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How Russian investments reacted to COVID

There was a noticeable decline in the number of investments from $204 m in 1H2019 to $51 m in 1H2020 due to COVID, while the number of deals increased from 15 to 19 at the same period.

The chart below shows some info on the dynamics of corporate investment amount, number of deals, and VC events. Excluding transactions of more than $50 m (statistical outliers), the investment activity of corporations is increasing, and the pandemic did not have a negative effect.

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Thus, we became curious how the number of VC deals affected these figures. During the discussion, there was an idea that it makes sense to calculate the correlation between 3 variables that are represented in the graph above (sorry folks, we tried to make it simple, but it didn’t completely work out).

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To aggregate the data about events we used Crunchbase (the overall figure did not change a lot comparing 2018 with 2019 due to the fact the vast majority of events going online), when both investment amount and number of deals were taken from our last report “Venture Russia 1H 2020” which was prepared with the support of Kaspersky, EY, DS Law and Crunchbase.

The result can be seen in a table below. Interestingly, that somehow it reflects the reality that we have now in the pandemic time.

We discovered a direct relation between the number of deals and the number of events, as well as between the latter and the investment amount.

Thereby, the more events are happening, the more start-ups are increasing their chances to receive investments from investors or to make a deal.

Furthermore, a reversed tendency might be seen in the number of deals and investment amount. It can be noticed that the average round was $13,83 m with 8 events against $2,68 m with 6 events in 1H2019 and 1H2020, respectively.

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To sum up, the beginning of this year was difficult for the global economy. Despite the new online reality and the decrease of offline events, Russian corporations continued to invest capital, test new hypotheses, and improve business-performance by piloting start-ups (even though not as active as before).

We are Dsight – a Russian BI (Business Intelligence) platform, with the focus on the technology market. We are constantly monitoring venture activities of Russian investors and start-ups.

P.S.

If you want to find out more about Russian market, we would highly recommend you to check out:

Open Innovation Forum 2020 – 19-21 October 2020 – The Forum’s main goal is to develop and commercialize new technologies, promote global tech brands and create new tools for international cooperation in innovation. The program includes plenary and themed sessions, educational events, seminars and master classes, innovative shows, business meetings and, of course, informal networking.

Techweek Moscow – 16-19 November 2020 –  More than 350 speakers, practicing experts from leading Russian companies will take part in the conference. 18 thematic streams were organized: digital business transformation, VR / AR, fintechb, AI & BigData, blockchain, HR-tech, digital marketing and sales, product management, ED-tech, sharing economics, soft skills.

AINL 2020 – 7-9 October 7-9, 2020 – The 9th conference on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language (AINL 2020) invites everyone interested in intellectual technologies, both from academic institutes and innovative companies. The conference aimed to bring together experts in the areas of text mining, speech technologies, dialogue systems, information retrieval, machine learning, artificial intelligence and robotics; to create a platform for sharing experience, extending contacts and searching for possible collaboration.

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