You're reading: Ukrainian group’s popular VOX audio player gets $400,000 in seed money for expansion

Ukrainian venture capital fund AVentures Capital on Aug. 29 announced it was the lead investor of $400,000 seed money to promote the VOX audio player, the flagship product of Coppertino Inc. run by a group of Ukrainians.

The most widely used alternative to iTunes among millions of Apple
MacBook users in more than 70 countries, AVentures said it plans to assist turning
the VOX player into a platform for distributing content to music streaming
services like Spotify, Deezer, Yandex.Music and others. 

Coppertino’s initial angel investor Peter Bondarevskyi of Internet
Investment Group told the Kyiv Post that VOX will be available for iOS and
Android devices by July 2014. 

“Music fans and audio files (are) mostly used (by) iOS devices and MacOS
laps. That’s why we decided to start with that audience,” said Ivan Ablamskyi,
the founder and CEO of Coppertino. “Users of VOX are slightly less than 1
percent of the $7 billion music market. In the short term, VOX will reach more
than 5 percent of the audience who pay for quality audio – we will increase
this rate to launch VOX on mobile devices form the ecosystem around listening
quality.”

Ivan Ablamskyi (foreground), founder and CEO of Coppertino, and Peter Bondarevskyi, angel investor into and partner of VOX audio player project.

Some 100,000 people downloaded VOX in the first week of its release in
the Mac App Store earlier in August, and it was the most downloaded free application
after just three hours of its release in the store. 

“We are pleased to become Coppertino’s partners. Their flagship product
– VOX audio player – is not just for playing muisic. It’s a tool that allows
for the creation of an ecosystem around music, because VOX lets users listen to
audio from different musical content aggregators,” noted Andriy Kolodyuk,
managing partner of AVentures Capital. 

Coppertino was founded by Kyiv resident Ablamskyi in 2010. It has a
production office in Cupertino, California where Apple is headquartered, and a
research and development team of six in Kyiv. 

AVentures targets investments in the consumer internet
and e-commerce sectors in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S., as well as software, mobile,
gaming and other digital-related projects with global prospects. 

In April, the investment fund purchased a minority
stake in nuPSYS
, a leading visual network software developer for an
estimated $1-$2 million. In February, AVentures bought a 25
percent equity stake in Augmented Pixels
, a technology developer for Google
Glasses and other augmented reality applications.  

Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be
reached at [email protected].