Cisco Launches Euro VC fund

The Deal magazine runs a story on Cisco preparing to launch a new VC fund aimed at technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe, with commentary on the deal from Alexei Miller, Executive VP at DataArt.

Cisco is teaming on the initiative with 3TS Capital Partners Ltd., a private equity and venture capital firm with offices in Budapest, Prague, Vienna Warsaw and Bucharest, Romania, and said it will make the anchor investment in the new $44 million 3TS Cisco Growth Fund III fund. From a private equity perspective, according to Cisco, Eastern Europe is “probably a little more advanced than Russia”.

"In a sense the entrepreneurial spirit has always been there, but the social and economic environment was not always nurturing," added Alexei Miller, executive vice president of DataArt Enterprises Inc., a software development company that has offices in Russia and Ukraine. "Today there's an opportunity for more innovation and more investment."

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The story has been picked up by The New York Times: view article

Hedging With Technology

Global Services magazine devotes an exclusive cover story to the successful partnership between HedgeSpeed and DataArt, detailing DataArt’s expertise in financial technology and extensively quoting Alexei Miller.

According to the article, HedgeSpeed “realized that a generic software development company wouldn’t be able to provide what they were looking for. They needed someone who was familiar with the capital market and was open to change and innovation. The provider’s understanding of the domain was critical to HedgeSpeed”. The grip on time to market issues was another reason for trusting DataArt with handling development of middle-office liquidity management solutions, which resulted in a “happy customer-provider alliance”.

John DiRocco, CEO of HedgeSpeed, declared that this would be a multiyear strategic deal, to which DataArt brought a “bit of uniqueness with their model of working. Less than 10 percent of DataArt’s team works onsite unlike the industry average of 30 percent. The majority of development work is done offshore in the R&D facility of DataArt in Russia… This 1:9 ratio of onsite to offshore workforce not only saves cost for HedgeSpeed but also enables efficient resource management for both the customer and provider,” writes the magazine.

“In the hedge-funds market, you should be able to reduce the time between product vision and implementation,” the magazine quotes Alexei Miller, Executive Vice President at DataArt. “The whole premise is acceleration.” The deal targets 30 to 50 percent saving on time and roughly the same range of cost savings for HedgeSpeed.

“I like the personal attention we get at DataArt,” adds John DiRocco, CEO of HedgeSpeed.

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