Investors are no longer willing to pay for pretty promises

Two portfolio companies of KAMA FLOW have made it into Forbes’ top five Russian companies that attracted the largest investments in 2026. Robo raised RUB 500 million, while Callisto Vision raised RUB 700 million. In total, the five companies on the list attracted more than RUB 3.7 billion, with almost a third of that amount coming from KAMA FLOW deals.

According to Pavel Okhonin, a partner at KAMA FLOW, the high Central Bank key rate and the attractiveness of fixed-income instruments are putting additional pressure on the private equity and venture capital market, forcing investors to apply stricter criteria when selecting technology projects: “Investors used to occasionally choose technology projects based on flashy presentations and ambitious growth projections. Today, market players are much more conservative. In the B2B segment, an investment-worthy product must solve critical business problems rather than fall into the ‘nice to have’ category. A product we invest in must either significantly reduce costs or help a company generate substantially more revenue.”

He emphasized that when evaluating B2B projects, the fund looks not only at the team, technology, and market size, but also at the product’s impact on the customer’s economics, the presence of a regulatory tailwind, and the level at which the purchasing decision is made.

KAMA FLOW completed the two deals mentioned in the Forbes article less than a month apart.

•  Robo develops autonomous robots for commercial cleaning. The company’s fleet includes more than 135 machines servicing over 5 million square meters per month. Using the platform can reduce businesses’ monthly cleaning costs by up to 34%.
• Callisto Vision develops solutions for product labeling and quality control. Its products are used across more than 200 production lines in Russia, and the company also operates in Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia.

Read more about the largest investment deals of the year in Russia in the Forbes article