CHICAGO, IL, Runa Capital, a global venture capital firm with offices in Moscow, Russia and Berlin, Germany, today announced a significant investment in ThinkGrid, a platform vendor enabling the IT channel such as Value Added Distributors, MSPs and Value Added Resellers (VARs) to become cloud service providers.

ThinkGrid is in growth mode after three successful years of establishing itself as a leader in its market. The company is a channel-focused vendor providing turnkey worldwide infrastructure and a control panel platform that allows IT solution providers to become cloud service providers; able to create, bill and manage IT services from the cloud in real-time. The investment will be used to scale sales and development teams and open more datacentres to support international growth of the partner ecosystem.

"There are many large vendors threatening mainstream adoption of the cloud by cutting out traditional channel partners and going directly to customers with restrictive and often substandard cloud offerings," said Rob Lovell, CEO at ThinkGrid. He continued: "The partner community has historically played a critical role in helping customers with new technology decisions. This is why ThinkGrid has become both successful and unique in the market place by delivering a cloud platform with a full portfolio of services to the channel. With support from Runa Capital, we are now in a position to continue to build upon our success and further drive adoption of the cloud for IT providers around the world."

The ThinkGrid platform includes a full range of services such as Hosted Virtual Desktop, Exchange, VoIP, Software-as-a-Service and Virtual Server Infrastructure. Partners are able to re-package, resell and even rebrand ThinkGrid's products and cloud services. More recently, ThinkGrid also launched a Private Cloud solution, which allows partners to accelerate time-to-market of their own cloud services. ThinkGrid's core development is based in the Ukraine where it has an R&D facility.

"ThinkGrid represents Runa's eighth significant investment since the fund's launch last year, and demonstrates our commitment to supporting technology talent internationally," said Andre Bliznyuk, Partner at Runa Capital. "Its unique, channel-focused model and powerful platform for cloud computing services reflects the type of innovative thinking we're keen to champion. We are extremely excited by the firm's existing success and long-term prospects."

About Runa Capital:
Runa Capital (www.runacap.com) is an early stage venture capital firm with offices in Moscow, Russia and Berlin, Germany, established to pursue opportunities in the rapidly growing areas of Cloud Computing, Internet, Virtualisation and Mobile Applications. Founded by Serguei Beloussov (founder of Parallels and Acronis) and Dmitry Chikhachev (Ericsson, Ritzio, Uvenco), and advised by Alexander Galitsky (Almaz Capital Partners), Runa Capital is run by a team of successful entrepreneurs, most of whom have worked together for over 15 years. It is a united team with broad geographical and cross-industry experience, as well as an extensive professional network. Runa Capital investment team members possess an excellent track record in tech investments.

Runa Capital's investment strategy focuses on early stage opportunities, where venture capital is scarce and deal flow abundant. The key execution point is to select promising teams and drive and support them in the global marketplace, turning them into international champions

Runa Capital's investments announced to date include: OnAir3G/Telefir, developer of a voice-enabled mobile communications platform; Jelastic, a cloud-based application development platform; Metabar, provider of tools used to enhance browser experience; Travelmenu, one of the Top 3 online travel companies in Russia and the Ukraine; BigTime® Software, Inc. (USA), a leading provider of cloud-based productivity tools for growing professional services firms; Nginx - the third most popular web server in the world, which powers 43 million websites and more than 20 percent of the top 10,000 busiest websites including Facebook, Groupon, Dropbox, LivingSocial, WordPress and Yandex

About ThinkGrid
Founded in 2008, ThinkGrid is a private corporation headquartered in the UK, with offices located in London, Seattle, Sydney, Belgrade and Lviv, run by an experienced management team. ThinkGrid operates nine data centres across the world to house a unique platform, which delivers real IT services such as Hosted Virtual Desktop, Virtual Server, Voice to a network of partners. Partners then can use our state-of-the-art software platform to provision, bill, manage and service their customers in real-time.

ThinkGrid have over 10,000 users accessing services on a day to day basis, powered by our partner ecosystem which encompasses over 150 partners who deliver and resell our services, packaging them for different vertical markets.