A state-owned Russian venture capital fund is poised to pump millions of dollars into Canada's fledgling nanotechnology industry.
Senior officials from the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies — which calls itself RUSNANO — were in Windsor, Toronto, and Ottawa last week meeting with scientists and entrepreneurs, as well as provincial and federal officials, as part of their global search for promising nanotechnology companies that need some seed money.
“What we saw we liked,” said Alexander Losyukov, RUSNANO's deputy director general for international co-operation, in an interview in Ottawa. “Scientists are getting engaged.”
Losyukov and other senior fund officials have also travelled to Germany, Israel, Finland, the U.S. and elsewhere as they look for startups in which to invest. With $5 billion U.S. to work with, RUSNANO is one of the largest technology capital funds on the planet.
Losyukov said it has identified more than 100 Canadian firms involved in commercial development of nanotechnology.
Later this spring, fund officials in Moscow will decide which firms or startups it wants to back. The fund's minimum investment in any of these firms will be $10 million U.S. [Red the rest of the story]