Pavel (Pasha) Bogdanov

General partner at Almaz Capital. His interests span software, gaming, and the Internet. He led deal execution for Jelastic, Parallels, Acumatica, Alawar, and other Almaz companies. Pasha is currently on the boards of Alawar Entertainment, AlterGeo, Flirtic and Nival. He helps portfolio companies with strategy, fundraising, and recruitment.

Pasha was the head of the company selection committee for the 2009 Russian Tech Tour. Prior to joining Almaz Capital, Pasha was a partner at Russian Technologies (RT), an early-stage venture capital fund in Moscow. At RT, he managed ten of its portfolio companies and also led an investment into CIP, the leading Russian 3D cartography operator.

In 2005, he was recruited to Sistema Telecom. As Investment Director, Pasha arranged $2 billion of debt and equity financings for a number of Sistema’s portfolio companies. He was a member of the IPO team for Comstar-UTS (LON: CMST) and participated in and led the acquisitions of several regional fixed-line operators. Pasha led Sistema’s investment into Wavecrest, a wholesale telephony operator in the UK, and later negotiated the sale of Wavecrest to MTT. He participated in the investment committees of Comstar-UTS and MTS (NYSE: MBT), and also developed Sistema’s WiMax strategy and its relationships with regulators outside of Russia, and participated in a telecommunications operator auction in Turkey.

In 2002, Pasha joined KLA-Tencor, the leading semiconductor yield management company, as a Systems Design Engineer in Silicon Valley. Prior to KLA, he worked as a graduate research associate and post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) at the University of California, Berkeley. His research was published in leading scientific journals, including Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters. In 2003, he was part of the team that put together the first US-Russia Technology Symposium at Stanford, which brought together US and Russian venture capitalists and Russian technology companies.

Pasha earned a PhD from Stanford University, an MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France; and a BS from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia.