Opera Software

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The contextual advertising accounted for 86% of Yandex revenues. The display (banner) advertising accounted for 11% of its annual revenues. The remaining 3% of revenues came from Yandex.Money, software sales, and others. The number of Yandex advertisers was up 55% year-on-year to 120,000. Yandex holds 78% share of Russian contextual advertising market valued at $9.6 billion Rubles ($302 million) in 2009.

According to TNS Russia, Yandex increased monthly audience 29% year-on-year to 22.7 million users. Yandex is the 7th largest search property globally with 1.9 billion searches in December 2009.

The leading online display advertisers in Russia included Ford Motor, Honda, MTS, Megafon, and Peugeot Citroen.