Successful software-based startups on one side, their investors on the other side, and independent experts will analyze how venture capital and technology-based business can work hand by hand to enable innovative technologies in the global market. “How did you find each other? What were your main criteria for selecting a partner? How do you work together today?” – these are just examples of questions that will be debated and disputed at the roundtable.

Moderator: Nikolai Puntikov, PhD

President, First Line Software

Dr. Puntikov is the President of First Line Software, a global company offering broad range of software development and technology enablement services and solutions. Nikolai is a serial entrepreneur and business executive with a proven track record in building successful global organizations. He is also a committed advocate for the development of the Russian innovative ecosystem. In 2010, Nikolai co-founded the Russian Chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum, a non-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. Currently, he is the Chairman of CEE-SECR, the largest software engineering conference in Russia and Editor-in-chief of analytical portal Software Russia. Dr. Puntikov holds his M.S. degree from the St. Petersburg State University and a Doctorate degree from the Institute of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Participants

Gabriel Levi

CEO and Founder Dnevnik.ru

Gabriel has more than 7 years of experience in leading talented IT teams and creating revolutionary products. He worked as the CEO of CMS Europe until 2010 and is now a consultant on the advisory board for CMS-Gain Capital. In 2009 he launched Dnevnik.ru – an internet start-up that is meant to revolutionize education by making it technological, relevant and accessible to everyone.

As the CEO Dnevnik.ru Gabriel is responsible for business strategy, operational planning, team building and global growth. In 2012 Dnevnik.ru became the largest social educational network in Russia with more then 4 000 000 users. The project is now localized and launched in 5 countries including Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Poland and Hungary and doing global expansion in 15 new countries including China and USA.

Serguei Beloussov

Mr. Beloussov is a successful self-made entrepreneur, investor advisor with an outstanding 19-year track record in building, growing and leading high-performing, multi-national high tech companies in North America, Europe and Asia.

He is currently a Senior Partner and Investment Advisor in the venture capital fund Runa Capital focused on seed and early stage investments in Internet, Cloud Computing and Mobile Applications. The fund works with Russian-speaking teams located in Russia and virtually any other place in the world.

Mr. Beloussov is the Chairman and Chief Architect of Parallels, a global leader in hosting and cloud services enablement and desktop virtualization software. Under Mr. Beloussov’s leadership, Parallels has quickly grown to profitability and #1 market with its innovative Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Parallels Desktop for Mac and Parallels Plesk product lines.

Mr. Beloussov is also a founder, major investor and Chairman of the Board of Acronis, a global leader in storage management and disaster recovery software for consumers, SMBs and large enterprises. Total turnover of Acronis and Parallels exceeds $300 mln.

Serguei Beloussov holds his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (2007), M.S. degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering (1995) and B.S. degree in Physics (1992) from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

Alexander (Sasha) Galitsky

Managing Partner of Almaz Capital Partners and Skolkovo Board Member

Prior to co-founding Almaz Capital Partners, Alexander formed the Information and Communications Technology investment practice at Russian Technologies (“RT”), one of the first venture capital funds in Russia. Alexander was involved in investment community from 2003 as the President of the first TechTour-2004 event in Russia. Prior to his investment career, he founded and led as CEO five successful companies in the software, communications, semiconductor, internet and security sectors, including Elvees, ELVIS+, Elvis Telekom, TrustWorks Systems and EzWIM. Alexander has also been an individual investor and advisory/board member for a number of companies, including Magnifire (now F5, Nasdaq: FFIV), Parallels, Start-Telecom; NavMaps (now TeleAtlas), Acronis, S-Terra and PGP Inc. In 1993, he negotiated the first overseas and direct investment ever made by Sun Microsystems and pioneered in WiFi and VPN development. Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Alexander served as one of the top Technical Executives for the Soviet Space industry. Alexander was honored as the most influential person in the Russian IT and Internet industry, and named “Technology Pioneer” at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2000. He earned PhD in Computer Science from joint authority of Defense Research Institute and MIPT.

Ruslan Synytsky

CEO, Jelastic

Ruslan has more than ten-year experience in Java development. He was an engineer of Science Department at National Space Agency of Ukraine (2001-2007), senior GUI developer at Datamash Corp. (2007), team leader at SolovatSoft (2008) and senior UI architect at iQueLab Ltd (2008-2010). Now Ruslan Synytskyy is CEO of Jelastic Inc., which was founded by him in 2010 with a purpose to create unique offers in the cloud service market. The main sphere of activity is providing the cloud hosting for Java and PHP applications. Platform as a service, developed by the company, makes the process of deploying applications to the cloud much easier thanks to the convenient UI and supported technologies.

In 2001 Ruslan graduated with honors the institute of radio electronics in his native city Zhitomir (Ukraine). His specialty is the equipment of special monitoring. The year later Ruslan became the winner of “The Best young employee of National Space Agency of Ukraine” competition. In 2010 he got the first place in the IT Conf. CodeCamp 2010, which took place in Ukraine and the first place in the Russian IT competition Dev Generation 2010. His Jelastic project has been selected as the Technology Leader Award Winner in Duke’s Choice Awards 2012 at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco, CA.

Ruslan Synytskyy has a reach scientific luggage. Here are just some examples:

• 2002-2006 – A lot of lectures at scientific conferences in systems of geophysical monitoring area. Participated in research of engineering and design efforts on the subject of the geophysical monitoring system construction.
• 2006-2007 – Publications in scientific magazines approved by higher examination board of
  Ukraine:
  • “Algorithm of automatic correction of arrival time of seismic p-waves on basis on Akaike information criterion with the use wavelet transformation of Haara” – Institute of problems modeling in energy (Kharkov)
  • “Object-oriented designing and development of the automated collection system and processing of geophysical information” – Institute of problems modeling in energy (Kharkov).
• 2008-2010 – A few articles in IT e-magazines about Ajax technology, client-side optimization and
  cloud platforms.

Now he is also actively involved in various conferences for developers and hosting providers.

Mikhail Tsygankov

Chief Investment Portfolio Office, RVC

Prior to joining RVC Michael for number of years worked at Microsoft leading the Local Software Economy initiative rendering support to Russian technology startups by implementing programs of technology access (BizSpark, WebsiteSpark), early-stage financing and investments, entrepreneurial learning, startup community engagement.

Before joining Microsoft Michael served at various positions in software outsourcing industry, his last assignments included VP of Business Development at Star Software and GM of St.Petersburg branch of Luxoft, a major Russian software outsourcing vendor.

Sergey Eremin

Emerging Business and VC Lead, Microsoft Russia

Sergey is responsible for the planning and implementation of Microsoft’s overall strategy for engaging with software startups community and investment organizations in Russia, promoting Microsoft technology platform and business partnerships for mutual success and innovative ecosystem development. Microsoft’s ecosystem offerings include such valuable benefits as seed financing and cloud hosting resources (grants to selected startups), licensed software and tools, developer access to Windows Store and Phone marketplace, consulting, marketing and PR resources. See http://www.ms-start.ru. During the last 6+ years more than 5000 Russian software entrepreneurs and startups got valuable benefits by participation in such programs as BizSpark and BizSpark One, Microsoft Startup Accelerator, Microsoft-Business-Start, Start In Garage, IT-Alliance etc.

Sergey works in Russian software industry for 20 years. He holds Ph.D. in Computer Science from Moscow State University of Electronics and Mathematics. His professional experience includes software development for a number of major Russian industrial companies and government organizations, governance of the large-scale projects in the IT and education sector; strategic and operational management, business development, establishment of branch networks, development and promotion of new products and services.