Russian hotel booking online service Ostrovok.ru has announced raising $13.6m investment in the round A, Venture Business News reports. Among the investors in the startup are General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners, as well as over ten leading venture companies and business-angels from all over the world. The founders still maintain control over the company.

“Investment into Ostrovok has been made by very experienced and successful investors in the IT world, and ten of them invested in the Russian market for the first time. This is an impressive demonstration of the fact that Russia has taken a worthy place among information-wise developed countries,” Sergey Fagge, the general director and co-founder of the Ostrovok.ru service, said, - The number of Russian-speaking users in the world exceeds 300 million people, who are increasingly using technologies and have a high level of available middle class revenue: it is 40% more than the average in America. However, despite that, Russia remains the only large world economy that does not have a secure online-solution for travels. “With Ostrovok we have entered an almost undiscovered market,” Mr. Fagge added.

Besides General Catalyst Partners, that had earlier invested into Kayak and ITA Software, and Accel Partners, that had invested into Facebook and Groupon, Ostrovok.ru also raised investment from Peter Thiel and the Founders Fund known for its investment into Facebook; Niklas Zennstrom, the founder of Skype and Atomico Ventures; Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga; Esther Dyson, a member of the BoD of Yandex; Fritz Demopoulos, the founder of Qunar; Sebastien de Halleux from Playfish; Naval Ravikant from Epinions and AngelList; Scott Banister from Ironport and Slide; James Hong from Hotornot; and Sam Shank from Hoteltonight.

Ostrovok was founded in late 2010 by Sergey Fagge and Kirill Makharinsky, Russian entrepreneurs who had graduated from Stanford and Oxford Universities, worked in Google and Slide, founded in the Silicon Valley startups Tokbox, YouNoodle and Quid that managed to raise $30m investment from the leading venture funds, including Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund. Today the entrepreneurs want to create the first company in Russia that would be built on principles used in the Silicon Valley: accent on excellent user qualities of the service, star team of software developers and marketing specialists, strategic partnerships and implementation of the best business-practices of successful technological startups.