The American service for monetization of applications with Russian "roots" Appodeal raised $3.1 million

The Appodeal service, which automatically selects the most profitable ads to display, announced this week the closure of the first round of investments in the amount of three point one million dollars.

The company plans to spend the funds received on its further development: “to improve the quality, performance and algorithms of the product, to provide support for a wider range of frameworks and to increase the presence in the mobile advertising market.”

In connection with the transaction, we asked a few questions to Pavel Golubev, the founder of the service.

How difficult is it for a company with Russian roots to get an investment in the USA?In Russia, it is more difficult to find financing, since it is customary to show profits immediately here.

This is very limiting: due to the fact that you have to constantly show profit, you can’t grow fast. In California, they understand that profitability can always be tightened. The most important thing is to gather users and make a cool product. We understood it, investors understood it. In addition, the main metric that investors evaluate at the first stage is the team. Those investors who invested in Appodeal have known me for a long time, so they invested in me rather than in the idea.

Is she a team with you in California or here in the CIS?The development is all in Russia and Ukraine.

There are only three people in California. Another employee — an American — is sitting in Boston. But this is such a business development team. There are no techies here.

But would you advise a young startup to follow your model: that is, we take and send business leaders to the States, organize a company there, and leave all development in the CIS?To be honest, I myself don’t know any examples of successful teams that have worked this way.

We manage to work this way due to the fact that I myself — as a person with a technical background – have been working remotely for a very long time. Therefore, I have a good understanding of how such a system should work. But if a novice entrepreneur, not a specialist, not a technician is going to work with a remote team, then I would strongly advise him not to.

As for whether to make a company in Russia or somewhere else, it strongly depends on the goals that you set for yourself. For us, the main advantage was that… You see, it is very important for us to have good relations with advertising companies — with AdMob, with Chartboost, with all these companies. They are all here. If we were sitting in Russia, it would be very difficult for us to find a common language with them, because a lot is built on personal relationships, to come there and drink coffee together.