UrBC, Yekaterinburg, June 11, 2019. MegaFon and Fort Ross Ventures Management Company signed a strategic partnership and cooperation agreement to work jointly on innovations, technology-sharing, and finding promising investment targets, MegaFon Ural’s press service reports.

Under the terms of the agreement, Fort Ross Ventures will offer MegaFon its exclusive expert advice and information on promising potential investments as well as its own portfolio-bulging campaigns. MegaFon, on its part, intends to consider the possibility of investing into the venture funds that Fort Ross Ventures acts as the general partner in.

‘We have been working to build business partnerships with the country’s leading companies and to help the startups we support find reliable partners and investors. MegaFon is open to innovation and shares our both our values and our intention to develop tech entrepreneurship in Russia and abroad, which is why we hope to see some important, tangible, and long-term outcomes of the strategic partnership we have,’ says Director-General at Fort Ross Ventures Viktor Orlovsky.

A digital opportunities leader, MegaFon sees looking for interesting projects and working with its own ‘innovation sandbox’ as one of its priorities. Innovative projects, technologies, and ideas create bigger equity value and result in new, breakthrough digital projects. We have achieved great results since our ‘tech sandbox’ got introduced less than a year ago, selecting some thirty best projects out of eight hundred interesting proposals, and we are now working on these selected projects. The partnership with Fort Ross Ventures is a logical step in the same direction and a way of synergizing with a company that has vast and long-standing expertise in the venture investment sector. We expect a fruitful partnership that will support innovative development at MegaFon and help us adjust the international-scale technologies for the Russian market,’ says Director for Strategy & Business Development at MegaFon Alexander Sobolev.