Runa Capital raises $135M second fund for later-stage U.S. and European startups

Yesterday Runa Capital, a venture investment firm operating globally from its offices in Moscow, London, and San Francisco, announced that it has closed its second fund, Runa Capital Fund II, having raised $135 million. As a result, Runa has $270 million under management, taking into account its first fund, which also amounted to $135 million.

The firm declined to disclose any information about the new fund’s backers.

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Focusing on series A and B investments in the USA and Europe, Runa Capital Fund II targets “companies with high ambitions on the global market,” essentially in the fields of complex enterprise software and cloud applications, education, public services, finance, and health.

“The new fund logically follows our development over the past years,” said Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner at Runa Capital. “While Runa Capital I dedicated a part of its means to early-stage series, now we fully focus on more mature companies. We will support those who aim to gain significant shares on highly competitive markets.”

Runa Capital Fund II — which began operating two years ago — has already made 13 investments, coming in addition to the first fund’s 30 portfolio companies.

From Russia with love… and venture money

Launched in 2010 by Sergei Beloussov, Ilya Zybarev, and Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital I initially focused on Russia. The fund progressively expanded its scope to investing globally, following a strong invest-abroad trend among Russian venture capitalists.

Over the past few years Runa — which Dow Jones VentureSource ranked among the top three European funds in 2015 — has invested significantly in Californian and Western European startups.

Most recently, Runa led a $5.6 million round for SchoolMint, a leading provider of mobile and online enrollment systems for U.S. public, charter, and private schools. Runa had already invested in the company at an earlier stage, in 2014.

Among Runa’s other portfolio companies are B2B-Center.ru (Russia), Brainly (Poland), Citizr (France), DrChrono (USA), Ecwid (Russia), and Mambu (Germany). Several companies — such as Acumatica, Jelastic, Ngnix, and Wallarm — have Russian origins but are established in the U.S.

The fund has several exits so far, starting in 2012 with the acquisition of its U.K. portfolio company Thinkgrid by ColtTelecom. In 2014, U.S. startup StopTheHacker was acquired by CloudFlare, French startup Capptain was acquired by Microsoft, while Metabar, a Russian developer of browser applications, was bought by Yandex.

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Runa also had its failures, such as Travelmenu, a Russo-Ukrainian startup that shut down its service in 2013 in spite of capital injections from Runa and other investors.

This post first appeared on East-West Digital News, an international resource about innovation in Eastern Europe.