Yekaterinburg venture fund invests in Finnish startup

Yekaterinburg venture fund invests in Finnish startupProjector Ventures Fund, established by Leonid Volkov, has become the major investor of the funding round conducted by the Walkbase project from Turku (Finland). The startup also received investment from another known Yekaterinburg businessmen Leonid Gluzman (the founder of Ural’s first coupon service NadoVmeste). The amount of invested funds is not disclosed, but the sum was sufficient and allowed the regional Seed Investment Fund to enter the Board of the tech company.

Walkbase is an indoor positioning service based on analysis of the signals transmitted from any WiFi-enabled devices. This is the world’s first solution for retailers that measures offline traffic and is integrated with Google Analytics.

Walkbase will use the funds to launch the sales outside Scandinavia. Previously, the Walkbase project received seed investments from Finnish and foreign business angels, as well as grants from local state fund Tekes.

Finnish became one of the first projects integrated with the Google Universal Analytics API, which is a new solution from the search giant that allows monitoring both online and offline data through a single platform. As a result, the retailer receives comprehensive information for better management of subtenants, commercial information objects, advertising campaigns, etc. The system has been installed at Helsinki-Vantaa airport, and in some major shopping centers, retail networks in Finland and other Nordic countries.

According to Leonid Volkov, Projector Ventures’ partner, the Ural fund decided to work not only with regional, but with Moscow projects too. Once business goes beyond its region, the fundamental difference between the capital and neighboring countries disappears.

WalkBase is not the only startup that develops analytics for the retail industry. Euclid Company with similar technologies operates in the U.S. market, though, according to Leonid Volkov, Finnish algorithms are more interesting. Euclid received an investment of $17M one and half month ago.





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