Photo by Imaginechina · Corbis

Alisher Usmanov

Net worth: $14.4 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 3

Проект: Didi Kuaidi

Fund: n/a

Manager: n/a

In October 2015, Alisher Usmanov made one of the largest investments in sports, deciding to support not real, but virtual sports. His USM Holdings announced that it will invest more than $100 million in Virtus.pro, the largest Russian e-sports community.

Lately, Usmanov has been preferring projects in Asia. Through DST Global, managed by Yuri Milner, he invested in the Chinese companies Didi, Kuaidi and the Indian Ola Cabs. The services are united not only by region, but also by topic: mobile applications for calling a taxi.

Didi and Kuaidi services appeared in China in 2012. Investors include telecommunications company Tencent and online retailer Alibaba. In February 2015, the services merged into Didi Kuaidi, whose drivers serve more than 6 million orders daily in more than 360 cities in China. According to Usmanov's representatives, he invested in Didi and Kuaidi both before and after their merger. Immediately after the merger, the service raised $600 million and was valued at $8.75 billion, and in the summer it raised another $3 billion. At the same time, Uber raised $1.2 billion for development in the Chinese market; the search engine Baidu led the round. The money will be spent on launching the application in 100 cities in China (currently Uber is present in 20 cities).

Didi Kuaidi competes with Uber and supports its competitors: in May, together with Alibaba and Tencent, it financed the American Lyft, and in August it joined a $350 million investment round in the GrabTaxi service, which operates in Southeast Asia.

“The market for calling taxis using mobile apps in China is growing rapidly, driven by both growing smartphone penetration and low levels of personal car ownership. We estimate the potential turnover of the online taxi market in China to be tens of billions of dollars. Didi Kuaidi is the undisputed leader,” explains the interest in the service in the press service of USM Holdings.

Photo by REX · Fotodom

Roman Abramovich

Net worth: $9.1 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 12

Project: Medviser

Foundation : Millhouse

Manager: David Davidovich

Over the past two years, the billionaire has invested in several dozen projects. And he doesn’t intend to stop - in October 2015, Millhouse invested in Igor Ryabenky’s Altair Capital venture fund. Abramovich invests in startups through the Ervington Investments and Impulse VC funds.

And although Millhouse manages all of Abramovich's investments, including in metals and pharmaceuticals, management is involved in early-stage projects. In May 2015, for example, the fund invested $0.5 million in the Russian-Israeli telemedicine service Medviser. Negotiations began when the startup was just testing the idea; its staff was limited to three partners.

Medviser provides Russian users with video consultations with doctors from foreign clinics. “We position ourselves as Uber in the medical market: a platform where the patient gets direct access to a doctor without intermediaries,” explains the general director and founder of the project, Lev Orlovsky, a native of Russia. A consultation costs $250–500, approximately half the price of an in-person visit to the same specialist. The main areas are oncology, cardiology, hepatology.

Orlovsky appreciated the prospects of telemedicine while working at the consulting firm Booz & Company; he himself comes from a family of doctors; the technical part was also clear - he studied computer science and worked at IBM.

“Our goal is to create a platform that will be global,” says Orlovsky. The first steps have already been taken - cooperation has begun with doctors from India, Spain, and Germany. But the investor’s wish to work with Russian luminaries is still difficult to fulfill - the status of telemedicine in Russia is not defined by law.

Photo by Tim Robberts · Getty Images

Iskander Makhmudov

Net worth: $3.5 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 29

Project: Beyond Verbal

Foundation: Singulariteam, 2013

Manager: Kenes Rakishev, Moshe Hogeg

The son of the main shareholder of UMMC, Jahangir Makhmudov, works in one of the companies owned by his father and is involved in venture investments - in 2014 he became a partner in the Israeli fund Singulariteam. In October of the same year, speaking at a press conference in Almaty, one of the founders of the fund, Kenes Rakishev (No. 10 in the Forbes Kazakhstan ranking, net worth $684 million), said that Iskander Makhmudov was going to invest $10 million in Singulariteam, and Jahangir represented him at the foundation and serves on the board of directors.

The fund's second managing partner is Moshe Hogeg, the creator of the Mobli app, which allows users to share photos and videos like Instagram. In November 2013, a pool of investors led by Carlos Slim invested $60 million in Mobli. The application is part of the Singulariteam project pool, like Hogeg’s other project, the Yo messenger, which allows you to send only this word to a friend (more than 1 million people downloaded it from the AppStore in 4 days after its launch).

Singulariteam’s portfolio includes the startup Store Dot (both Abramovich and Bresht invested in it), as well as the Israeli Beyond Verbal. The latter company was founded in 2012, but its creators have been developing technology that can recognize emotions in voices for more than 20 years. A team of physicists and neuropsychologists analyzed the speech of more than 1 million people speaking more than 40 languages. The result was a service capable of recognizing about 400 emotions by voice. In 2014, Beyond Verbal released a mobile version, the Moodies Emotions Analytics app. Moodies studies intonation, volume, timbre and pauses between words to determine the user's mood. In this case, the language for analysis is not important. Singulariteam twice led a consortium of investors who invested a total of $6.1 million in Beyond Verbal.

by Josh Damon Flickr Photo

Vladimir Yevtushenkov

Net worth: $2.8 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 35

Project: Si-Bone

Fund: Redline Capital Management, 2011

Manager: Alexey Buyanov

Si-Bone was founded in the American city of San Jose by orthopedic surgeon Mark Reilly, who has 20 years of experience creating devices used in orthopedic surgery. His Kyphon technique has revolutionized the treatment of vertebral compression fractures and is used in 43 countries.

In 2008, he developed Si-Bone, a titanium implant system to stabilize the sacroiliac joints, which are responsible for 25% of low back pain. Implants help relieve pain faster than other methods. More than 18,000 procedures have already been performed using this system, and more than a thousand surgeons have been trained.

In May 2015, Redline invested $21 million in the project. In total, since 2009, Si-Bone has raised $81 million from players such as Skyline Ventures, Montreux Equity Partners, Novo A/S. “Biotechnology is a very complex industry, but if you get the investment right, the return is significant,” fund manager Alexey Buyanov said in an interview with Forbes. “We make up for what we lack in expertise by investing together with more sophisticated players.”

Фото Shazam Entertainment Ltd

Boris Mintz

Net worth: $1.6 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 53

Project: Shazam

Fund: Buran Venture Capital, 2010

Manager: Alexander Konoplyasty, Mikhail Salontai

Every second, Shazam users around the world tap the button inside the app more than 230 times to determine what tune is playing around them. Once you see the title and artist, you can immediately buy the track on iTunes or listen to it on streaming services Spotify and Apple Music. Commissions from selling content on third-party services are the basis of the app’s revenue.

Shazam is not yet profitable, but during the next round in January 2015 it was valued at $1 billion. Among the investors was the Buran Venture Capital fund, in which Boris Mintz’s O1 Group invested several million dollars. The billionaire's eldest son, Dmitry Mints, is on the fund's supervisory board. It also includes former co-owners of Mail.ru Group Grigory Finger and Mikhail Vinchel. Buran VC's investment in Shazam is $8.5 million.

The service was created in 1999 in the UK. Then, in order to recognize a melody, you had to dial a short number, turn the phone towards the music source, and then wait for an SMS with the name of the song. Over 16 years, the company has attracted $130 million in investments, including $40 million from one of the richest people on the planet, Carlos Slim, owner of the telecommunications company America Movil.

In addition to music, Shazam has learned to recognize the audio content of TV programs and advertising and now intends to earn money from advertisers. For example, in the summer of 2015, the Russian Gazprom Media Digital launched a campaign for the horror film “Insidious 3”: with the help of Shazam, viewers could recognize a commercial for the film running on television or the Internet, and then take part in a prize draw on the promotional site.

For Buran VC Shazam is the first foreign project. The fund’s portfolio includes the Ivi online cinema, the CompareKupi service and the Netology Group online education center.

Фото Moodboard · Corbis

Vyacheslav Bresht

Net worth: $0.95 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 90

Project: Noveto Systems

Fund: n/a

Manager: n/a

The founders of the Israeli startup Noveto want to revolutionize the electronics market and the automotive industry. They are developing directional sound technology: the system will track a person’s position and direct sound directly to the ears. It will be possible to abandon headphones and Bluetooth headsets and, without interfering with each other, simultaneously watch TV and listen to music in the same room.

The company was founded in 2011 by Israelis Noam Babayof and Tomer Shani. Both have experience in the field of electronics - for example, they participated in the development of wireless battery chargers, night vision systems, and ultra-fast optical scanners for the oral cavity. However, they promise to show the prototype of the Noveto system only in 2016. Potentially, the development may be of interest to all manufacturers of electronics and automobiles.

According to Bresht, he, along with his son-in-law, millionaire Daniel Yammer and daughter Elizaveta, are the only investors in the project. As the businessman said in an interview with Forbes, his son-in-law and daughter are looking for startups, and he invests in those that he likes. He usually invests $2–3 million. The family already has successful investment experience: they invested at an early stage in battery developer StoreDot, its valuation has since grown tenfold.

Photo by Peter Macdiarmid · Getty Images

Grigory Berezkin

Net worth: $0.6 billion

Place in the Forbes list: No. 140

Project: 2Can

Fund: UST group of companies

Manager: n/a

In the spring of 2014, the mobile acquiring service “Smartfin” (2Can brand) announced the closing of an investment round for $5 million. Among the investors, in addition to the specialized Inventure Partners and Almaz Capital Partners, unexpectedly was the group of unified social tax of Grigory Berezkin, whose wealth is based on energy assets. “The UST has an analytical group of several people that analyzes startups. I do this myself,” says the entrepreneur. According to Berezkin, the group is interested in IT technologies, both Russian and foreign. But a startup must have a connection with the Russian market.

2Can is a Russian service that allows you to accept payments for goods and services by bank card through mobile card readers. The company's clients include online stores, courier services, street cafes and other small and medium-sized enterprises. 2Can earns a commission (2.75%) from each transaction. In 2014, 2Can’s acquiring turnover increased 8.5 times and reached 1.07 billion rubles.

After the success of the acquiring service Square, created in 2009 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, several similar projects appeared in Russia: 2Can, LifePay, PayMe. In the summer of 2015, 2Can merged with its competitor iBox and raised $1.3 million for development.

UST also invested in Jolla, a Finnish developer of smartphones and the Sailfish operating system. Berezkin, a chemist by training, says that he would like to invest in biotechnology: “ I understand this topic well, and it is very interesting to me. Together with a group of scientists from the Faculty of Chemistry of Moscow State University, we are conducting some research projects, but for now this is rather an area of fundamental science .”

7 venture projects of Russian billionaires