One of the Russian startups closed in New York: sanctions left the investor without money

Russia-backed delivery app Buyk abruptly suspended the vast majority of its employees on March 4 as sanctions against Russia left the company without funding. The Post.

buyk, which was founded by two Russians and has significant operations in New York and Chicago, is laying off about 98% of its employees until it can secure funding from US sources, CEO James Walker said in a statement to The Post.

The news comes about a week after The Post reported that Buyk employees feared an economic war between the US and Russia would cost them their jobs.

“We have made the difficult decision to temporarily leave our employees on furlough until we can secure more U.S. funding sources,” Walker said. – Our founders Slava Bocharov and Rodion Shishkov are providing bridge financing for Buyk until the completion of the next investment round. However, sanctions against Russian banks rendered this bridging financing scheme untenable, despite the fact that none of our founders were sanctioned.”

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The 2% of employees who continue to work are operations, HR, finance, legal and IT staff.

At least one Buyk employee was unaware of his release until contacted by The Post.

“Once this becomes public knowledge, it will be bad,” the employee said. “Many employees are single parents, mostly fathers who are in debt on child support.”

After The Post broke the news, some Buyk employees received calls saying they were going on vacation, while others simply received emails, the sources said.

“Couriers are notified by email,” one Buyk employee said.

On March 4, before announcing the holiday, Buyk abruptly sent workers home due to what the company said were technical problems.

“They just said it was an IT problem and it wasn't going to be fixed quickly, so they sent everyone home,” one employee said.

That same evening, a message appeared on the Buyk app for customers in New York and Chicago who wanted to buy such Productslike ice cream and pet food: “Demand is too high. We will be taking orders soon!

The news was not entirely unexpected after employees said last week that they fear sanctions against Russia could affect Buyk workers. Their concerns centered on Buyk's ties to Russia's largest state-owned bank, Sberbank. He was recently sanctioned by the US and UK in response to Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion of Ukraine.

One of the investors in the initial $46 million fundraising round was Fort Ross Ventures. He collected money Sberbank and its management team have a former head of Sberbank. Buyk's head of retail operations, Yana Pesotskaya, previously served as Sberbank's Food Technology Portfolio Managing Director from 2019 to 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile.

In addition, Buyk was founded as a subsidiary of Samokat, a popular delivery app in Russia, which is partly owned by Sberbank. Buyk's ties to Samokat include using the same technology and forwarding customer support requests from the US to workers in Russia.

Russian workers gradually disappeared from Buyk's telegram messaging channels without explanation this week ahead of the 4 Matra shutdown, a company source said.

In an interview with The Post last week ahead of the announcement of the Sberbank sanctions, Buyk CEO James Walker said of the possible sanctions: "I don't know if it will affect the business."

“We are an American company with American leaders,” Walker added. “We will make sure that our employees understand that they are not at financial risk.”

But Buyk employees working at the store said Walker and other executives did not reach out to company executives, even when he confirmed to The Post on March 4 that they had all been put on vacation.