Rostelecom to invest 30% of venture fund outside Russia, CIS
MOSCOW. April 14 (Interfax) - Rostelecom is setting up a corporate venture capital fund of 1.5 billion rubles, the Russian national telecom provider's director for venture capital assets, Alexei Kupriyanov said at a meeting of the Club of Friends of the Skolkovo IT cluster, a regular informal gathering.
"We're creating our own corporate venture capital fund of 1.5 billion rubles. We plan to invest 30 million-350 million rubles in startups in rounds A and B," Kupriyanov said to representatives of startups.
He said that the company plans to invest at least 70% of the fund in companies from Russia and the CIS, and the other 30% in startups in other parts of the world.
Rostelecom decided to set up the fund at the beginning of 2014, and its planned size has been revised repeatedly since then. In April 2014, company vice president Alexei Basov, who is in charge of this project, estimated the future fund would total $100 million-$150 million. Last December Rostelecom said it would total 1.5 billion rubles, and at the beginning of April company president Sergei Kalugin said the budget for the fund would be about 1 billion rubles.
The priority areas of investment for the fund will be projects in the area of import substitution of equipment and software.
"We would like to import substitute a great deal. Clearly there are difficulties in Russia with hardware components, but there are segments where there is no such big lag as in this area, such as the areas of software-defined networking, information security, GPON, DWDM equipment and others," Kupriyanov said.
Rostelecom is also interested in startups geared toward rapidly growing markets related to the operator's business and projects that could yield synergies between portfolio companies and Rostelecom's core business.
"A project should be potentially important for Rostelecom. It should be aimed at a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Otherwise, it will be too narrow, too much of a niche project," Kupriyanov said.
He said that Rostelecom would be able to offer the founders of portfolio companies additional opportunities to exit. In other words, the company will be prepared to buy out businesses it is interested in.
Kalugin said at the beginning of April that Rostelecom had already selected seven companies in which it plans to invest money from the venture capital fund. He did not name them, but said four of them manufacture equipment and three produce software. Kalugin estimated investment in each equipment maker at several tens of millions of rubles and investment in the software companies in the millions of rubles.
