Russian Brain Drain Saps Talent as Sanctions Hit Financing

Artem Kulizhnikov, founder of a startup designed to help musicians annotate music, is packing his bags to leave Moscow in December.

His destination: Dubai or Singapore, where he sees a better chance of securing funding for his second company.

“Russian venture-capital funds want to invest their money only in Russia, but we want to build an international business and they won’t support us,” Kulizhnikov, a former analyst at investment firm Alor SPB, said at a forum at Moscow’s Digital October center on Oct. 10. “We don’t need that much. Maybe $5 million to $10 million, to hire engineers, specialists, etc.”
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Kulizhnikov, 22, is part of a growing brain drain as Russia’s worst clash with the U.S. and Europe since the Cold War accelerates an exodus of capital and its brightest minds in finance and technology. More people emigrated from Russia in the first eight months of 2014 -- 203,659 -- than in any full year under Vladimir Putin’s rule, according to the Federal Statistics Service. With the stigma of sanctions limiting access to capital markets abroad and the government tightening controls at home, more entrepreneurs and investors in particular are looking elsewhere.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in March, Pavel Durov, the founder of VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, left the country to develop a mobile social network, saying he was unwilling to comply with government demands to turn over personal data on Ukrainian users. Game Insight LLC, ranked by Forbes magazine as the nation’s seventh-largest Internet company, shifted its headquarters from Moscow to Lithuania. Pavel Muntyan, the Russian founder of Toonbox animation studio, moved his staff of 15 from Moscow to Cyprus.