Gus Robertson and the Founders of NGINX

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However, implementing this idea turned out to be a difficult task. Despite solid experience, connections and an entrepreneurial background, it was difficult to attract investors. Then Chikhachev and Belousov invited their university friend Ilya Zubarev as a co-founder and partner.

The partners invested about $30 million of their own money, as well as attracted funding from family and friends. It was this initial capital that motivated investors to join Runa Capital Fund I. The managing partners managed to secure the support of investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, UBS and other influential financial institutions, who invested their personal funds in the fund.

Runa Capital Fund I
Runa Capital Fund I immediately demonstrated foresight and a clear understanding lebanon phone number list of promising areas. Already in 2010, its founders recognized the potential and invested in Jelastic. The company was developing a platform for hosting providers (PaaS), telecommunications companies and software developers.

In 2011, Runa Capital invested $1 million in one of its most successful projects, the open-source company NGINX. The investment proved profitable: in late 2013, the NGINX team released its first commercial product, NGINX Plus, and in 2014, it earned its first million dollars.

In 2018, NGINX raised an additional $43 million in funding led by Goldman Sachs and NEA. The venture capital firm subsequently exited the project in 2019, selling its stake to F5 Networks for a whopping $670 million.


In addition to NGINX, one of Runa Capital Fund I's first investments was $1.5 million in the e-commerce platform Ecwid. At that time, the startup already had 100,000 sellers from 174 countries. Ecwid subsequently demonstrated rapid growth - by 2020, the number of sellers on the platform increased to 1.5 million. Runa Capital sold its stake to Lightspeed and earned $500 million.