OREANDA-NEWS. July 05, 2011. i-Free Company announces the opening of the venture capital fund i-Free Ventures. The fund will invest in venture projects in informational technologies sphere.


Basing upon its long-term experience and competence in development and introduction of innovational projects and services i-Free Company took a decision to open venture fund i-Free Ventures.


The Fund will provide financing, education and mentorship for startups and technology companies at any level of their development – from Seed Stage to Early Growth Stage. Planned volume of each investment is from 20 thousand to 600 thousand dollars.


The Fund considers applications from technological companies and start-ups including the ones that are specialized in innovational technologies like NFC, automatic identification and data capture (AIDC), augumented reality (AR) etc.


Sphere of interests of the Fund covers meta search engines for travelers and frequent commuters loyalty; shopping clubs and collective purchasing services and e-commerce; mobile and browser games; digital media including mobile media; applications for handhelds, smartphones, Tablet PC and home multimedia devices.


It should be said that i-Free Ventures considers not only projects with already proven business models focused on existing markets but also projects with unclear monetization and projects targeted on segmented markets are to be considered. More over we do not limit ourselves only with the Russian market and we are eager to work with companies oriented on Europe, Asia and the USA.


At the very moment i-Free Ventures already has several partnership agreements with other VC-companies. In particular an agreement with Russian Venture Company Seed Fund is ratified and also agreements for joint investments with other Russian and Western companies are reached.


The investment committee of i-Free Ventures includes founders of i-Free Company – Kirill Gorynya, Kirill Petrov and Sergei Shulga who are the heads of i-Free Innovation department of i-Free Company and are doing development and introduction of innovational projects.


Georgiy Zamyshlyaev is appointed as an investment director who is also at the moment a head of investment projects department at i-Free. The Managing Partner is Gleb Kaplun.


Commenting on the opening of the fund Georgiy Zamyshlyaev said: “i-Free Company had a long-term interest for venture projects and we really do know that there are many talented innovators and startups in Russia. In the process of application selection we consider in the first place a team as for we are sure that exactly a team defines the success of an innovational project and I hope that in future millions of people will be able to use state of the art technologies and services and thus achieve prosperity”.