Leonid Boguslavsky

Leonid Boguslavsky (born June 17, 1951 Moscow, Soviet Union) is a USSR-born Canadian entrepreneur, scientist and venture capital investor. He was named the Internet investor of the year (Forbes, 2012) and the most successful investor of the year (RBC, 2017). He is the founder of RTP Global, a venture capital firm with offices in New York, London, Paris, Bangalore and Dubai. He was one of the first investors in companies such as Datadog or Delivery Hero. Boguslavsky is in Forbes' billionaires list. His wealth is self-made from venture capital investments with more than 99% created outside of Russia. He is widely considered one of the most successful technology investors. In the global Forbes 2023 ranking, he occupied the 787th place with a fortune of $8.6 billion.

Early life He was born into the family of writer Zoya Boguslavskaya and scientist-engineer Boris Kagan; he was the stepson of poet Andrei Voznesensky.

Boguslavsky studied physics-mathematics at school in Moscow, USSR. In sixth grade he won the Moscow University Biology Olympiad and went on a year later to win the USSR TV Mathematics Olympiad. In 1973 under the rector Fyodor Kochnev, Boguslavsky graduated from the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineering, (MIIT) where his father Boris Kagan taught, majoring in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.

From 1973 to 1990, he conducted scientific research at the Institute of Control Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences in mathematics for computer systems and networks. Upon receiving his Doctorate of Science (Engineering), Boguslavsky wrote articles, scientific books and made inventions while heading his own laboratory.

In 1990, Boguslavsky was offered by Oracle Corporation to distribute Oracle software products in the USSR and he concluded the exclusive distribution agreement with Oracle for the territory of the USSR. He founded LVS in 1990.

He returned to Moscow to work for Oracle.

In 1992, Boguslavsky concentrated on his own business – the company LVS which is a systems integration business.

In December 1999, Boguslavsky met investment bankers Charles Ryan (UFG), Michael Calvey (Baring Vostok) and David Mixer (Rex Capital), who were planning to set up an Internet investment company at that time.

During 2000 and 2001, ru-Net Holdings survived the dot-com crisis, although some investors intended to exit the business and distribute the remaining funds. Some investors were especially concerned about the future of Yandex, whose revenues were low at the time.

ru-Net Holdings made its first investments in a couple of system integration and software development companies in 2002, buying stakes in TopS (Russia-based enterprise management systems integrator) and VDI (offshore programming). Later, VDI merged with Epam to become the largest offshore programming and software outsourcing company in Central and Eastern Europe and launched an IPO on NASDAQ. ru-Net Holdings restructured its business in 2006 with only Yandex shares left and the company changed its name to Internet Search Investment Limited (ISIL). Other assets (including shares of Ozon.ru, TopS, and VDI) were distributed among the shareholders of ru-Net Holdings. As a result, Boguslavsky was still a significant shareholder of ISIL and, accordingly, a beneficiary of shareholding in Yandex (he had also invested additional funds) on one hand and obtained corresponding stakes in all other assets on the other hand. The former head of Microsoft in Russia, Olga Dergunova , will be an independent director.

Yandex floated 17.6% of its shares on NASDAQ for $1.3 billion on 24 May 2011. Boguslavsky sold a small portion of his shares during the IPO. He partly used the funds (about $60 million) to invest in the purchase of new shares in Ozon, leading to the largest investment ($100 million) in an Internet company in Russian history.

In 2011 Leonid set up a US-based subsidiary, the venture capital company - ru-Net Technology Partners (RTP Ventures), opening a New York office. Headed by Kirill Sheynkman, RTP actively invests in early-stage companies in the US market with investments in Big Data, SaaS, cloud computing, Fintech, Health Care, IoT and Information Security. ru-Net also started investing in Europe and India. Among some of the early investments was German startup Delivery Hero that later in 2017 was valuated at €4.5 billion at IPO.

In India, Boguslavsky invested in Practo, Faasos, Snapdeal and other companies. In the United States his investments include RingCentral, which had a successful IPO in 2013.

In 2016, Boguslavsky invested in European internet company Urban Sport Club, that sells passes to sport and fitness clubs. He also co-founded the first professional international league in triathlon - Super League Triathlon (SLT). His partners are the triathlon athlete Chris McCormack and Michael D’Hulst.

He received an investment return of 400 or 500 times from his original stake of $11 million in 2012 with his American company Datadog after its IPO which has a capitalization of $32 billion at the end of 2020, generating approximately $5 billion in profit.

RTP Global

In 2020, Leonid set up RTP Global third fund of $650 million. RTP Global manages assets in excess of $3 billion as of early 2022.

In all of RTP Global's funds since inception, the vast majority of capital has derived from him. He contributes >99% of the capital in the current fund, the vast majority of his wealth having been created in Europe and in the US.

RTP Global does not invest in Russia. Its portfolio includes businesses from 18 countries across the world. Leonid is not and has not been a tax resident in Russia since February 2015.

Response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine Boguslavsky released a statement in February 2022 calling "for an immediate end to the catastrophic and unjustified war in Ukraine", adding that he "could not remain silent seeing what is happening in Ukraine". The statement included that he "moved from Russia to Canada as a young man to work as a University Professor, and it was from here that he started an investment career that has turned into a global portfolio of successful businesses [...] Leonid has no political ties to Russia". RTP Global has never received an investment from a Russian institution and more than 99% of Boguslavsky's net worth was created outside of Russia. It does not invest in Russia.