Venture Fund Life.SREDA announces its first investment

A venture fund of the financial group LIFE, established in August, invested in Instabank project, which is a mobile service for Instagram’s fans, which is going to involve the full range of banking services in the form of a stylish and user-friendly mobile application.

The amount of the transaction and its details are not disclosed, but we know that Instabank is estimated at $4M, and the venture fund has received its minority stake.

Instabank service users can register through their in Facebook account, issue a card (one or several) with their picture or a collage of images on Instagram, and they will be able to transfer money within the users of the service and outside by simply using Facebook name or geolocation.

As the fund reported, the deal was closed in early October. Instabank’s launch is scheduled for the first quarter of 2013. The initial release will be in the form of applications for the iPhone and a credit card with individual design from Instagram. iPad and Android versions will be released later. After the initial release in Russia, the project will be scaled to other countries - the U.S., the UK and China.

According to official data, the management team includes three people: Dmitry Feofanov (the CEO of the project, has been a leading developer in Android team for more than two years), Valentin Kravtsov (SRT, the founder of the service, comes from Google), Roman Potemkin (the head of the product). Dmitry Feofanov and Roman Potemkin are the co-owners of iDa Mobile company.

fund establishment by the Financial Group Life. The Fund will focus on investing in projects related to financial services. The initial size of the fund was $10M.