Dmitry Grishin, CEO of Mail.ru, wants to invest in companies that can sell robots for less than $2,000.
Dmitry Grishin knows a lot about the virtual world, serving as CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian social networking and games website worth more than $6 billion. But when the 34-year-old decided to start his own company on the side, he opted instead for something far more physical — robots — stemming from his own childhood passion for playing with construction sets.
Last year, Grishin set aside $25 million to found Grishin Robotics, which invests in companies creating consumer robots.
“While information technologies and the Internet have made a giant leap in the last two decades, there have been no revolutionary breakthroughs in the offline world,” Grishin wrote in an e-mail. “Robots may become one of them.”