Dmitry Grishin: From Molotok to a $1 Billion Deal with Amazon

Former Mail.Ru CEO Dmitry Grishin became the luckiest Russian investor of the week. The startup Ring, in which his fund Grishin Robotics invested in 2016, was bought by Amazon — according to various estimates , for $1.1-1.8 billion. Grishin invested $10-15 million in Ring at a valuation of $200-300 million and could have earned $50-90 million on the deal. We have collected the main information about Grishin and his fund (you can read more about Ring and why Amazon needed it here ).

How I started

• Grishin was born on the territory of the Soviet military testing ground Kapustin Yar near Astrakhan. According to his own words, he started programming at the age of 5-6. He earned his first money in the 6th grade, writing a computer game "Alfa Romeo", based on the picture of the car from the insert of "Turbo" chewing gum.
• In 2001, he graduated from the Faculty of Robotics at Bauman University, and three years before that, he began remote programming for the American developer Axiom Int.
• In 2000, while still in his fifth year, Grishin found a job at Yuri Milner's Netbridge and headed the development of the online auction "Molotok" there. "Molotok" quickly became the largest Russian online auction, was sold to the South African holding Naspers, which closed it in 2015. And Grishin became the CEO of the Mail.ru service in 2003, which by that time was Milner's main project and the center of his holding. In 2012, Grishin replaced Milner as chairman of the board of directors of Mail.Ru Group.

How I became an investor

• Grishin is now 39 years old. A few years ago, he was included in the MIT rating of “35 Innovators Under 35.” “When the Internet took off in Russia, he was in the right place at the right time. Now he’s trying to do the same with robots,” MIT Technology Review writes about him.
• In 2016, Grishin stepped down as CEO of Mail.Ru Group to focus more on his personal projects. He founded his first fund, Grishin Robotics, back in 2012, investing $25 million of his personal money, or 15% of his fortune at the time. He earned the money by selling Mail.ru Group shares during an IPO on the London Stock Exchange.
• Grishin founded the second fund together with his partner Verdi Israelyan in 2016, raising $100 million. Israelyan is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a partner at Yuri Milner's DST Global fund. Other private investors, whose names are unknown, also invested in the fund. Now the second fund is investing, "a significant part of the first one's funds was spent," Grishin told RBC.
• The main areas of investment are startups related to robotics, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.
• Excluding Ring, the fund's portfolio includes 18 projects. In particular, Grishin, together with Alibaba Entrepreneurs, invested $9 million in the Hong Kong rental gobee.bike, $14 million in the gaming startup Wonder - singer Shakira and her husband, footballer Gerard Pique, also invested in it, the developer of nanosatellites for collecting data and images of objects in space NanoSatisfi ($300 thousand) and the robot "designer" littleBits Electronics (the size of the fund's investments is unknown, but the entire round, closed in July 2015, amounted to $46.7 million).

Read more

• Grishin's interview with Oleg Tinkov in the program "Business Secrets"
• A big interview with Forbes after leaving Mail.RU Group.
• Grishin's lecture on robots at RBC.

What do I get out of this?

It's useful to know more about the man who can predict which startup Jeff Bezos will want to buy.

Anastasia Stogney