Lukashenko is sincerely surprised about the dissatisfaction of specialists with the “paradise for IT talents” he has created, the OMON continues to arrest them, the FID – to terrorise companies with searches, initiate criminal cases against employees. This is the reality that is confronted by the tech sector and that forces it to make important decisions about closing or moving its businesses to other countries in the shortest possible time.

And yes, Ukraine is now at high-speed mode preparing opportunities for Belarusian specialists and companies to settle down here. More details about the conditions of moving IT specialists to Ukrainian cities can be found in the guide prepared by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, specifically about relocation to the capital can be read here.

EduDo is working on a mobile application with educational video content concerning various fields of knowledge for Generation Z. The project was launched in May 2020 by the CEO Yury Shlaganov, but the product has not yet been released on the market. Usually, investors do not give funds to a startup at this stage, but Shlaganov managed to convince them:

“Apparently, I managed to show the guys that EduDo is a story worth not just tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but billions,” he claims. The fact that Yury Shlaganov previously worked as an investment manager in Flint Capital and RBF Ventures funds also played a huge role. 

The startup will spend the proceeds to the finalization of the product, which is planned to be released in autumn. If the launch will be successful, EduDo wants to raise a new investment round in early 2021.

UiPath, $225M

The Robotic Process Automation company UiPath has closed its Series E investment round, raising $225 million at a post-money valuation of $10.2 billion.

The round was led by Alkeon Capital Management with participation from Accel, Coatue, Dragoneer, IVP, Madrona Venture Group, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Tiger Global, Wellington.

UiPath designs and develops end-to-end platform for hyper-automation, combining the  RPA solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable each organization to scale digital business operations quickly. 

Varjo, $54M

Helsinki-based Varjo company has closed a Series C round worth about $54 million.

The investors include Lifeline Ventures, Atomico, EQT Ventures, Volvo Cars Tech Fund and new ones, such as Tesi, NordicNinja, and Swisscanto Invest.

Varjo is creating the advanced VR/XR hardware and software for industrial use, merging the real and virtual worlds seamlessly together in human-eye resolution. 

Supermetrics, $47M

The data management and analysis tool for marketers Supermetrics has raised $47 million in a new funding round.

The round was led by Highland Europe with participation from IVP, Amit Agarwal, CPO at Datadog, and Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell.

Supermetrics is a SaaS tool that pulls data from various sources to use for web analytics, social media, and online marketing. 

Swappie, $42.3M

Helsinki-based end-to-end online marketplace for buying and selling refurbished smartphones Swappie has closed a $42.3M Series B funding round.

TESI, Lifeline Ventures, Reaktor Ventures, and Inventure are among the investors.

The company is aimed to refurbish iPhones using the latest technology and reducing environmental waste. 

PandaDoc, $30M

Document automation solution PandaDoc has attracted $30 million in a Series B financing round led by One Peak Partners. 

Microsoft’s (М12) Venture Fund, Savano Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners, and EBRD Venture Capital Investment Programme participated in the round.

Founded by Mikita Mikado, San Francisco-based PandaDoc company develops software for the full cycle of the sales documents automation from proposal to electronic signature and payment.

Quuppa, $23M

The global provider of Real-Time Locating Systems Quuppa has received $23 million in its first-ever round of funding led by Finland-based private equity fund Bocap and Tech Consulting Group TCG Oy.

The company develops a technology platform that provides real-time tracking with centimetre-level accuracy, which gives an opportunity for customers in a variety of industries to correctly and reliably locate Bluetooth-enabled devices.  

Infermedica, $10.25M

Digital healthcare company Infermedica has received $10.25 million in a Series A funding round led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Heal Capital. 

Existing investors Karma Ventures, Inovo Venture Partners, and DreamIT Ventures also participated in the round.

Infermedica develops machine learning and AI-tools for preliminary medical diagnosis and patient triage including Symptom Checker and COVID-19 Risk Assessment.

Kompany, €6M 

Austrian global business verification company Kompany has attracted €6 million from Fairway Global Investment and Global Brain as leading investors. 

Previous ones European Super Angels Club and the startup’s management team also participated in the round.

Kompany provides real-time audit-proof business verification data for business “know your customer” needs.

FitAdept, $260k

Polish provider of personal training FitAdept has attracted over $260,000 from AgriTech Hub and three business angels.

FitAdept develops the B2C fitness platform for conducting individual online workouts, as well as a network of personal trainers in Poland. 

AWSM Bank, $150k

Full-service banking for teenagers AWSM Bank has raised $150,000 from 500 Startups in the frames of the agreement with QazTech Ventures.

AWSM Bank is an edtech company that develops online-banking for teens. The startup is aimed to educate its young users financially, as well as their parents, by intertwining theoretical content with full-service banking.

GamePad develops the platform that launches full-fledged games with graphics written on the HTML5 in the Telegram messenger. All of them are working on external servers but displayed in the Telegram browser through the API. This means that by launching @GamePadBot, users can choose any game and do not need to be registered or download additional software.

There are three models of platform’s monetization:

1. In-app purchases. There is a universal currency called crystals that users can earn by inviting friends or buy, and then spend in any game. 
2. Advertising. 
3. Game subscription. With the subscription, users can turn off ads, for example.

As the CEO of GamePad Pavel Kuznetsov claims, the startup is planning to spend raised funds on traffic acquisition and further project monetization. By advertising on the different Telegram channels including European ones, GamePad is willing to gather an audience of 150 million people in three years.

AIN.TECH selected the Belarusian accelerators that support startups in their developing and scaling.

TechMinsk 

Founded in 2013 with USAID support, TechMinsk is the first startup accelerator in Belarus. 

For whom: Tech-based companies.

What is offered: It provides pre-seed and seed funding to and invests up to $50,000 to the best startups selected after the Demo Day of the two weeks program.

In June 2019 TechMinsk signed a partnership agreement with Google to support the growing startup industry and tech ecosystem in Belarus. The Google Launchpad program offers young tech companies from Belarus access to more than 600 international mentors and advanced Google technologies. 

Terms of participation: TechMinsk does not take equity from the startups. Application to the Batch 2020 is already closed.

For any further information, you can contact TechMinsk via e-mail.

Portfolio: MSQRD (acquired by Facebook), FriendlyData (acquired by ServiceNow) and PandaDoc.

KrokIT

KrokIT startup accelerator is a project of the “Future with us” business incubator.

For whom: IT startups from the CIS countries with a potential to enter the US, Chinese and European markets.

What is offered: KrokIT offers the guidance of experienced entrepreneurs, founders and experts from various fields for the startups on different stages – idea, MVP, sales, scaling. It also provides investments to the startups of up to $50,000. 

Terms of participation: The startup is able to choose the terms of the participation – to pay a fixed amount of $9,500 or to provide a 3-9% of shares to the accelerator.

Applications for the next program are accepted until September 8 here.

FTH.BY

The first Belarusian fintech and banking accelerator launched by Belgazprombank and Ten-X Company. 

For whom: A prerequisite for the participation is a presence of a well-developed concept, a prototype, alpha or beta versions of the product and first sales. 

What is offered: FTh provides participants with technological and service support from Belgazprombank and accelerator partners. Curator, mentors and experts supervise the startup at every stage of the program. The startup also has an opportunity to launch a pilot project or implement its services and products in the infrastructure of Belgazprombank, as well as other corporations and large companies-partners of the accelerator.

To enter the FTh accelerator you need to leave an application on its website.

Terms of participation: FTh does not take equity from the startups.

San Francisco-based company develops software for the full cycle of the sales documents automation from proposal to electronic signature and payment. The idea for PandaDoc came from a document automation tool Quote Roller that was launched in Belarus in 2011 by Mikita Mikado, PandaDoc’s CEO and co-founder, writes Crunchbase.

PandaDoc has offices in the US, Belarus and Philippines, 334 employees and more than 20,000 customers. As Mikado emphasized, more than 50,000 users were added after the company made its eSignature tool free in response to COVID-19. This step has turned it into “a lead magnet” and increased conversion on the website.

The attracted funds will be invested in further developing of PandaDoc’s eSignature tool, as well as expanding the team and customer base.

VOCHI is an application for adding motion effects to videos. According to its founder Belarusian developer Ilya Lesun, it was designed to satisfy the growing demand for mobile video content, in particular on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The tool uses computer vision and neural networks technology. Users can select individual objects in Full HD and apply different effects to them easily in a real-time environment.

Genesis Investments is a Ukrainian-based VC-fund with a focus on technology businesses from Ukraine, Belarus and Baltic countries. As explained by the CEO of Genesis Investments Vitaliy Laptenok, VOCHI has the potential to become a disruptive innovator because of bringing to application’s users the simplicity of self-expression through the video amid booming mobile photo and video content market.  

The application is available worldwide for both iOS and Android devices and supports 12 languages. The founders of VOCHI are planning to spend raised money on the further development and expansion of the application’s functionality – to create new effects and improve neural networks.

The startup has developed its data collection and analysis technology that allows the processing of millions of YouTube channels with minimum expense. As the CEO of Easy Bloggers Yevhenij Rozhko claims, cooperation with bloggers is one of the most effective promotion channels now. The platform helps businesses resolve their pain point – finding suitable bloggers for building a successful advertising campaign. 

“We are working on a full-cycle influence marketing platform. It will be possible not only to choose bloggers there but also to arrange business negotiations with them, sign the necessary documents, receive a detailed report on the results and make a payment with transaction security guarantee,” Rozhko emphasizes.

The capital startup has raised will be used for expanding the platform’s functionality and entering new markets. Currently, Easy Bloggers analyses only English-language Youtube, but within three months developers plan to add bloggers from the CIS and European countries. 

investhub.vc is an international club of business angels and VC funds that are interested in working with software early-stage startups from Eastern Europe. As of May 28, 2020, there are more than 50 members in the community from Belarus, Russia, USA, Netherlands, China, UK, Turkey, says Startup Jedi.