Galitsky, 53, a former engineer and military inventor, is famed in Russia tech VC’s community for farming infosec solutions maker Elvis Plus. In 1993 a 10% stake in Elvis Plus was bought by Sun Microsystems, thus bringing Galitsky’s name to the Eastern Europe technology entrepreneur’s hall of fame. In 1999, amidst the economy meltdown in Russia, Galitsky founded another security solutions provider, TrustWorks, in Amsterdam, Holland. Unfortunately, the new venture went out of business during the dot-com burst in 2002.

To date, Galitsky stays Elvis Plus’ president and CEO. In addition, he sits on the boards of PGP and virtualization software maker Parallels. And certainly Galitsky masterminds new ventures. A Moscow-based Almaz Capital Partners is among them, aimed to fuel up IT, comms and media start-ups and mid-sized businesses with investment money. Last week Cisco announced it will put in $30 million to form a half of assets of Almaz now totaling $60 million. The fund is set to gather about $125 millions, but “as we have already a half of this sum, we can start doing business,” explains Galitsky.

As for Cisco itself, it already has an experience of investing into Russia’s Internet industry. More than a year ago Cisco took a stake of 25% at the online retailer Ozon.ru. But according to Galitsky this time Cisco plays only the part of institutional investor, and Almaz Capital will seek investment opportunities and manage the fund’s investments by itself. The average Almaz’s investment size into start-ups will be $10 million; the average period of investing is set to be 5 years. In the past decade Cisco has deployed over $1 billion into various ventures worldwide.

It’s expected Almaz Capital will soon finance three different companies in Russia. Hilton Romansky, vice president of Cisco's Global Corporate Development, told his company is not aiming to use the fund for acquisitions of invested ventures.