Wired magazine’s top 10 Moscow start-ups

Moscow is one of Europe’s top tech cities with a population of 62 million internet users — even larger than Germany’s — and a raft of top start-ups, Wired magazine reported. Other cities to have made the list are: London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, Helsinki, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Barcelona.

Following The Calvert Journal’s top five apps published this week, here are Moscow’s hottest start-ups, according to Wired magazine:

1. ZeptoLab: a Russian entertainment and gaming company best known for the hit game Cut the Rope. Since then the company, launched by twins Semyon and Efin Voinov, has released a sequel, Time Travel, and another game Pudding Monsters. “Our new games such as Time Travel incorporate animation because we are expanding into other media like television,” says CEO Misha Lyalin.

2. Zingaya: launched in 2010, Zingaya allows people to make free customer calls via a button installed on companies’ websites. It counts both Russian and US firms among its clients including Volkswagen. Last year, 1.4 million calls were made via Zingaya, a number eclipsed in the first quarter of 2013.

3. Narr8: an app that produces original, interactive content such as stories, articles and motion comics.

4. Ostrovok: an online hotel-booking service that boasts a million unique visitors a month.

5. Avito: Russia’s largest classifieds site has 40 million users monthly and 450,000 ads posted a day. Avito was founded by Swedish entrepreneurs Filip Engelbert and Jonas Nordlander in 2007.

6. Digital October: A tech incubator and events organisers for the international start-up community in the heart of Moscow.

7. OneTwoTrip: Russia’s most popular flight ticketing website.

8. Game Insight: A mobile games publisher with more than 150 million users a month.

9. LinguaLeo: an English-language teaching service with four million Russian and Brazilian users.

10. Eruditor Group: An online tutoring service with over 100,000 registered tutors and 400,000 customers. “We book over $200m (£123m) of tutoring every year,” says 32-year-old founder Egor Rudi.