Gaidar Magdanurov to work in Runa Capital

Gaidar Magdanurov, who served as the Director of the Seed Fund of Microsoft Russia before early October, goes to work in an international venture fund Runa Capital, he said to Digit.ru on Monday.

He will take the post of the investment director and will supervise investments in IT-projects, hosting services, virtualization, and mobile applications with investment from $100K to $1M.

Magdanurov Gaidar was born in 1985 in Moscow, and in 2007 he graduated from the Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He had been working at Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds from 2002 to 2007. He was engaged in laser Raman spectroscopy and quantum chemical calculations.

He is the chief editor of Visual Basic Streets website since 2002. In 2005 he was awarded the status of Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for the promotion of Microsoft products for developers. At the same time he participated in web start-ups as a developer, project manager, and consultant. From 2007 to 2012 he has worked in various positions at Microsoft.

International venture fund Runa Capital is focused on investments in technology companies. The investment portfolio of the fund has more than a dozen companies from Russia, the U.S., France and Ukraine. In total, the fund plans to invest in 40-50 technology companies.

Runa Capital has invested in Thinkgrid (sold to Colt), Nginx, Talkbits, Jelastic, Metabar, Travelmenu, BigTime Software, Ecwid, StopTheHacker, Capptain, B2B-Center, Infratel, Dnevnik.ru, Station x, LinguaLeo.

For the past year and a half of its work, the Seed Fund of Microsoft gave grants to 18 Russian IT-companies for a total of $765K, for example, in the development of intelligent search platform Choister, in a service for annotating and publishing of online video fragments ClipClock, in medical projects - Alpha Smart Systems and Cloud Health Care and more.