Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy and chief investment negotiator Kirill Dmitriev is currently in the United States, where he is holding meetings with representatives of Donald Trump. He also participated in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine in Saudi Arabia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy and chief investment negotiator Kirill Dmitriev is currently in the United States, where he is holding meetings with representatives of Donald Trump. He also participated in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine in Saudi Arabia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy and chief investment negotiator Kirill Dmitriev is currently in the United States, where he is holding meetings with representatives of Donald Trump. He also participated in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine in Saudi Arabia.
Isn’t it strange for you to see such a beginning of the material on dev.ua? Where is Putin’s envoy, and where is Ukrainian IT?
In fact, there is a connection. It’s just that few people know about it.
Let’s start with a more well-known fact: Kirill Dmitriev was born in 1975 in Kyiv, into the family of a biologist. He studied at a physics and mathematics school.
Then he began studying in the USA at Stanford University, then at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, then he started working in Russia at the IT company IBS…
But all these facts do not concern Ukrainian technologies. The most interesting fact, which concerns our sphere and the Ukrainian market, happened a little later, in 2010.
Kirill Dmytriev launched the first 4G network in Ukraine. And he even launched it in Kyiv.
In 2007, Dmitriev returned to Ukraine and headed the Icon Private Equity investment fund, which included investments from Victor Pinchuk, with a capital of about a billion dollars.
This fund invested money in the first Ukrainian «4G» operator, Freshtel, which deployed a network using Wimax technology. For some reason, Intel believed in it at the time.
«Thanks to the launch of the FreshTel network in September 2009, the technology has now become available to all residents of Kyiv and the surrounding areas, and during 2010-2011 the network will appear in all major cities of Ukraine,» the media wrote at the time .
«In two or three years, we will not be able to imagine ourselves without WiMAX, just as we cannot imagine ourselves without cellular communication now,» said Kirill Dmitriev.
But it wasn’t quite true 4G. Smartphones barely supported it (only portable internet modems and some laptops). It was a dead branch of evolution — an alternative 4G standard called Wimax. That is, it wasn’t LTE.
After some time, Wimax collapsed all over the world. And Icon Private Equity’s multi-million dollar investment in the Ukrainian network Freshtel cried. The project was closed. Although it was also resold, it floundered for some time.
Here is a piece of history.
