According to fund managers, Sberbank is already in talks with Chinese investors, dealstreetasia.com reports. The Sberbank venture fund will target Series A, B and C rounds with average investments starting at USD 5 million. The fund will target industries ranging from fintech to AI, marketplaces, sharing economy, and cybersecurity.
The bank’s first corporate venture fund, SBT Venture Capital which is managed by MoneyTIme Ventures, had a corpus of USD 100 million. The initial fund which was launched in 2012 has invested in ten companies worldwide including ride hailing giant Uber and eToro. This fund targeted Series A and B investments.
Lev Khasis, Sberbank’s first Deputy Chairman, said that the fund had so far invested USD 40 million in 10 companies and has yielded one exit. Sberbank, headquartered in Moscow, controls over 46% of Russia’s money. Back in June 2016, the bank teamed up with the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF) to launch an accelerator for fintech projects.
Recently, Sberbank also partnered with the Linux Foundation to participate in the Hyperledger Project, which was launched in December 2015 and counts IT major IBM as one of its partners. The project is a collaborative effort to “advance blockchain technology by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally.”, the source cites.
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