Leonid Reiman’s Russian Fund to invest € 20 M in French startups

Russian venture capital fund New Generation Investment (NGI), including former Minister of Communications Leonid Reiman as one of the founders announced its intention to invest in a number of French startups. To do this, the fund plans to create a € 20 M (or $ 26.4 M) special investment program for the projects NGI interested in. It is noted that the first of them is to be a service for IP-telephony.

As the TechCrunch portal reports, € 20 M is quite a large sum for the European start-ups market, although relatively modest for the United States, since during the entire first quarter of 2012 the French start-ups attracted € 168 M ($ 222 M) from venture capitalists, and the U.S. companies - $ 5.8 B.

The investment range of the new NGI fund will include projects in IT, telecommunications, the Internet and media.

France has the assets, particularly in the technology sector. At this stage of the crisis, Europe can take a leading positions in various sectors, - said Reiman, adding that France can become only the first stage and the NGI will monitor other European projects as well.

The first project of the new fund will be French VoIP service and its launch is scheduled for autumn this year. The NGI plans to make this project a real rival of Skype, spreading it throughout Europe.