Visitech, a Russian developer of industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and safety software solutions which is headquartered on the Island of Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East, is raising $1.6m from the Far Eastern High Tech Fund (FEHTF), the Russian business daily Kommersant reported.

FEHTF was set up by Rusnano, Russia’s government-owned nanotech giant, the local Foundation for the Development of the Far East and the Baikal Region, and the Russian Venture Company (RVC), the national fund of funds for innovation.

Visitech wants to use the money to fine-tune its products, step up R&D, improve marketing, and open a rep office on the Island of Russky in Vladivostok, the key city of Russia’s Far East.

Visitech was established four years ago in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Sakhalin’s center, by Rustam Milanov and Sergey Bobylyov, two former engineers at Sakhalin Energy, and Anton Kirichenko, an ex software developer at EY and Rover Computers. One of the co-owners of the company is Eldar Razroev, the former head of Euroset, a large mobile tech retail network; he owns 2% of Visitech. The company is developing software for production safety monitoring, predictive analytics to forecast and investigate failures. The team ended 2018 with $1.9m revenue. Its client base includes large-scale Russian oil and mining companies, such as Rosneft, Gazprom Neft, MMK, and a few others.

With the Visitech solutions, a user can reduce by 80% the time required to address industrial emergencies. The analytics provided by the team helps users identify and prevent systemic or one-time reasons of failures. Labor safety costs may be reduced by 10-25%, the incidence and acuteness of on-site accidents by 20-50%, and overall fines and downtimes caused by accidents can be decreased by 30-50% for a three-year horizon.