Venture fund ST Capital and Qiwi co-founder Sergei Solonin acquired shares in online programming school Zerocoder (Zerocoder LLC). They now own 13.04% and 3.46% of the shares respectively. Its CEO Kirill Pshinnik also increased his stake in the company, from 0.83% to 5.91%. This follows from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, to which RB.RU drew attention.
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The shares were sold by Anatoly Solovyov (from 37.42% to 25.98%), Oleg Dorokhov (from 29.32% to 24.33%), Sergey Petrakovsky (from 15% to 12.45%), JSC Solid Management (from 6% to 4.98%). Changes to the Kontur.Focus system were recorded on April 5.
According to the analytics company Dsight, 13 EdTech transactions were completed in 2023, but the amounts of known transactions are few and Dsight estimates them at between $2 and $4 million, with Uchi.ru alone being purchased for $119 million.
The Moscow Seed Fund, together with investors, invested around $100,000 in Zerocoder in 2023. Typically, the Moscow Seed Fund finances companies with a valuation of between $1.5 million and $5 million, they note.
“We can assume that investors obtained a valuation of about 6 million dollars (100%), which represents five times the revenue, which doubled in 2023 and amounted to just over 200 million rubles (approximately 2 million dollars) . The company is growing very well and the founders have a lot of experience, which gives confidence to investors to bet on them,” Dsight CEO Sergei Kantserov told RB.RU.
ST Capital told RB.RU that they do not comment on transactions. Zerocoder founder Vadim Mikhalev and the school’s CEO Kirill Pshinnik did not respond to a request at the time of publication.
- Sergey Solonin already invested in this online school in 2022. A year later, he pulled out of some of the assets he had previously invested in. His shares were transferred to Solid Management JSC, a management company that has been operating on the stock market since 1997. Then RB.RU in one of the projects confirmed that the businessman did not abandon the list of owners, he only changed the form of ownership of the asset.
According to Ivan Fedyakov, general director of the INFOLine news agency, everything related to EdTech is experiencing a fairly active rise. And despite the tightening of competition in the Russian market, many projects have the potential to scale and enter foreign markets, since, in general, all these technologies are more or less universal and are in demand in other countries.
The analyst also drew attention to the zerocoding technology itself, which allows various projects to be implemented without programming knowledge.
“And in general, they say that this could soon become a new milestone in the development of programming, since deep knowledge of the program code will become a kind of limited specialists and professionals, and the vast majority of users will write its solutions using zero code -coding ideology that, like a builder, assembles a project quite easily and quickly, although it may be high-tech. Therefore, interest and investment here are related to the prospects of the project itself,” Fedyakov concluded.
Zerocoder was founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Vadim Mikhalev, former Tinkoff product manager Leonid Byakov, Unisender co-owner Dmitry Solovyov, and co-founder of the Finologist and Megaplan companies Mikhail Smolyanov. Kirill Pshinnik, founder of Megaproryv and former commercial director of the company Unium.ru, later joined the project.
According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in 2023 Zerokoder LLC received a net loss of 10.6 million rubles and the company’s income amounted to 204.8 million rubles.
Author:
Karina Pardaeva
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
