In spite of massive market opportunities in Russia, some of the major venture capital firms from Russia made select investments abroad in fall 2011. Those VC firms include Almaz Capital, Runa Capital, RTP Ventures and VTB Capital.

RTP Ventures, the U.S. arm of ru-Net group of Leonid Boguslavsky, made early-stage investments in four U.S.-based companies such as Cake Health, GridGain, Koding and Tinfoil Security. New York-based RTP Ventures is headed by Kirill Sheynkman.

Almaz Capital, a Moscow-based venture capital firm of Alexander Galitsky, invested in Vyatta, a U.S.-based vendor of software-based networking for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures.

Runa Capital, a Moscow- and Berlin-based early-stage venture capital firm of Serguei Beloussov, invested in U.K.-based ThinkGrid and U.S.-based BigTime Software.

VTB Capital, the investment business of Russian banking group VTB Group, invested $5.5 million in aiHit, a U.K.-based provider of company data to the business information, market research and lead generation industries. aiHit planned to open a R&D office in St. Petersburg, Russia. aiHit was previously funded by Amadeus Capital Partners.

In September 2011, Russia became the largest Internet market in Europe with 51 million online users. Who are the top emerging internet companies that disrupt the Russian market. Find out below a list of top 10 Russian web startups of 2011.

1. Oktogo.ru

Having raised $5 million in venture capital from European early-stage investors, Oktogo.ru is #1 in Russian online travel. Russia’s ‘Booking.com‘ Oktogo.ru has not only collected the largest online hotel database in Russia but also baked it with user reviews from TripAdvisor.

Oktogo.ru CEO Marina Kolesnik is one of the most visionary female internet entrepreneurs from Russia.

2. ZeptoLab (Cut the Rope)

Russia’s answer to Rovio‘s Angry Birds, ZeptoLab‘s Cut the Rope reached 60 million game downloads in the first year from initial release without venture money.

Managed by Voinov brothers, Misha Lyalin and, from recently, Diana Moldavsky, Moscow-based ZeptoLab strives to leverage its Om Nom game character by releasing Cut the Rope sequel and branching out into comic books and plush toys.

3. Biglion

Heavily-funded by Tiger Global and Ru-Net, coupon service Biglion beats Groupon and other upstarts in the space in Russia. Biglion delivers the highest revenue growth in Russia’s internet history: from zero to $15 million monthly revenues in one and a half years. Biglion could be the next largest internet IPO candidate from Russia after Yandex in 2011 and Mail.ru Group in 2010.

4. Metabar

Metabar is the perfect example of how to turn a simple idea into a hundred million business. Founded by Yandex grad Michael Ushakov, Metabar offers browser toolbar creation service, just like Conduit. To grow fast, Metabar has raised $1 million from Runa Capital.

5. Nginx

It’s hard to beat Microsoft. Nginx did it. The lightweight, high-performance web server, reverse proxy and e-mail proxy software provider Nginx is #2 web server software on the Web, behind only Apache. Founded by Rambler refugee Igor Sysoev, Nginx raised $3 million from global venture capital investors to make it a commercial success.

6. Lamoda

Online shoe store Lamoda.ru is the first project launched in Russia by Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet with funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Group and Investment AB Kinnevik. Lamoda stands against competion from Sapato.ru and Ozon.ru who both closed massive VC rounds in 2011.

7. Surfingbird

Curation is a hot trend on the Web. So is web discovery. Backed by $2.5 million from the French and Russian investors, Surfingbird.ru delivers a web recommendation and discovery service to end-users. Is it better than StumbleUpon? 2012 will tell us.

8. GridGain

St. Petersburg, Russia- and Foster City, California-based cloud computing software vendor GridGain employs the winning formula for Russian startups: a software development in Russia and sales & marketing in the U.S.

GridGain closed $2.5 million Series A in November 2011 led by RTP Ventures, the U.S. arm of Yandex and Ozon.ru investor Ru-Net Holdings of Leoind Boguslavsky.

9. BabyBoom

Kids’ goods online retailer BabyBoom.ru finds itself in a very crowded market space in Russia unless a baby boom is really coming to the country. Index Ventures‘ seed fund seems to believe in it by backing BabyBoom. We will see next year.

10. KupiVIP

Online commerce is booming in Russia. Top 10 Russian web startup of 2009, online shopping club KupiVIP.ru made headlines in April 2011 when it closed $55 million round from Bessemer, Balderton and Russia Partners, the largest internet startup funding in Russia. In 3 years from launch, KupiVIP managed to become bigger than Ozon.ru, a 10-year old ‘Amazon’ of Russia. Time to market is a key!

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Tiger Global Management has invested some $25 million in the leading Russian coupon service Biglion, reported newspaper Vedomosti. Previously, Biglion raised funding from Ru-Net of Leonid Boguslavsky.

Launched in March 2010, Biglion offers coupons to 7 million users in more than 50 cities of Russia as well as in Kiev, Ukraine. Its annual turnover is estimated at more than $150 million. The company is reportedly profitable.

Biglion‘s closest competitors in Russia are Vigoda.ru and Groupon Russia (formerly Darberry) with annual turnover of ca. $100 million.

Russia has 51 million Internet users, the highest number of users in Europe.

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Click to download Quintura’s visual search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

Just in time for Christmas the Sochi 2014 online shop has been launched. The internet shop sells apparel, souvenirs, toys and school & office supplies with the symbols of Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.

The most interesting items include the Sochi 2014 Olmpic mascots: white bear, hare and snow leopard as well as Khokhloma souvenirs: matryoshka and kitchen ware.

Sochi 2014 online shop (shop.sochi2014.com) takes pre-orders and delivers in Moscow and across Russia.

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Click to download Quintura’s visual search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

The Russian startup Questli, which offers iPhone and Android app and browser-based quest games, has raised a new funding from Zurich-based venture capital firm Redalpine and private investors from Switzerland and Germany.

Questli was founded by CEO Danila Kozyatnikov in April 2011 with Redalpine‘s funding of CHF 200,000. Quest.li has a software development team in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, Russia and marketing team in San Francisco. Dan Kozyatnikov first met Redalpine partner Nicolas Berg via Le Web in Paris in December 2010.

By downloading Questli games to their smartphones, users can play quests along and against others to win prizes.

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Click to download Quintura’s visual search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

The Russian early-stage venture capital firm of Serguei Beloussov, Runa Capital has invested $1.5 million in Ecwid, according to both companies (via Yandex.News). Ecwid offers an online shopping application to sell goods on your own web-site or social network.

Launched in September 2009, Ecwid has over 100,000 registered accounts. Ecwid (E-Commerce Widgets) offers SaaS-based online shopping cart creation. Ulyanovsk-based Ecwid is headed by CEO Ruslan Fazlyev.

Moscow-based Runa Capital recently invested in BigTime and Travelmenu.

The acquisition of Cynapspro by InfoWatch is folded into a recent trend when a Russia-based software company acquires a Russian-founded international software company. First, LANIT purchased e-book publishing software vendor Evident Point. Then, Yandex acquired mobile software developer SPB Software. Now, the German-based endpoint data protection software company cynapspro is purchased by InfoWatch, a spin-off of Kaspersky Lab and leading global developer of enterprise data security solutions, according to RBC Daily.

Natalya Kaspersky, CEO of InfoWatch recently sold part of her stake in Kaspersky Lab to General Atlantic.

Cynapspro was founded and managed by Sergej Schlotthauer who graduated from a technical university in Moscow in 1994. German-headquartered cynapspro has a software development office in Izhevsk and sales office in Moscow. The solutions of cynapspro are used at more than 800 customer sites, covering over 450,000 endpoint devices.

The leading Russian search engine and contextual advertising company Yandex has made its largest acquisition to date. Yandex said it acquired SPB Software, maker of the world’s most popular paid mobile application, SPB Mobile Shell. The acquisition price is ca. $38 million. Build on SPB UI engine, SPB Shell 3D will become a foundation on which Yandex is going to build up its mobile opportunity.

Founded in 1999, SPB Software, which is headquartered is St. Petersburg, employs 75 in offices in Russia, Taiwan and Thailand. SPB offers a suite of popular mobile software applications for consumers, device manufacturers and mobile operators including a mobile user interface engine for smartphones and tablets.

SPB Software is headed by CEO Sebastian-Justus Schmidt, COO Vassili Philippov and CTO Yaroslav Goncharov. SPB is owned by its management.

SPB Software‘s mobile TV software SPB TV is not part of acquisition by Yandex. In October 2011, SPB TV was spun off into a separate company MobileWorld Media.

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Click to download Quintura’s visual search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

The developer of e-book software and firmware Evident Point has been acquired by LANIT, leading Russian IT group. Evident Point recently released e-book publishing platform Active Textbook. Previously, Evident Point developed software for Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

Founded in 1995, Evident Point Software Corp. is headquartered near Vancouver, Canada with a software development team in Moscow, Russia. Evident Point was founded by Yuri Khramov and Eugene Nizker.

Russia has become the market with the largest online audience in Europe. In September 2011, Russia had 50.8 million unique visitors. Russia overtook Germany with 50.1 million unique visitors and France with 42.3 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore.

Russia is now officially the market with the highest number of unique visitors online. Other top five markets inlclude the U.K. and Italy. The highest online user engagement was found out in the U.K, with users spending an average of 36 hours online last September vs. 22 hours in Russia and 24 hours in Germany. The Russian social network VKontakte showed the highest engagement among top properties, with users spending on average 7.1 hours on the site.

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Click to download Quintura search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

Angry Birds‘ cousin HockeyBird has been named the official mascot of the 2012 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship. The championship, which is the biggest annual winter sports event worldwide, will be held in Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Sweden in May 2012.

The hockey playing bird, Hockey Bird was designed by Toni Kysenius and Rovio Entertainment, the company behind Angry Birds.

Having reached over 500 million game downloads, Angry Birds has become one of the most well known Finish brands worldwide.

Angry Birds‘ global success is being followed by Cut The Rope and its character Om Nom from Russian game developer ZeptoLab.

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Click to download Quintura search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

The Finnish private equity firm CapMan, which manages Russia-focused fund CapMan Russia Fund L.P., has invested an undisclosed amount in exchange for a 29% equity stake in Lumex Instruments, a leading Russian analytical instrumentation company. CapMan Russia also plans to increase its ownership in Lumex to 44% during the next year. The founding shareholders of Lumex will hold the remaining shares.

Founded in 1991, Lumex develops and manufactures analytical instrumentation products for scientific, industrial and environmental control applications in the food and beverages, power and utilities, agriculture, chemical, and other industries. St. Petersburg-headquartered Lumex has a dominant market share in Russia and significant market share in a number of analytical technologies markets worldwide. Lumex generates 25% of its sales outside of Russia and CIS markets. Lumex, which has a holding company in Cyprus, holds production facilities in Russia and sales & service offices in Russia, Germany, China, and the US. Lumex is expected to generate sales turnover of EUR 11 million in 2011.

In July 2011, CapMan Russia invested in Expert Photo.

Russian-developed Nginx web server software company Nginx Inc. has raised $3 million in Series A equity funding from BV Capital, Runa Capital and MSD Capital of Michael Dell, the company announced today. The venture capital investors obtained less than 40 percent stake in the company, reported newspaper Vedomosti. BV Capital from Germany was the lead investor in the round.

The http, reverse proxy and mail proxy server software nginx (from engine x) is free and open source. It powers web servers of Rambler, Vkontakte, Yandex and others. The new funds will be used to develop commercial products based on nginx and set up a US office in San Francisco.

Nginx Inc. was founded in July 2011 by Russian software engineer Igor Sysoev, who has been developing Nginx software since 2002. Igor Sysoev first released Nginx to public in October 2004.

The web server software Nginx served 8.5% (43 million) of top servers across all domains in October 2011, ahead of Google with 3.5%, according to Netcraft. Apache and Microsoft held 64.7% and 15.7% market share for top servers across all domains, respectively.

Across active sites, nginx holds 11.3% market share vs. Microsoft’s 12.5% share. “If current trends continue nginx will soon overtake Microsoft to have the second largest number of active sites.” said Netcraft.

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Click to download Quintura search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

The global marketing communications group Ogilvy & Mather, part of WPP, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Promo, a Moscow-based digital marketing services agency.

Founded in 1997, Promo specialises in creating internet, mobile and multimedia campaigns for a variety of clients in Russia including Gazprom, LG and MTS. Promo reported revenues of ca. $3 million in 2010. Promo was one of the first digital marketing agencies in Russia.

WPP now employs 2,000 in Russia and generates annual revenues of $200 million in the country.

Runa Capital, the early-stage venture capital firm of Serguei Beloussov, has invested in BigTime Software (formerly Edison’s Attic), a Chicago-based software provider of timesheet for Intuit’s QuickBooks, the company announced.

Runa Capital Fund I joined $2.7 million Series A financing round with LTC Partners, Geneva Venture Investment Management, Hickory Grove and Howell Capital. The proceeds will be used for sales channel growth and marketing.

Founded in 2002,  BigTime Software offers a browser-based time, billing and practice management software as a service (SaaS) solution that connects to QuickBooks. BigTime was founded by Brian Sounders.

Launched in August 2010, Runa Capital Fund I has more than $70 million in equity capital commitements. Runa Capital previously invested in cloud-platform service for software developers Hivext in Moscow.

The online classifieds business Slando, which is mostly active in Russia and Ukraine, has been acquired by MIH Allegro, part of Naspers of South Africa. Slando was 20% owned by eBay and part of eBay Classifieds Group. MIH Allegro first signed an agreement to acquire Slando in May 2011. Slando was founded by Michael Pennington and Simon Crookall, the founders of Gumtree, the largest classifieds site in Britain with 14 million monthly visitors. The acquisition could be valued at more than $50 million.

Launched in March 2006, Slando has 11 million unique monthly visitors of which 6 million are from Russia and 3 million – from Ukraine. Slando is the 3^rd largest general classifieds business in Russia and the leader by revenue as well as the market leader in Ukraine.

Slando.ru faces major competion in Russia from AVITO.ru, OLX.ru (part of Naspers – majority-owned free classifieds network OLX) and IRR.ru, online version of classifieds newspaper Iz Ruk v Ruki (From Hand to Hand) owned by Trader Media East.

In August 2010, Naspers acquired 68% in OLX for $144 million. AVITO.ru was valued $66 million in November 2010 when it raised $26 million from Kinnevik and Northzone.

MIH (Naspers) owns a 29.1% stake in Mail.ru Group in Russia.

The private equity firm Baring Vostok Capital Partners (BVCP) has invested some $200 million for a 9% stake in 1C, the leading Russian software company, reported newspaper Vedomosti.

Founded in 1991, 1C reported sales turnover of more than $600 million in 2010. The sales are expected to increase by 20% in 2011. 1C focuses on development, distribution, publishing and support of mass-market software. 1C publishes 1C:Enterprise, the most popular ERP software for small and medium-sized businesses in Russia.

BVCP made an investment in 1C out of Baring Vostok Private Equity Fund IV. The fund previously invested in broadband telecom operator ER-Telecom. BVCP is an investor in Yandex and OZON.ru.

In January 2011, General Atlantic invested $200 million in security software vendor Kaspersky Lab from Russia.

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Click to download Quintura search apps for iOS, Android and Symbian.

The leading Russian search engine company Yandex, which completed $1.3 billion IPO on NASDAQ in May 2011, invested $15 million in Blekko, U.S.-based search engine company this week.

It’s not clear why Yandex, which is loosing its market share to Google in Russia, put $15 million for a small stake in a tiny search engine in the U.S market, which is dominated by Google. To better fight Google, Yandex could have been able to invest that kind of money in Russia-developed search technnologies of Nigma (‘WolpframAlpha‘ of Russia) and Quintura (‘Powerset‘ of Russia).

Yandex‘ search share in Russia decreased from 65% in May 2011 to 61% at the end of September 2011, according to Liveinternet.ru.

The shares of Yandex (YNDX) closed at $20.46 at NASDAQ last Friday, down from $42.01 in July 2011.

Yandex was the largest investor in Blekko‘s $30 million new equity funding round. Other investors included MLC Private Equity from Australia and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), CMEA Capital and PivotNorth Capital. According to newspaper Kommersant, Yandex obtained a 10% stake in Blekko as a result of its investment. Yandex CEO Arkadiy Volozh joined Blekko‘s Board of Directors.

Founded in 2007, Blekko‘s slashtags-based search engine was launched in November 2010. Blekko.com, which has only $224k unique monthly visitors (according to Compete), previously received $24.2 million in total investments. Blekko has a web index of 3 billion pages.

Web surfing and recommendation engine Surfingbird has raised $2.5 million in equity funding from business angel investors from France and Russia, reported newspaper RBC Daily. Surfingbird previosly raised $0.4 million.

Founded in 2010, Surfingbird.ru is currently in beta. Surfingbird, which is headed by Sergey Shalaev, plans to reach 100K daily users by the end of the year. It also plans to release browser plug-ins as well as launch the English version of its service.

One of Surfingbird‘s early investors is Pierric Duthoit, former CEO of WomanJournal.ru, Russia’s leading women-centric portal.

The Russian internet investment firm ru-Net of Leonid Boguslavsky, which has led $100 million OZON.ru investment, joined $60 million investment round in e-commerce platform MJ Group in Vietnam together with Rebate Networks of Germany and IDG Ventures Vietnam.

MJ Group was formed by merging Vietnamese companies Diadiem.com, online mapping service and Nhommua.com, online shopping service. MJ also includes mobile application company Two.vn and online advertising service Two Media. In 2010, Rebate Networks invested in Nhommua. IDG Ventures invested in Diadiem.

MJ Group has 500 employees in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. MJ is headed by CEO Tom Tran. Vietnam has more than 25 million Internet users out of 86 million country population.