Social games company Nival Network has raised $7 million in new equity capital from DST, 1C Company and Nival Group founder & CEO Sergey Orlovskiy at post-money valuation of $32 million, reported newspaper Vedomosti. The new shareholder DST invested $4 million for a 12.5% stake in Nival Network, the newspaper said. The other shareholders, accounting and multimedia software vendor, 1C Company and Nival CEO, Sergey Orlovskiy invested $1 million and $2 million, respectively. As a result, 1C and Sergey Orlovskiy will own 26.56% and 60.94% stake in Nival Network, respectively.

In December 2009, Russian online portal, Mail.ru merged with online games company Astrum Online Entertainment. In February 2010, Mail.ru acquired the remaining 30% stake in online game developer Astrum Nival, which was part of Astrum Online, from Sergey Orlovskiy.

Founded in 2008, Nival Network develops, publishes and operates free-to-play online games in Russia and former Soviet countries. The company has game development studios in Moscow and Minsk.

Nival Network develops and operates a leading Russian online gaming and social networking portal, ZZima.com with such MMORPG titles as Dragonica; Shaiya: Light and Darkness; Cabal Online, multiplayer racer Level-R, browser-based strategy offering Khan Wars 2.0, music game RockFree, and Prime World, online strategy game with social networking features.

In January 2010, Mangrove Capital and ABRT Fund invested $4 million in social games company Drimmi.

In 2009, the Russian online games market was valued at $238 million, of which MMOGs accounted for $210 million and casual games accounted for $28 million.

Opera Software, maker of the Opera web browsers for desktops, devices and mobiles, could build a web browser for kids. “We think about creating an internet browser for kids. It’s a secret, exclusive..,” said Opera Software Communications Manager in Russia, Vladimir Isaev in his recent interview to Runetologia. He added that the company thinks about adding extensions to the Opera browser in its future versions (similar to add-ons to Firefox).

The safe search engines and web browsers for kids include Ask Kids, KidZui, KIDO’Z, and our own Quintura for Kids.

Being the leading internet browser for desktop and mobile in Russia and Ukraine, Opera Software has decided to open an office in St. Petersburg, Russia. Headquartered in Norway, Opera has 5 employees in Russia who work remotely.

In May 2009, Opera Software bought Mobica Solutions of Poland for $2 million. Before purchase, Opera contracted consultants from Mobica.

In January 2010, Opera Software acquired mobile ad optimizer AdMarvel for $8 million, plus, an additional consideration of up to $15 million, subject to meeting certain financial targets over the next two years.

17 years-old Moscow student Andrey Ternovskiy, founder of  Chatroulette, one-on-one online video chat that connects random users, has received an offer from Russia’s leading Internet investor, Digital Sky Technology (DST) to buy a stake in his venture, according to Spiegel Online. Andrey did not accept an offer straight away, the story said.

Instead, the creator of one-man-venture Chatroulette is going to visit the U.S. to talk to venture capital investors. He received few hundred emails from venture capitalists as well as from Skype and Google. No wonder, Chatroulette daily usage skyrocketed to 1.5 million users, of which one-third comes from the U.S., by spreading entirely by word of mouse. The daily usage was only 500 users last November.

In February, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures was going to reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. It looks like he (or someone else) did. Spiegel Online, which called it “The Russian-American battle over Chatroullete” reported that Chatroulette could be valued between $13.5 million and $40.5 million.

After Facebook and Twitter, the Internet world is looking for the next big thing. Will Chatroullete be it?

Renault F1 Team has confirmed an agreement that Russia’s leading automotive brand, LADA, which is owned by AvtoVAZ, will feature the LADA logo on the chassis of the Renault F1 R30 race cars during the 2010 season. The agreement was signed in Moscow on March 1, 2010.

The LADA branding will also appear on the overalls and team uniform of Vitaly Petrov, the first ever Russian driver in F1.

Renault F1 Team Chairman Gerard Lopez said that the agreement marks another important step Formula 1 in Russia.

Gerard Lopez also said that through Mangrove Capital they have been actively investing in Russia over the last years and know the country well. Gerard added that it is an honour for the Renault F1 Team to spearhead Russia’s entry into the sport and to carry the LADA brand at the highest level of world motorsport.

World’s largest privately-held Internet security company, Kaspersky Lab is becoming the largest software and Internet company in Russia. Kaspersky Lab should be bigger than 1C Company, accounting and mutimedia software vendor with estimated revenue of $265 million in 2009 and Yandex, the leading Russian search engine whose revenue were just under $300 million in 2009.

Founded in 1997, Kaspersky Lab reported revenue of $391 million in 2009, up 42% from 2008. The company generated revenue of $188 million in Europe; $97 million – in EEMEA region, $80 million – in Americas, and $26 million – in APAC region. The revenue split was as follows: consumer products – $255 million, corporate – $109 million, and technology alliances – $27 million.

Headquartered in Moscow, Kaspersky Lab employs over 1,800 including over 600 software engineers (R&D) in Russia and regional offices in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Japan, China, South Korea, Romania and the United States.

Kaspersky Lab is #4 security software vendor globally, behind Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro. Its top consumer products are Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Anti-Virus.

In 2009, Kaspersky Lab entered IDC’s Top 100 of Worldwide Packaged Software Vendors as the fastest growing software vendor and the only Russian company in the list.

Kaspersky Lab is 50% owned by its co-founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky. Board Chairman and co-founder, Natalya Kaspersky owns a 30% stake in the company.

Leading IT service company in Northern Europe, Tieto has acquired Russian telecom consulting and system integration company T&T Telecom (formerly, Telecom Design) from its founder and CEO, Yuri Pesnya. Tieto first partnered with Telecom Design in March 2008. Tieto paid $10 million for 100% stake in T&T Telecom valuing its at 5 x EBITDA, according to newspaper Vedomosti.

Tieto plans to invest EUR 100 million in expanding its IT service business in Russia via both acquisitions of local IT service companies, opening own data center and R&D facilities in 2010-11, the newspaper reported.

Founded in 2002, Telecom Design completed 400 integrated telecom projects for fixed-line and mobile telecom operators, banks, outsorcing call centers and state companies. The company employs over 70 telecom consultants in offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Its major customers include Megafon, Vimpelcom, Svyazinvest, Delta Telecom, Comstar, Sinterra and Rostelecom.

The leading international entertainment production company Endemol has agreed to invest an undisclosed amount in exchange for a 51% controlling stake in Russian scripted production company WeiT Media. The company could have invested up to $30 million, reported Vedomosti. According to the agreement, WeiT Media will become producer of Endemol’s scripted and entertainment formats in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Launched in August 2009, WeiT Media currently produces sitcoms, soap operas and documentary series, and a sketch show for major Russian broadcasters, as well as two feature films and one full-length animated movie. Its 2010 revenues are estimated at $40 million. WeiT Media was founded by Russian producer Timur Weinstein. He sees the deal as strategic partnership that combines Endemol’s global scale, expertise and resources with WeiT Media experience in the Russian market.

In 2000, Timur Weinstein founded leading Russian production company Lean M where he was General Producer. In 2006,  Sony acquired a controlling stake in Lean M.

The first Russian driver in Formula One, Vitaly Petrov who started racing for Renault F1 Team in 2010 is going to be sponsored by LADA, the brand of Russia’s largest car producer AvtoVAZ.

Renault President Carlos Ghosn and AvtoVAZ Board Chairman Sergey Chemezov confirmed in Moscow today that the LADA logo will be displayed together with the Renault logo on the Renault F1 cars in the 2010 season. In 2008, Renault purchased a 25% stake in AvtoVAZ.

In his early career, Vitaly Petrov won the Russian LADA Cup in 2002. He also won the LADA Revolution Championship with ten wins in 2005. The Russian team LADA Sport competed in the FIA Word Touring Car Championship (WTCC) in the 2009 season.

Renault F1 President Gerard Lopez is Managing Partner at leading European VC firm, Mangrove Capital Partners that has invested in several internet ventures in Russia, including in Quintura.

Quintura powers site search on AvtoVAZ corporate website Lada.ru.

The online video platform and advertising company Digital Access, which was acquired by ru-Net Ltd of Leonid Boguslavsky in 2009, has launched ivi.ru, online video service for Russian internet users. The free service, whose design reminds of Hulu, will be monetized with pre-roll, post-roll, and video-overlay ads. The revenues from ads will be shared with content rights owners. ru-Net Managing Director Dmitry Alimov revealed that it invested several million dollars into project.

ivi.ru has over 9,000 hours of licensed video content from one hundred content rights owners, mostly from Russia, including TV channels TNT, CTC, MTV, Muz-TV, and Stream; cinema production companies Central Partnership and Amedia, and animation film studio Souyzmultfilm. Digital Access, which will exclusively sell video ads on ivi.ru, is run by CEO Anna Znamenskaya. Previously, Anna was Commercial Director at Rambler Media.

Digital Access expects the Russian online video advertising market to reach $10 to 12 million in 2010, up from $5 million in 2009.

The web server software Nginx served 7.5% of top servers across all domains in January 2010, ahead of Google with 7%, according to Netcraft. Apache and Microsoft held 53.8% and 24.1% market share for top servers across all domains, respectively. Nginx has been steadily gaining market share ever since first release in 2004. The growth accelerated in 2009 when nginx added more than 12 million web-sites.

Nginx serves over 15 million web-sites. It is being used by leading Russian portal Rambler.ru, as frontend IMAP/POP proxy by FastMail and load balancer by WordPress, among others.

The http, reverse proxy and mail proxy server software nginx [engine x] is free and open source. Nginx was written by one person, the Russian software developer Igor Sysoev. He is the only developer of nginx, according to his interview to Pingdom.

Igor Sysoev was born and grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He graduated from the Bauman State Technical University in Moscow in 1994. Igor Sysoev works at Rambler Media (the owner of Rambler.ru) as senior system administrator.

Launched in autumn 2009, the Russian social games startup, Drimmi announced last month that it raised funding from Mangrove Capital Partners and ABRT Fund with goal to become #1 Russian social games company. The amount of funding was not disclosed at that time. Today, Drimmi launches its web-site that offers some details on the company. The name “Drimmi” comes from “Dream”.

Drimmi recently released its first social game, Рыбное Место (Fish Place). The game, which is about fishing, is available for playing on Vkontakte, the biggest Russian social network with over 60 million registered users.

Nikita Sherman, Founder & CEO of Drimmi (pictured to the left) said in an interview to BFM.ru last week that Drimmi raised $4 million from Mangrove Capital and ABRT in the first round.

He also said that the company will need the second round before it will enter global markets, likely at the end of 2010. Based in Moscow, Drimmi already opened two games development offices in Russian regional cities of Bryansk and Tolyatti.

Meantime, Facebook and Zynga investor Yuri Milner, who is CEO of largest Russian internet investor DST, said he has $1 billion to invest in social media outside of Russia.  Next ones may be Twitter and Foursquare.

The leading provider of automation and virtualization software for cloud services, Parallels has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from Siguler Guff‘s Russian investment arm, Russia Partners, which led the round, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Founded in 1999, Parallels has numerous sales and business offices across the U.S., Europe and Asia and significant research and development operations in Russia. The annual revenues of Parallels exceed $100 million. The company, which has more than 700 employees, is led by CEO Serguei Beloussov.

In 2005, Parallels (formerly SWsoft) raised its first institutional round of funding from Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Insight Venture Partners. In 2009, Almaz Capital part acquired Insight’s share in Parallels.

In 2006, Siguler Guff & Company invested in EPAM Systems, global leader in software engineering services with offices in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Hungary. Russia Partners‘ latest fund, Russia Partners III with comitted capital of $626 million was raised in 2008.

The Quintura search destination on Quintura.com is very popular among Search Engine Optimizers (SEO) and Search Engine Marketers (SEM) as a visual-based keyword suggestion and research tool.

Today, we released a new SEO tool – Quintura SEOInfo for keyword extraction and more that demonstrates the Quintura technologies.

You can use the SEOInfo tool to extract keywords, build annotation and derive categories for an internet article or any text.

Simply, type in URL of the article and press “Process” button on SEOInfo. You can adjust a size of annotation and number of categories.

Two leading Russian online communities, video sharing site RuTube and online dating platform Mamba have launched online VideoDating on Love.Rutube.ru. 10 million monthly users of RuTube.ru can now search for user-generated video profiles across 12 million user database of Mamba.

RuTube and Mamba introduced cross-site registration and online communication for users of Video Dating (Видеознакомства), the first online video dating service in Russia.

Launched in 2006, the biggest Russian video sharing community RuTube was acquired by Gazprom Media in 2008.

Launched in 2002, online dating platform Mamba is owned by Finam (68.5%) and Mail.ru (31.5%). Mamba powers online dating service on Mail.ru, Rambler.ru, MSN.ru, and other portals. In 2008, Mamba generated revenues of $15 million with EBITDA margin of 47%.

The leading Russian private equity firm Baring Vostok Capital Partners (BVCP) is in final negotiations to acquire almost 50% of Riki Group, company that owns rights to the popular Russian cartoon series for children, Smeshariki, reported newspaper Kommersant. BVCP valued the company at $90 million and is close to purchase 45%-47% of the group and provide it with $10-15 million loan, the newspaper said.

First aired on CTC channel in Russia in July 2004, Smeshariki totals 260 episods. The cartoon series is filmed by animation studio Peterburg in St. Petersburg. Riki Group publishes educational computer games, books, and magazines. The group licensed its characters to more than 40 producers of goods for children and sells goods in a chain of 12 stores operating under the Smeshariki brand. The total sales of goods with Smeshariki names reached $190 million in 2009.

The Smeshariki (Смешарики) name is derived from “smeshnye shariki” (funny little balls). Smeshariki are stylized rounded animals. Each of the ten characters has a unique personality and range of interests. There are no negative characters among them. Their interactions are similar to the ones that children may encounter in their everyday lives.

In the U.S., Smeshariki is known as GoGoRiki and distributed by 4Kids Entertainment. The series was first aired in fall 2008.

In 2009, the creators of Smeshariki were awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation.

The international entertainment broadcasting Group MTG (Modern Times Group) of Sweden has acquired 50% of DTH satellite pay-TV platform Raduga TV operated by DaoGeoCom in Russia from Continental Media S.A., a company representing Raduga TV founders and management. The Russian startup Raduga TV was acquired in a year from its launch. According to newspaper Kommersant, the deal could be valued at $10 million. In September 2009, Gazprom Media agreed to acquire leading Russian pay-TV operator Tricolor TV.

Raduga TV will be folded into MTG-owned DTH satellite pay-TV platform Viasat Broadcasting that has 1 million subscribers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine.

Launched in February 2009, Raduga TV reported 70,000 subscribers at the end of 2009. Raduga TV offers a package of more than 50 TV channels including Viasat channels for RUB 300 ($10) per month on a 3 or 6-month pre-paid contract basis. The run-rate annual revenues of Raduga TV can be estimaired at $10 million.

The Raduga TV channels, which are encrypted with the Irdeto conditional access system, are made available through the Asian Broadcasting Satellite ABS-1 (75° East) Northern beam. It covers more than 90% of the Russian territory and is operated by Russian satellite operator Geotelecommunications.

In Russia, MTG owns 39.4% of CTC Media, which broadcasts free-to-air TV channels CTC, Domashny and DTV. MTG entered the Russian market in 2001 when it acquired 75% of Darial TV (now DTV).

The leading Internet group in Eastern Europe, Naspers/MIH Group, which together with DST (Digital Sky Technology) own the largest Russian online portal, Mail.ru is doing due diligence of assets of DST-owned holding Forticom, reported newspapers Vedomosti and Kommersant.

As a result, Naspers/MIH and DST could merger their Polish internet assets, instant messaging service Gadu-Gadu and social network Nasza-Klasa.pl into a single entity that shall reach over a half of Polish internet users.

In addition to social networks Odnoklassniki.ru in Russia and One.lv & One.lt in the Baltic countries, Forticom owns 70% of Nasza-Klasa.pl, the leading social network in Poland with over 23 million registered users. Forticom acquired majority of Nasza-Klasa in 2008.

Naspers/MIH Group owns 100% in Gadu-Gadu, the leading Polish instant messaging service with 15 million registered users. Naspers acquired Gadu-Gadu for $155 million in 2007.

Poland has over 20 million internet users, which is 52% of 38 million population. The internet advertising market in Poland was valued at $370 million in 2009.

The leading early-stage European venture capital firm, Mangrove Capital Partners of Luxembourg has confirmed its association with the Renault F1 Team. The firm said in its latest quarterly newsletter: “We are proud to announce our association with the Renault F1 racing team. This association will undoubtedly lead to new business development opportunities and play a role in helping us create the best business relationship network in the industry.”

Gerard Lopez, Managing Partner at Mangrove Capital Partners, is also director at Genii Capital of Luxembourg. In December 2009, Genii agreed to acquire a majority stake in Renault F1 Team.

Renault F1 Team just signed Russian driver Vitaly Petrov, the first Russian to compete in Formula One. Today, Vitaly Petrov made his debut for the team at winter car testing in Valencia. “This driver has the talent and we think that at some time that will help open up an interesting market. That’s someting that also appeals,” said Gerard Lopez about Vitaly Petrov to AP.

Mangrove Capital Managing Partner, Mark Tluszcz, Forbes Midas List #30 who’s speaking at Troika Russia forum in the Russian capital Moscow this week, twitted from there that “Russia is the largest Internet market in Europe – how can you not want to invest in this great country?” and “Entrepreneurs in this country are hungry“.

“Russia has proven to be a fast growing and dynamic market for social networks and gaming characterized by high levels of users engagement and strong monetization history. Mangrove [is] being in love with Russia”, said David Waroquier, Principal at Mangrove Capital Partners who leads the firm’s investments in Russian market. 

Mangrove Capital has invested in four Internet and technology ventures from Russia such as social games company Drimmi, online shopping club KupiVIP.ru, in-game advertising company Entermedia and visual search engine Quintura. The venture capital firm intends to make several investments per year in the country.

Drimmi just launched its first social game. KupiVIP.ru raised $20 million, the largest Internet venture capital round in Russia. Entermedia owns one of the most compelling technologies for in-game advertising. Quintura was awarded its 8th U.S. patent; licenses its search technology to online information providers.

Moscow and Silicon Valley-based Almaz Capital Russia Fund I, which is sponsored by Cisco, UFG and EBRD, has invested about $3 million for a 23% stake in the leading Eastern European casual games company, Alawar Entertainment. The 15% stake was purchased from Finam Capital Partners and the other 8% was purchased from business angel investor, Elcomsoft President, Alexander Katalov. This is the 2nd venture capital investment in Russian online games company over the past month after Mangrove Capital and ABRT Fund invested in Drimmi.

Finam invested about $1 million in Alawar in several stages in 2007. The valuation of Alawar increased several times to more than $12 million since that time, reported Vedomosti. Alexey Basov, Director of IT Investments at Finam and CEO at Begun, negotiated Finam’s investment and exit from Alawar.

Founded in 1999 by Alexander Lyskovsky and Sergey Zanin, Alawar Entertainment specializes in the development, publication and distribution of casual games. It is based in Novosibirsk, Russia with five development studios in different cities. Alawar distributes games to audiences in 60 countries worldwide through its own web-sites and online portals as well as offers a ‘white label’ solution for web-site owners to launch their own casual games sections. In 2009, the Russian casual games market was valued at more than $30 million. Alawar holds some 70% of the Russian market. More than a half of Alawar revenues come from USA and Europe.

Alawar published 24 casual games for PC last year, including Farm Frenzy 3, Vampire Saga: Pandora’s Box and The Treasures of Montezuma 2. The company also released 8 games for iPhone, 2 games for PlayStation 3 and several games for Android & Ovi platforms. In 2010, Alawar plans to enter the social games and MMO markets as well as expand onto other platforms.

Almaz Capital Russia Fund I previously invested in web-based ERP and financial software company Acumatica, mobile social network provider Apollo Project, virtualization and automatization software vendor Parallels, and search engine Yandex. The fund is managed by Almaz Capital Partners.