Kirill Podolsky

Kirill Podolsky is a Russian serial entrepreneur and angel investor whose career spans grain trading, online travel, and agricultural logistics technology. An engineer-programmer by training, he graduated from the Taganrog Radio Engineering Institute (TRTI). In the 1990s he founded YugTransitService (YTS) in Taganrog, becoming one of the first major exporters of Russian grain, where he served as general director until 2006. That year he founded the agrarian-trading company Valars Group, which grew Russian and Ukrainian grain for export and became one of the top-three grain exporters in Russia and top-five in Ukraine, operating under the Valinor holding.

In 2008 Podolsky launched AnywayAnyday.com, an online air-ticket and hotel-booking service that became one of the largest online travel platforms in Russia. He remained the majority owner — holding roughly a 60% stake — and chairman; in 2010 Tiger Global Management (an early Yandex backer) acquired a 40% stake. In 2012 Podolsky publicly stated the company aimed to raise up to $50 million from investment funds with a possible London or New York IPO no earlier than 2014. He ultimately sold the business roughly five years after its consumer launch.

After the collapse and asset sale of his agricultural holding (Valinor's assets were sold around 2015, and Podolsky was declared personally bankrupt by a Russian court in November 2018 over Valars-related debts), he returned to entrepreneurship in agritech. In 2016–2017 he founded SmartSeeds, an "Uber-for-grain" digital platform that automates the transport and delivery of agricultural cargo by connecting cargo owners, carriers, and terminals, complete with driver/customer apps and electronic-signature workflows. SmartSeeds raised several million dollars from Artem Kuznetsov, co-owner of the Guta group, and Podolsky has chaired a standardization council for agricultural trading rules.

Alongside operating businesses, Podolsky has acted as an angel investor, deploying personal capital into early-stage Russian internet startups — most visibly in online real estate and local-services ventures connected to his AnywayAnyday network.

• Invests as an angel/founder-operator, backing early-stage (seed to Series A) Russian internet and marketplace businesses.
• Gravitates to sectors he knows firsthand — online travel, local/city guides, real-estate marketplaces, and agriculture/freight logistics.
• Comfortable writing meaningful early checks (a documented $3M Series A) and co-investing with a trusted partner rather than leading large syndicates.
• Favors operationally-heavy, transaction-based platforms (booking, brokerage, freight matching) that digitize a fragmented offline market — mirroring the "Uber-for-X" model he built with SmartSeeds.