The most successful young businessmen of Russia in 2015: new faces

The publication “The Secret of the Firm” ranked the rating of the most successful young businessmen in Russia. Entrepreneurs were selected according to the following criteria:

• Age - less than 40 years;
• Business from scratch - on your own or on borrowed money;
• Russian citizenship;

• Place in the ranking was determined by the value of the share of the hero in the company he created (or several companies).
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The leader of the rating was Pavel Durov, who continues to develop his global project, the Telegram messenger. His fortune is estimated at $ 1 billion. In second place was the chairman of the board of directors of UTV Holding and the general director of MegaFon, Ivan Tavrin, with a fortune of $ 400 million. The third and fourth place was taken by Simon and Efim Voinova, the founders of the developer of games for mobile platforms Zeptolab . The state of each of them is estimated at $ 250 million.

In the evaluation, only existing entrepreneurs were taken into account. For example, the founder of Qiwi , Andrei Romanenko, owns 1% of the company's shares, but it is known that he intends to part with him and no longer participates in operational management.

As the “Secret of the Company” notes, the information given in the rating is the result of expert and journalistic assessments. This data is not official.

Megamind draws readers' attention to new faces and little-known names in the ranking .

Alexander Agapitov

31 years
Xsolla
$ 125 million

Ten years ago, Alexander Agapitov was expelled from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Perm State University - the work was taking too much time: the student wrote an algorithm for analyzing bookmaker sites, making winning bets, and launched a game payment service on the Internet.

The first service in the end did not shoot, but the second eventually evolved into the company Xsolla with headquarters in California, where Agapitov moved in 2009 with his family, and offices in all over the world (one of them is still working in Perm).
Xsolla supports about 700 payment systems - it is used by such giants of the gaming industry as Valve and Wargaming .

In an interview with The Secret, Alexander Agapitov said that this year he rejected an offer to sell Xsolla to a “well-known company that trades on the NASDAQ” for $ 150 million, which is about six annual revenues of the service.

Andrey Pryakhin

30 years
"Kefir!"
$ 19 million

The main hit of Kefir studio is Tyuryaga social game - 12 million fans in the Vkontakte social network, a month after launch - 2 million installations. Pryakhin did it for three months with a small team. In 2011, the fate of a small studio "Kefir" hung in the balance - the first game did not shoot, and if Tyuryaga had failed, Pryakhin would have had to close his startup. But the criminal theme was popular. A couple of years later, the studio released the next hit - the game "In the Trenches". The Great Patriotic War is another sacred topic to which social network users are not indifferent.

In 2015, Kefir is a large studio with headquarters in Volgograd and a branch in St. Petersburg. The company employs over one hundred people, the audience of Kefir games is 20 million users. Now the company has the opportunity to experiment and do not only viral social games, but also play with the formats.

Anton Gladkoborodov

35 years
Coub
$ 15 million

Coub - a popular service for creating short looped videos, co-founder of Look At Me and Theories and Practices, Anton Gladkoborodov, launched with his brother Igor in April 2012. The popularity came almost immediately, and already in 2013, Gladkoborodov managed to attract an investment of $ 1 million from the funds of Phenomen Ventures and Brother Ventures . Another $ 2.5 million in 2014 was invested by Vaizra Capital in the project.

This allowed the co-founders of Coub to open an office in the USA and start a full-fledged global expansion from there.

Ilya Sachkov

29 years
Group-IB
$ 12 million

Ilya Sachkov was a student at Moscow State Technical University named after NE Bauman, when he realized that he wanted to investigate cybercrime. Twelve years later, Ilya Sachkov is the owner of Russia's largest cyberdetective agency Group-IB with revenues of tens of millions of dollars, which is on the list of the seven most influential cybersecurity players in the world. Group-IB clients include the largest banks, as well as mining and oil companies.

Now the company is looking for investment. There is already an agreement with IIDF, but foreign investors are also being considered. Ilya Sachkov himself believes that Group-IB costs about $ 100 million, but competitors consider this estimate to be overestimated.

“Group-IB has one of the strongest teams on the Russian market — specialists of this level, of which there are very few in principle,” explains Irina Krivenkova, director of the services department of the Softline group of companies. - Even one Group-IB expert will be incredibly difficult to replace if he leaves the company. This is the weakness of Group-IB as a business: with all the successes in the subject area, the company is extremely dependent on the people who work in it. From the position of a serious investor, such dependence is a very big risk. ”