The story
In 2004, Cisco approached Alexander Galitsky, former scientist and technological entrepreneur who was appointed as president of the first Tech Tour in East Europe — a specialized forum in which international investors visited countries with growing venture markets and got to know local startups, and offered him financing to establish a venture fund to invest into East European startup companies. Galitsky selected the bridge fund model and has focused on investing in and connecting Eastern European startups creating promising technologies for global markets with western companies that can benefit from engineering resources in Eastern Europe.
Alexander Galitsky founded Almaz Capital in 2008 together with three partners: Charles Emmitt Ryan, founder of United Financial Group, senior advisor at Deutsche Bank and former CEO of Deutsche Bank Russia; Peter Loukianoff, who was working for Alloy Ventures; and Pavel Bogdanov. Geoffrey Baehr, a former General Partner at US Venture Partners (USVP), used to curate joint projects with Galitsky in the 1990s when he was CNO at Sun Microsystems and later joined Almaz Capital as advisor. In 2011, Loukianoff resigned from Almaz Capital and Baehr became fund's fourth general partner.
From Wikipedia’s article on Almaz Capital, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3