Last week two Moscow-based venture funds, Leta Capital and Simile Venture Partners, announced they invested “nearly $3 milllion” in Double Data, a Russian startup developing Big Data solutions for financial institutions.
The details of the deal were not disclosed, but Double Data co-founder Maxim Ginzhuk told East-West Digital News that Leta led the round, and that the investors received a minority stake “of a fairly standard size for a Series A round.”
“So far the company had been financed by ourselves, the founders, or by reinvesting own profits. This capital injection, however, will help us diversify product range and expand to new markets,” Ginzhuk added.
Founded in 2012, Double Data targets banks and other financial institutions who need to improve their performance for a variety of processes – from customer acquisition and assessment to debt collection. The Double Data software combines Big Data analysis tools, computer-aided learning methods and data mining.
Among Double Data’s latest products are ‘Double Social Marketing,’ a tool to attract customers via social networks, ‘Double Data technologies,’ which profile users and adapt credit offers correspondingly, and ‘Double Scoring,’ a package of predictive tools for lending agencies.
The company claims to have implemented more than 100 projects over the past two years, involving banks – including Home Credit Bank, Alfa Bank and Tinkoff Bank, – international financial institutions as well as credit history and debt collection agencies.
Double Data is a resident company of Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow.
Simile Venture Partners was launched by Pascal Clément, the Moscow-based French entrepreneur who is also behind Fastlane Ventures, in 2012. The fund invests in early-stage Internet startups, mobile solutions and engineering companies across a variety of countries, from Europe, to South-East Asia, to Brazil, to Turkey, to Russia.
Lauched in 2013, Leta Capital is the venture arm of Leta Group, a major Russian IT company. Its latest investments went to Wakie, an internationally-oriented Russian startup which has developed a social alarm clock, and to automated navigation robot developer Robocv.