Startups
Top Russian Fintech Startups, Will They Shutdown?
Russian fintech Companies have recently been struggling with regulatory challenges due to some economic, social, and political factors. The pressure on these fintech companies is increasing especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
What brings some questions to the table, such as will these startups be able to continue operating? And, will these companies help Russia find a way out of the western financial sanctions?
Here is a list of the most innovative fintech companies in Russia, and you can predict which will be impacted and which will get an opportunity.
1. Bistrodengi
Bistrodengi is the leader in the Russian microfinance market. The company provides various financial services via online platforms, as well as through an extensive branch network of 500 offices throughout the Russian Federation. Bistrodengi justifies its lending decisions with effective predictive models based on a large number of innovative data mining methods and technologies. Customers can apply for a loan of up to 1 million rubles (provided in cash or credited to their bank account).
Founded Year: 2008
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Yuri Provkin
Funding Amount: $61.3M
2. Blackmoon Financial Group
Blackmoon is a technology platform that provides Marketplace Lending as a Service (MPLaaS) for balance sheet lenders. MPLaaS enables balance sheet lenders to access institutional funding via a marketplace approach.
Blackmoon integrates with lending companies through proprietary technologies. Enabling asset managers to efficiently select portfolios by utilizing Blackmoon’s platform for analytical modeling, order management, portfolio monitoring, and projecting returns. Our objective is to provide a global MPLaaS platform for Balance Sheet Lenders.
Founded Year: 2015
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Ilya Perekopsky, Oleg Seydak
Funding Amount: $32.5M
Investor(s): A&NN Investments, Target Global, and Flint Capital
3. MoneyMan
MoneyMan is a digital finance company that offers automated payday loan services 24/7. The company concentrates its research and development efforts on developing innovative risk assessment models, big data processing, and developing secure applications for both web and mobile platforms
Founded Year: 2011
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Alexander Dunaev and Boris Batine
Funding Amount: $9M
Investor(s): Emery Capital and Vadim Dymov
4. MILI
MILI is the fastest consumer finance company in Russia.
Its disruptive technology allows MILI to issue loans to active users of social networks, leveraging their social capital. MILI has built unique scoring methods, paying equal attention to both standard information sources and users’ online social capital. The credit decision is made within 5 minutes directly on the website and money is transferred through one of the largest retail chains in Russia (over 5,000 retail posts) – Euroset.
Founded Year: 2012
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): George Belotserkovsky, Grant Alaverdian, Levan Nazarov
Funding Amount: $6.1M
5. B2Broker
B2Broker offers solutions for financial institutions to increase and optimize their workflows and help new brokers to build their business. Our products and services include MT4/MT5 White Label, Forex/Crypto/CFD Liquidity, Forex Broker Turnkey, Cryptocurrency Exchange Turnkey, B2Core (Trader’s Room & Back Office Software), Investment Platform (PAMM, MAM, Social Trading), Cryptocurrency Payment Gateway.
Founded Year: 2014
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Arthur Azizov, Evgeniya Mykulyak
Funding Amount: $5M
6. Double Data
Double Data targets banks and other financial institutions that need to improve their performance for a variety of processes – from customer acquisition and assessment to debt collection. The Double Data software combines Big Data analysis tools, computer-aided learning methods, and data mining.
Founded Year: 2012
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Maxim Ginzhuk, Pavel Shuvalov
Funding Amount: $3.2M
Investor(s): Fastlane Ventures, Simile Venture Partners, and LETA Capital
7. Vdolg
Vdolg.ru “- mutual crediting service in Russia.
P2P service implements the principle: money directly from the lender to the borrower! Borrowers can obtain funds at lower rates than conventional banks, without reference to income and guarantors. Lenders can issue money in debt, choosing one of the investment strategies and earning more than on bank deposits.
Founded Year: 2010
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Anton Tarasov
Funding Amount: $2M
Investor(s): Runa Capital
8. Mandarin
Mandarin is a payment platform that allows companies to scale their business without growing back-office. We build open APIs that help fintechs, marketplaces, platforms, and other industries automate all types of payment flows and sell more with the help of cutting-edge installment products.
Founded Year: 2016
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Alex Tolstik, Maksim Nekrylov
Funding Amount: $1.9M
9. Dengi Vpered
You worked today. Get paid today. Product for people and HR to empower financial wellness. Get what you already earned. Mobile applications with deep integration into companies’ accounting systems empower both sides with massive pros.
Founded Year: 2019
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Konstantin Stiskin, Pavel Guzhikov
Funding Amount: $1M
Investor(s): Traget Global
10. Pay-Me
Pay-Me is a vendor and mPOS services provider for small- and medium-sized merchants. It enables its users to accept payment cards, including Visa and MasterCard. It is recommended for e-commerce and trade companies, taxi and car services, medium-sized hotels and hostels, insurance agents, and many others.
Founded Year: 2012
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Vladimir Kanin
Funding Amount: $1M
11. BitRussia
BitRussia is a financial ecosystem built with modern technological solutions of a distributed registry, smart contracts, with the possibility of issuing and exercising digital rights (tokens). BitRussia is constantly developing its own infrastructure and a set of pre-built business scenarios that provide users with the opportunity to implement projects in the field of factoring, banking, crowdfunding, insurance, reinsurance, banking, processing, trading, human resources, and management.
It is the only legal investment operator&platform in Russia with embedded DLT and smart contracts. BitRussia is deeply integrated with classic fin-tech industries such as banking and insurance. Present status: official piloting in “sandbox mode” with the Central Bank of Russia.
Founded Year: 2019
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Ivan Rodionov
Funding Amount: $900K
Investor(s): Da Vinci Capital
12. MyWishBoard
MyWishBoard is a crowdfunding, visual savings platform for personal and shared dreams and goals. The platform helps its users collect their desired products, get them funded by friends and family, and achieve personal goals in studying, traveling, and shopping. It is based in Moscow, Russia.
Founded Year: 2012
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Alexander Borodich, Dmitry Amroyan
Funding Amount: $880K
Investor(s): Life.SREDA, IMI.VC
13. GetFinance
GetFinance is a single digital space for all participants in the factoring market: suppliers, buyers, and financing organizations. GetFinance implemented on the basis of advanced fintech solutions in the field of highly loaded information systems, GetFinance has a powerful and functional universal core that allows you to automate complex business factoring processes at all stages: from the initialization of the financing process to the final settlement between participants and transaction accounting. Due to the modern system of remote verification, the platform provides a fully digital three-way format of work, previously inaccessible to the Russian market.
Founded Year: 2019
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Funding Amount: $770K
Investor(s): VTB Bank
14. ArtQuant Ltd
ArtQuant Ltd. provides innovative, tech-based financial and investment solutions.
Founded Year: 2014
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Ilya Filippov, Samit Yakovlev
Funding Amount: $600K
15. Scorista
Scorista – a unique online service for assessing the borrower. With their analytical system to perform a detailed and qualitative assessment of the solvency of the borrower for one minute without any extra costs for you and install additional software. You get a definite answer to “give” loan or “deny”, stating the reasons. They guarantee their expertise. If the result does not suit you, you can not pay.
Founded Year: 2014
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Ivan Tretyakov, Maria Veikhman
Funding Amount: $597K
Investor(s): Starta VC, Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), Moscow Seed Fund, and Life.SREDA
16. REGA
REGA Risk Sharing is an international software company specialized in blockchain fintech product development. Now we go out of our way to built REGA Platform to reinvent insurance. We have more than 20 years of experience in risk assessment and scoring, developed fintech products for main RU banks, using facial and behavioral scoring, ML, and computer vision.
Founded Year: 2016
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Leonid Morozovskii, Roman Ischenko, Sergei Sevriugin, Sergey Kiselev, Victor Chernyshev
Funding Amount: $507K
Investor(s): AltaIR Capital
17. PayZakat
PayZakat is a unique Islamic FinTech plaform. It’s an AI-based bot platform for personal donations management and organization. The chatbot allows users to select from a wide range of donation types and worldwide organizations.
Founded Year: 2018
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Behnam Gurbanzada
Funding Amount: $159.3K
Investor(s): Sberbank
18. Automatic Finance Complexes
Automatic Finance Complexes is a system that transforms traditional offline finance organizations into automated online microfinance services. AFC creates logistics platforms for highly-loaded financial systems. AFC offers all stages of work for the ICO and creates end-to-end solutions for MFIs, banks, p2p-lending, p2b-lending.
Founded Year: 2014
Location: Skolkovo, Moskva, Russian Federation
Funding Amount: $131K
19. mplace.me
Mplace.me helps financial institutions to start online marketing campaigns immediately, with pre-set access to local financial traffic.
MPLACE is a platform for buying and selling leads in Kazakhstan, which offers advertisers to pay only for targeted user actions – buying, registering, filling out profiles, and so on. It uses a unique technological complex of its own development, which has no analogs in the market. The company’s experience and knowledge in affiliate marketing allow its partners to achieve impressive results.
Founded Year: 2017
Location: Moscow, Moscow City, Russian Federation
Founder(s): Arthur Mikaelyan, Viacheslav Semenikhin
Funding Amount: $18K
Investor(s): Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF)
20. Barter Card
A system of a multilateral commodity exchange for legal entities that increases the client base saves working capital. Also Known As Sistema mnogostoronnego tovaroobmena Barter-Kard.
Founded Year: 1991
Location: Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russian Federation
Funding Amount: $12K
Investor(s): Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF)
Al Nashmiah Farms, committed to aiding women burdened by debt and facing the threat of incarceration, offers a novel solution for them to earn their way to freedom. Under the leadership of Razan Harb, motivated by her family’s financial struggles, the farm has become a pivotal force in rescuing those ensnared in the debt trap, providing them with employment and a sense of purpose.
Harb, observing the plight of many women who took loans in hopes of improving their families’ fortunes, only to be overwhelmed by unfortunate circumstances, economic downturns, and oppressive taxes, has established a farm that serves as both a source of employment and a supplier of high-quality produce to major markets.
The farm’s operations include the provision of household essentials, emphasizing the importance of quality through methods such as nitrogen sterilization and the use of healthy packaging. Additionally, Harb has initiated work-from-home opportunities, enabling women to engage in the packing of vegetables and fruits for market and direct sales, thereby offering a sustainable model for economic independence and recovery from debt.
Selina Bieber, the Senior Director of Global Markets at GoDaddy, has predicted a significant increase in Egypt’s e-commerce revenue. By 2028, it could reach $9.88 billion.
Godaddy is forming strategic partnerships and launching initiatives to help local entrepreneurs. These efforts align with Egypt’s digital transformation goals and its Vision 2030.
In an interview with the Arabic financial news “Amwal Al Ghad,” Bieber spoke about GoDaddy’s plans and how they match Egypt’s 2023 strategy. She highlighted the company’s aim to provide effective, easy-to-use digital tools and services. By 2024, GoDaddy wants to serve more customers in Egypt by making its digital tools more widespread.
The company is working closely with the Egyptian government, especially the Ministry of Planning. They are offering training programs to improve the digital skills of startups and existing businesses. GoDaddy’s services in Egypt include domain registration, web hosting, e-commerce solutions, and digital marketing tools.
Recent surveys support Bieber’s positive outlook for e-commerce in Egypt. They show a clear trend towards digital strategies among small businesses. Many are realizing the importance of having an online presence for their growth and success.
As GoDaddy continues its partnerships and supports government digital initiatives, its influence on Egypt’s digital landscape is growing. The company is committed to sustainability and reducing its carbon footprint. It aims not just for business growth but also to contribute to a sustainable and thriving digital economy in Egypt.
The 2028 projection indicates a vast potential for e-commerce, with GoDaddy playing a key role in this digital evolution.
Lendo, a Saudi Arabia-based shariah-compliant debt crowdfunding marketplace, has raised SAR 105 million ($28 million) in Series B funding led by Sanabil Investments, a wholly-owned company by the Public Investment Fund (“PIF”). The round saw participation from Shorooq Partners, AB Ventures and other investors.
Lendo is a Shariah-compliant, debt crowdfunding marketplace that helps pre-finance outstanding invoices for businesses in Saudi Arabia. The platform is a community of creditworthy borrowers and sophisticated investors looking for alternative investments. The platform is licensed by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). Lendo will use the funds to support its fast-growing customer base in Saudi Arabia which has grown 3X year-on-year, introduce more innovative financing products, and accelerate market expansion plans.
“With this funding round, we are going to expand into new markets, support new and current customers, and launch new Shariah-compliant products, all the while continuing to innovate the marketplace for digital lending. We are going to make financial services more accessible, affordable, and inclusive for everyone. I am excited to see what the future holds for our company,” said Osama Alraee, CEO, and co-founder of Lendo, who also disclosed its plans for an IPO within the next few years.
Alraee has also expressed his gratitude to SAMA (Saudi Central Bank), Fintech Saudi, MCIT, Misk, and Monshaat for their unwavering support, emphasizing the pivotal role they have played in advancing financial inclusivity and fostering innovation in partnership with Lendo to reshape the financial landscape. Their dedicated efforts in advancing financial inclusivity and fostering innovation have been invaluable to us. We greatly appreciate their partnership in our mission to transform the financial landscape
Commenting on the announcement, Sanabil Investments said: “Lendo is a leading fintech company that is transforming the financial services industry in their specialist area of Shariah-compliant digital lending for SMEs. The Lendo team, especially the founders, Osama and Mohamed, have achieved a significant amount in a relatively short period, and we are eager to join their journey of increasing access to flexible financial solutions in Saudi Arabia and the region at large.”
“The growing demand for alternative, agile, and accessible lending solutions presents a significant opportunity. At Lendo, we are well-positioned to lead the charge in promoting financial inclusion not only in Saudi Arabia but also beyond. By fueling SME growth, we aim to contribute to the realization of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 economic goals and to create a ripple effect of opportunity throughout the MENA region,” said Mohamed Jawabri, COO, and co-Founder of Lendo.
Lendo previously raised a SAR 27 million Series A funding round ($7.2 million) in 2021 led by Derayah Ventures with participation from Seedra Ventures and other investors, bringing the fintech’s total funding to SAR 132 million ($35.2 million).
Since the inception of Dec 2019, Saudi fintech Lendo has processed more than 2,500 financing transactions on its platform, providing over SAR 1 billion ($300 million) in financing to SMEs and generating SAR 140 million ($37 million) returns for investors.
The Small and Medium Enterprise financing landscape in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) presents a substantial market opportunity as limited financial access continues to restrict the growth of the region’s businesses, with commercial banks hesitant to issue loans to SMEs at scale, resulting in a high percentage of declined financing requests annually. According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the SME financing gap is estimated at SAR 19.5 trillion ($5.2 trillion) every year in developing countries.
Lendo’s debt crowdfunding platform aims to bridge the financing gap for SMEs, which aligns with the Saudi Vision 2030 to significantly expand SME lending from 4% in 2018 to 20% by 2030.
The total value of debt crowdfunding in Saudi Arabia surged from 1.4 million SAR in 2019 to SAR 771 million in 2022, marking a remarkable 430% growth, according to SAMA’s annual fintech report 2022.
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