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US publication selects five most promising Russian hi-tech startups

According to an expert, Russia’s tech startups should get more attention from western investors

MOSCOW, June 22. /TASS/. Russia’s fast-growing tech startups should get more attention from western investors as despite the fact that the country’s tech landscape is largely associated as hacker-centric, a strong technological and entrepreneurial culture has developed in Russia, the U.S. techrepublic.com website wrote and selected five most promising projects for potential investors.

"Russian tech (founders), like our fiction writers and inventors, have a romantic approach about creating new things. They want to reinvent our lives," Russian tech evangelist Maria Podolyak was quoted as saying.

Telegram, FindFace, Nginx, Ecwid and Appodeal were identified as the top Russian tech firms Western companies should pay attention to.

With over 100 million active monthly users, Telegram may be the most well-known Russian social technology platform, techrepublic.com wrote.

FindFace is highly accurate facial-recognition technology, the publication said. The technology is assisted by the image database on massive Russian social network Vkontakte and claims over 70% accuracy. NTechLab, the five person engineering team that developed FindFace, claims it is able to identify one person in a billion photos, in less than one second.

Nginx is perhaps one of the most widely used web servers and load balancers applications of all time, techrepublic.com said. It emerged as an open source project in 2002 and built a strong community of passionate developers. The company has raised $41 mln in venture funding and now provides cloud hosting infrastructure services.

Ecwid is not a Russian company but a "global company with a Russian engineering team," the publication wrote. With over 1 million stores and counting, the app rivals Shopify in the global ecommerce market and intends to compete aggressively in the U.S. ecommerce market.

Adtech serves programmatic ads through a fast-growing network of websites and social networks. The company has nearly 2,500 affiliated publishers, serves spots to over 100 mln active users, and generates 6 bln advertising impressions per month.

According to Podolyak, "Russian projects are more competitive from the tech side but are not good in marketing and business development." Podolyak explained that many Russian startups aspire to build a company with Russian R&D roots and Americans running the business. "Russians don't want to solve small practical problems, they want to change the world," she said.