Prostor invests $2m in Smart Checkout

Prostor manages a $20m venture capital fund that focuses predominantly on investing in the technology sector in Russia. The firm recently merged its portfolio company VitaPortal with Runa Capital-backed ZdorovieOnline to create a new Russian online medical advice entity.

Company
Smart Checkout was initially part of Russian marketing agency Open Group, which was founded in 1998. Open Group began development of Smart Checkout in 2009 and patented the technology in 2011. The company Open Retail was founded in 2011 to implement the Smart Checkout technology. The business is headquartered in Moscow and operates under the name Smart Checkout.

Smart Checkout's technology is designed to create customer-specific coupons at checkouts in supermarkets and hypermarkets. The Smart Checkout system receives information on a customer's purchases as well as the customer's shop loyalty card and prints off promotional coupons tailored for the specific customer. A customer must meet fixed promotion criteria to receive coupons.

The company currently has no direct competition in the Russian market and plans on generating turnover of $100m by 2017.

People
Aleksandr Shurov is the director of Open Retail. Alexey Solovyov is a managing director at Prostor.

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• Topics
• CEE
• Early-stage
• Consumer
• Russia