Hubert Burda Media Publishing House invested $ 14 million in Vietnamese search engine with Russian roots

    The newspaper Vedomosti reports on the investment of the publishing house Hubert Burda Media in the Vietnamese company Coc Coc . The company owns the eponymous search engine, browser, contextual advertising system and Nha Nha geolocation service.

    The founders of Coc Coc are Victor Lavrenko and three Vietnamese students who studied at the Moscow State University: Le Van Thanh, Nguyen Duc Ngok and Nguyen Thanh Binh.

    Burda spokesman Bertold Heidbühel confirmed the deal for $ 14 million, Coc Coc has already received the first financial tranche.

    Victor Lavrenko is known as the creator of the search engine Nigma.ru, which was originally an experimental scientific project. A few years ago, Yuri Milner, as part of DST Global, allocated $ 3.5 million to the entrepreneur for the implementation of seed investments. In 2010, DST divided Russian and foreign assets, after which Nigma.ru managed to buy back its share.

    Hubert Burda Media is interested in entering Asian markets, so it is looking for interesting projects in different countries of the East. Coc Coc has a large audience in Vietnam and competes with Google, which also strengthens its presence on mobile platforms and devices. This moment is especially important, since the Internet in Vietnam became available only with the advent of low-cost smartphones - the “desktop” stage was simply skipped.

    According to Viktor Lavrenko, the money will go primarily to expand business in Southeast Asia - the most dynamically developing global macro-region. Coc Coc’s daily audience in Vietnam is 8 million users. According to Comscore, Google has a daily audience of 17.7 million users. Alexa says coccoc.com is the most popular site in Vietnam.

    Coc Coc’s daily audience in Vietnam is 8 million users, Burda reports from Comscore. Google sites are visited daily by 17.7 million users. But according to Alexa.com, coccoc.com is the most popular site in Vietnam, overtaking Google and Facebook.

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