Amazon has already bought a second startup with investments from Mail.Ru founder Dmitry Grishin

Mail.Ru Group co-founder Dmitry Grishin, who became a venture capitalist and invests in robotics, has another exit - and again with the participation of Amazon. Jeff Bezos's company buys startup eero, which Grishin Robotics invested in in 2016.

• eero makes routers for home Wi-Fi networks. The fact that Amazon is buying this company is stated in their joint press release. The terms of the deal were not disclosed in the message.
• The company's routers distribute Wi-Fi through several points instead of one, one costs less than $200 and can cover an area of ​​​​almost 140 square meters. m, writes vc.ru. For $149, the user can buy an additional point.
• “From day one, eero’s mission has been to make the devices in the home just work,” said startup co-founder Nick Weaver in the message. A fitting target for Amazon with its smart speaker and other home solutions that require a stable internet connection.

The deal was a new outlet for Dmitry Grishin's fund. His fund Grishin Robotics invested in eero in 2016 during a $50 million round. “This is another successful exit for our fund and the first in 2019,” Grishin . commented to vc.ru on the deal with Amazon He did not discuss its details, but said that Grishin Robotics and other investors "earned good money."

Read also How Mail.Ru co-founder Dmitry Grishin finds new “unicorns”, what Usmanov advises him and why VK will bypass Facebook

For his fund, this is the second deal involving Amazon. for a rumored $1 billion Last year alone, the tech giant acquired smart bell maker Ring , which also had Grishin Robotics as an early investor, . Soon after the deal, the company was at the center of a scandal - it turned out that Ring allegedly allowed employees to follow customers. Grishin told The Bell that investors were not aware of this practice.

Read also Bought by Amazon, the manufacturer of "smart" calls allowed employees to monitor customers

Another “unicorn” in Grishin’s portfolio last year was the Zume service, which was valued by investors at $1.5–2.25 billion. With the help of robots, Zume cooks and delivers pizza at the same time.

Find out more. At the end of January, a big interview with Grishin about where he finds such successful investment objects was published in our video project Russian Norms!, and in December he was a guest at BellClub .

Irina Malkova