Ukrainian venture capital fund AVentures Capital announced on Dec. 16 that it closed on its fourth investment of the year. The early stage investment fund was part of a consortium that gave $750,000 in seed money to CheckiO, an online portal where coders develop programming logic and skills by playing games and exchanging experience with others.
The other backers included Vegas
Tech Fund, the venture fund of Tony Hsieh, who is the chief executive of online
shoe and clothing shop Zappos.com. Well-known business investment angels
Bob Mason and Jay Batson also were part of the deal.
“With the closing (of the
seed) round, we not only have the opportunity to increase the pace of growth of
CheckiO, but also our team was augmented by partners and entrepreneurs with
impressive experience in building successful companies,” said Liza Avramenko,
co-founder and chief executive of CheckiO from Ukraine.
Built by a team of other
Ukrainians, including Alexander Lyabakh of Dnipropetrovsk who worked for Privat
Bank, CheckiO was first launched in 2011 to give coders a way to collaborate
and improve their skills by writing code to advance in an online game.
Now with more than 27,000
registered users, CheckiO is used to
recruit developers, train coders and for crowd sourcing software. Twenty
percent of its audience is in the U.S., 18 percent in France, 15 percent in
Ukraine, 9 percent in China and 38 percent in other countries.
The company is already
cooperating with O’Reilly Media and GitHub, and soon CheckiO will launch pilot
projects with HubSpot, Brightcove, and Dropbox. Square, Mozilla,
and Salesforce also are interested in teaming up with CheckiO.
A number of international
universities also use CheckiO to educate students, among them: The University
of Queensland (Australia), The University of Arizona, The University of
Washington, The University of Texas Arlington, Georgia Tech, and Ollin College.
“CheckiO is our fourth investment
although AVentures Capital normally doesn’t invest in the seed stage,” said
Andrey Kolodyuk, managing partner of AVentures. “In this case we decided to
make an exception and support a strong team with a globally competitive
product, and we look forward to possibly funding a Round A investment.”
The game uses both versions of
the Python programming language and will soon launch a version for JavaScript,
one of the fastest growing programming languages.
In August AVentures was the lead
investor of $400,000 in the VOX audio player, the flagship product of
Coppertino Inc run by a group of Ukrainians. Earlier in the year Aventures
invested some $1-$2 million, according to IT industry experts, in nuPSYS, a software
developer that simplifies the process of network management and automation for
large corporate networks.
On Feb. 15 AVentures bought a 25
percent equity stake in Augmented
Pixels, a technology developer for Google Glasses and other
augmented reality applications.
According to a recent report by
the National Commission for Communications Regulation, volume on the Ukrainian
IT market this year could reach $3.6 billion.
The same report added that the IT
services segment could reach $320 million.
The most promising fields,
according to experts, will be services related to outsourcing and system
integration, as well as the development of so-called cloud computing.
Aventures is co-managed by Yevgen
Sysoyev and Andriy Kolodyuk, the founder of Divan.TV, a leading over-the-top
content Smart TV operator in Ukraine and Russia.
Kyiv
Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at either [email protected]
or [email protected].
