OREANDA-NEWS By the end of 2022, investments in developing Russian IT companies declined sharply: 128 deals were concluded in total, compared with 291 a year earlier. Investments in startups fell by 57% to $1.1 billion. First of all, this happened because of the military actions in Ukraine, sanctions and the relaxation of many projects abroad. Moreover, if we exclude large transactions with American funds made before the outbreak of hostilities, we can see a drop in the market by more than an order of magnitude. In 2023, taking into account such a low base, investments may begin to grow, experts say, considering the replacement of foreign IT solutions as a promising direction.

Kommersant got acquainted with the data of the Venture Guide portal based on the results of 2022 on the Russian market of IT startups.

The total volume of investments in projects amounted to $1.1 billion, falling by 57% year-on-year. The number of transactions decreased by 56%, to 128.

Dsight, which participated in the data collection, clarifies that the statistics include information about open transactions at all rounds for the year, with the exception of those concluded with players who left Russia, such as Miro (an IT platform for collaboration). In the Voskhod venture fund, Kommersant confirmed the relevance of the data.

Among the market niches leading in terms of investments in 2022 were Business Software development — investments amounted to $449.35 million, HR & WorkTech (HR technology segment) — $425.67 million, cybersecurity — $251.5 million and telecommunications — $192.6 million. In the first category, deals were concluded, for example, with the developer of the information systems designer FIS (more than $ 5 million), among HR & WorkTech — with the recruiting chatbot platform XOR ($ 2 million).

The results of 2022 turned out to be "more difficult than one might have expected," says Pavel Fedosov, Director of Strategic Projects at Cifra Group: of the total $1.1 billion, about $900 million of investments were made in January 2022, including two deals with American funds (Accel, BlackRock) totaling $650 million.