Juno startup with a development office in Minsk sells for $ 250 million

Juno office in Minsk

Entrepreneurs Igor Magazinik and Talmon Marco continue to work successfully with Minsk programmers. Here they developed the Viber program, which they soon sold for $ 900 million, and now they are very close to selling another Juno startup. The cost of Juno with a development center in Minsk is estimated at $ 250 million, writes TechCrunch with reference to "numerous sources."

The program for tracking and calling a taxi Juno is positioned as one of the competitors of Uber. The buyer is Gett , one of Uber’s strongest competitors. The transaction is at an "advanced stage" of registration. This means that for some reason, theoretically, it could break, although none of the parties is interested in this.

After consolidation, Juno and Gett will be able to make even greater competition to the market leader - Uber, which now operates in 579 cities around the world and is valued at $ 60 billion, as well as other competitors like Lyft.
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Talmon Marco (left) and Igor Magazine. Photo: Andrey Davydchik, dev.by

Juno co-owners Igor Magazinik and Talmon Marco founded this startup a year after they sold the previous Viber startup to Rakuten for $ 900 million.

Entrepreneurs are well funded startup Juno, who declared himself in 2016 as a direct competitor to Uber, with the mission to lure drivers Uber to a more profitable payment system and a more humane model of work. Juno drivers are charged 60-65% less commission than Uber. The company was able to quickly capture a significant share of the car sharing market in New York.



Magazinik and Marco decided that it makes no sense to move the development to another place, if the Minsk programmers performed so well in the case of Viber (not counting the desktop client, of course). For the year of operation, the staff of the Minsk office Juno Lab exceeded 80 people.

“There is one thing that I clearly understood during my work in Belarus: the development center here is a very good idea. We are absolutely not obliged to build a new company here and did not make promises in the spirit of Schwarzenegger: I'll be back. But we have found the highest-class developers here, both professionally and humanly, ”said Talmon Marco in an interview with dev.by.

Juno Lab Minsk director Alexey Minkevich said that development in Minsk is beneficial because of the large tax breaks for programmers in this country.


Igor Magazinik and Juno Minsk office workers

The competition of Uber and Juno looks a little funny from the point of view of software development, because Uber expands its development center in Vilnius , that is, literally next door to the Juno Minsk development center.