russia
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Skolkovo built a startup city. The real test is the sale.
Russia’s Skolkovo Foundation bundles grants, laboratories and corporate introductions into a national technology project. Its history shows how much a state can build - and how much still depends on a customer saying yes.
Avito sold Russia on secondhand. Now it wants the whole business.
The Russian classifieds platform grew by helping strangers trade. Its next bet is to make the same marketplace useful for buying equipment, hiring staff and keeping a small company running.
VK has the audience. Now comes the arithmetic.
From Mail.ru to video feeds and business software, VK has built a place in millions of Russian daily routines. A costly expansion and a major share issue explain why its next test is turning attention into durable earnings.
Flowwow learned the hard way: a bouquet is a promise
Half the orders in an early holiday test went unfulfilled. Flowwow built a business by closing that gap - then took its local-shop model into cakes, gifts and an international operation now called Udora.
Ariadna Bogolepova
Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Alexey Aylarov
Alexey Aylarov is the CEO and co-founder of Voximplant, a Voice AI orchestration and cloud communications platform (CPaaS) powering 30,000+ customers and 2+ billion calls annually. A VoIP engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he spent 20+ years in telecommunications before building Voximplant into an enterprise-grade platform combining serverless infrastructure with AI-driven voice and video communications. Based in Sunnyvale, California, he co-founded the company in 2013 alongside Sergey Poroshin and Andrey Kovalenko, guiding it to profitability in under two years and through a $30M Series C raise in 2021.
Ivan Novikov
Ivan Novikov is the founder and CEO of Wallarm, an AI-powered API security platform that has raised over $70 million in funding including a $55M Series C in 2025. With 24+ years in cybersecurity, he is recognized as the inventor of memcached injection attacks and a pioneer of SSRF research, having earned bug bounty awards from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and Yandex. A Y Combinator S16 alumnus with a physics background from Moscow State University, Novikov transformed hands-on offensive security expertise into a company protecting APIs for enterprises worldwide.
Maxim Serebryakov
Maxim Serebryakov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sanas, a Palo Alto-based AI company building the world's first real-time Speech Understanding Platform. Born in New York and raised in Russia, Serebryakov co-founded Sanas at Stanford with two fellow international students after witnessing a friend face accent discrimination in a contact center. The company's AI modulates accents in real time while preserving a speaker's voice, tone, and emotion - serving 150,000+ live agents across 39 countries. Sanas has raised $149.2M in total funding, including a $65M Series B led by Quadrille Capital in February 2025.
Stepan Ilyin
Stepan Ilyin is the Co-Founder and COO of Wallarm, a San Francisco-based API and application security company that raised $55M in Series C funding in 2025. A former whitehat hacker and Bauman Moscow State Technical University graduate, he co-founded Wallarm in 2013 alongside Ivan Novikov and others, with the company graduating from Y Combinator's S16 batch. Wallarm now protects Fortune 500 enterprises with AI-powered API security, real-time threat detection, and CI/CD-integrated vulnerability management. Ilyin has authored over 500 publications on DevSecOps, API security, and AI threat prevention, and is a recognized conference speaker at Black Hat, RSA, and similar venues.
Natasha Alexeeva
Natasha Alexeeva is the Founder and CEO of Friendly, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company that automates insurance underwriting, claims processing, and reinsurance treaty analysis using deep learning. Originally from Moscow, she holds a CS degree from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an MBA from Stanford. Before Friendly, she pioneered EMR-integrated asynchronous telemedicine as founder of GoGoHealth and led new service incubation at Amazon Web Services. Her platform processes 7,000 pages per hour at 95% accuracy, delivering the 85% efficiency gains she's made her personal mission.
Daniel Kravtsov
Daniel Kravtsov is the CEO and Co-Founder of Improvado, a San Francisco-based AI-powered marketing intelligence platform that aggregates data from 500+ sources into a unified pipeline. A serial entrepreneur with 15+ years in digital marketing and ad tech, Kravtsov previously founded RTB-Media (acquired by Between Exchange in 2016) and Rizzoma.com before pivoting in 2017 to build Improvado into a $34M-funded revenue data platform serving enterprise marketers worldwide.