VEB Innovations Fund finances school social network

VEB Innovations Fund and the Institute of New Technologies have announced closing of a transaction to enter the capital of Global Lab Company, a resident of the IT Cluster of the Skolkovo Fund.

Global Lab international online project is a specialized social network designed to support collaborative research of students from different countries. The company's founder Boris Berenfeld conceived Global Lab in the mid-1990s, but in those days, neither school nor technologies were ready for the introduction of such breakthrough projects, although Fortune, Science, and Wired Magazine covered initial steps of Global Lab.

The company’s president Tatiana Krupa has been introducing the idea of developing education in real business since the mid-2000s. She changed her position of the deputy director at one of Russia’s largest IT companies for a career of startup President believing in success of approach developed by Global Lab. The project, as T. Krupa says, will help to raise a new generation of students who are independent, creatively thinking and interested in science and constant self-education.

This is the fourth investment of VEB Innovations Fund since the beginning of 2013. According to the Board Chairman Andrey Morozov, the education market has attractive volumes and growth rates: in the U.S., where Global Lab has strategic partners in promotion, the growth of the collaboration-based learning market is expected to reach $5.5B by 2015.

Ivan Kabulaev represented the founders of Global Lab during the transaction, whose responsibilities included the structuring and closing of the transaction. Unlike the majority of transactions in the venture capital market, Global Lab is not a traditional analog of western projects, but a truly technological breakthrough project at the intersection of education, crowdsourcing and science, - he says.