The fund aims to invest in some “200 startups” at the seed and Series A stages. It will support their international expansion as well as their “integration to the ecosystems of leading Russian corporations including Sberbank.” The new fund will also consider investments in “startups with a visible Russian/CIS angle,” conducting or planning to launch activities in Russia while being based outside Russia.

Fort Ross Investment Director Egor Abramov confirmed that Fort Ross Seed Fund will be more focused on “Russia and [neighboring] CIS countries” than the two previous Fort Ross funds, which had a larger target area including the USA and Israel.

Abramov believes the investor composition of Fort Ross Seed Fund could be “quite close to that of SBT Ventures II.” Launched in 2017, this fund collected as much as $235 million from more than 40 different LPs, including corporations, family offices and private individuals. (SBT Ventures I, created in 2012, did not exceed $110 million, brought essentially by the state-controlled Russian financial and technology giant Sberbank. Abramov also emphasized, that „we tend to ‘sell’ our Russian angle to startups as an opportunity for them to work with the Sberbank ecosystem and to enter Russian market with support from a trusted partner. And this is quite a lucrative opportunity for many early companies,”. “Moreover, we co-invest with tier-1 VC firms and they never had any questions about these Russian connections,” he added.

Previously this year, in April the VCs CEO Viktor Orlovsky confirmed to the leading Russian Tech and Startup media plattform Rusbase that "Fort Ross Ventures is responding to today's crisis situation with sufficient financial resources. Currently, approximately two thirds of the total available investment volume has been invested with a term until the end of 2022". In his opinion, it enables the VC to "invest in good projects well considered and after making a better valuation than before the pandemic crisis".

For more details please visit https://www.fortross.vc/