Almaz Capital is a global
VC fund headquartered in
Portola Valley,
California,
United States investing in early stage, capital efficient technology companies in high-growth sectors. Almaz Capital focuses on disruptive
deep tech companies in b2b software space, including
AI/
ML and
Blockchain applications,
IoT
and Edge Computing Enablers,
Cybersecurity, etc. Since its foundation the firm's portfolio has included about 50 companies, with more than 300 million US dollars invested in them.[1]
Almaz Capital is headquartered in
Portola Valley, California, has an office in
Berlin and representative offices in offices in Kiev (
Ukraine), Warsaw (
Poland) and other Central and Eastern
European countries.[2]
Almaz Capital's partners are Alexander Galitsky, Geoffrey Baehr, Pavel Bogdanov, Charles E. Ryan and Aniruddha Nazaré.
History
In 2004,
Cisco approached Alexander Galitsky, former scientist and technological entrepreneur who was appointed as president of the first Tech Tour [3] in East Europe — a specialized forum in which international investors visited countries with growing venture markets and got to know local
startups,[4] and offered him financing to establish a
venture fund to invest into East European
startup companies. Galitsky selected the bridge fund model and has focused on investing in and connecting Eastern European startups creating promising technologies for global markets with western companies that can benefit from engineering resources in Eastern Europe.[5][6][7]
Alexander Galitsky founded Almaz Capital in 2008 together with three partners: Charles Emmitt Ryan, founder of
United Financial Group [
ru], senior advisor at
Deutsche Bank and former CEO of Deutsche Bank Russia; Peter Loukianoff who was working for Alloy Ventures and Pavel Bogdanov. Geoffrey Baehr,[8] a former General Partner at US Venture Partners (USVP), who used to curate joint projects with Galitsky in the 1990s when he was
CNO at
Sun Microsystems later joined Almaz Capital as advisor. In 2011, Loukianoff resigned from Almaz Capital and Baehr became fund's fourth general partner.[6][9][10]
Funds
Almaz Capital Fund I was backed in 2008 with a capital of $72 mln. Among its investors, Almaz Capital I attracted $30 million from
Cisco and more $20 million were given by UFG partners. After a year, a third investor appeared in the Fund — Еuropean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) who invested around $20 mln. The first fund’s activity was focused on the search for interesting projects within the territory of CIS countries to be in demand in the global market.[6][11][12]
In 2013, Almaz Capital II was established. It raised around $200 million from its limited partners.[5][13] Cisco remained Almaz Capital's major investor in fund II with other major investment coming from UFG, EBRD and the
International Finance Corporation. In an interview for the
Vedomosti newspaper, Galitsky noted that Almaz Capital II attracted money from several
family offices.[5][6][7] The second fund excluded Russia’s originated companies from the list of new investments and expanded the geography of its activity to cover not only CIS countries but also some regions of East Europe.[citation needed]
Almaz Fund’s III with a capital of $191 mln final close was in 2021. EBRD still remained the main investor enriched by European International Fund (EIF).[14] The geographical focus mostly moved to the Eastern European countries, although CIS is still in the scope of interest of the Fund.[15]
Investments
Almaz Capital I was focused on startups from
CIS and the
United States and the second fund extended its geography to
Eastern European countries.[5][6][7][16] From 2008 to 2022 Almaz Capital invested over 300 million dollars in over 50 companies.[17][18][6]
3DLOOK (Mobile based body scanning technology that implements user measurement and shape data to optimize the fit of clothing purchased online);[30][31][32]
Acronis (ownership received in 2014 following Acronis acquisition of Almaz portfolio company, nScaled);[33][34][35]
GridGain (joint round with
Sberbank, MoneyTime Ventures and RTP Ventures);[38][39][40]
DMarket (An in-game item trading platform and a player-owned economy solution);[41][42]
Minut (Manufactures and provides security devices designed to offer home security. Its product Point recognizes things like alarms, windows breaking or unexpected activity and combines sound and sensor data to recognize events);[43][44][45]
Refurbed (Marketplace for refurbished electronics);[46][47]
Mobalytics (The company is developing a Gamer Performance Index (GPI) that involves using in-game data available from game
APIs and crunching it through
machine learning algorithms to analyze and improve player performance);[48][49][50]
Neptune (
Metadata store for MLOps, built for research and production teams that run a lot of experiments);[51][52][53]
OneSoil (OneSoil builds mobile and web apps that use
satellite imagery for
agricultural analytics and provides field insights for farmers and agricultural consultants);[54][55][56]
Pavel Bogdanov is a co-founder and general partner. He holds a bachelor's degree from
MIPT, a
PhD from
Stanford University and an
MBA from
INSEAD, is a former investment director at Sistema Telecom, a top manager at
KLA-Tencor, and a partner at the Russian Technologies Foundation.[86]