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Runa Capital, a new Russian venture capital fund pursuing opportunities in the rapidly growing areas of cloud computing, Internet and mobile applications, recently announced $2 million in OnAir3G, a voice-enabled mobile social networking platform.

Since its launch back in August, this is Runa Capital's first investment. In a press release, the fund officials announced that the investment was made with a goal of offering $30 million in seed financing to start-ups in rapid growth tech sectors such as cloud computing, machine learning, virtualization, and mobile and Internet applications.

“There is a huge amount of innovation happening in the ever-expanding market for mobile software. This is why it is critical to ensure that promising start-ups are given the opportunity to accelerate their entry into this space. The team at OnAirG has been involved in some pioneering work in both mobile software and Internet-based services. This is why we are extremely excited to be a part of what may well be the next killer mobile application,” said Dmitry Chikhachev, managing partner of Runa Capital.

Moscow-based OnAir3G is a start-up founded by online and mobile pioneer Andrey Vasilevsky, who also co-founded SmartCom, a developer of navigation software for Symbian (News - Alert), Windows Mobile and J2ME.

Three years ago, Vasilevsky sold SmartCom to Yandex, Russia's largest Internet company. According to OnAir3G, SmartCom’s mapping application is currently used every day by millions of motorists to avoid traffic jams in a number of major Russian cities.

OnAir3G aims to replicate this success with a powerful new voice-enabled mobile social networking platform designed for use on 30 million Internet-enabled mobile phones currently used in the Russia, the company officials divulged.

“The current economic climate poses a number of challenges for start-ups, particularly when it comes to bringing new innovations to market. In a short space of time Runa Capital has been able to bring to bear its significant expertise in the world stage to help accelerate our plans and ambition for success. We are very proud to be named the first investment opportunity from this exciting new venture capital fund,” said Vasilevsky in a statement.

Recently Yandex, the seventh-largest search engine in the world, announced that it is integrating Facebook (News - Alert) notification data into search results. Short for “Yet Another Indexer,” Yandex boasts more than 19 million unique visitors on a typical week day and claims more than 64 percent of the Russian local search market. According to the company, its network of sites together fetch a global audience of about 50 million people a month.