DST has secured stakes in several prominent U.S. The complicated relationships point to the rising influence of emerging market capital in technology venture investing. Co-founder Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger are the other primary shareholders of DST. It’s unclear if DST will merge ICQ with, which it partially owns. Tencent went ahead and bought a 10.26 percent stake in DST for $300 million, adding to the Russian firm’s four other primary external investors, which include Goldman Sachs, Renaissance Capital, Tiger Global and Alisher Usmanov. That would come on top of indirect investments in some of the most prized privately-backed Internet companies in the U.S.
If Tencent invested in DST, Naspers could still own an indirect stake in ICQ if DST went ahead and bought the company. Naspers has a 35 percent stake in Tencent Holdings Ltd., a Chinese social networking company that has a market capitalization of $36.8 billion. So the two parties came up with an interesting solution. Adding ICQ would give it more than 90 percent market share in instant messaging. DST, which has collected stakes in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga over the past year, didn’t want competitors in the Russian market, where it controls 70 percent of the pageviews via, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte.
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