The Russian holding VK acquired the YClients service, which still operates in Ukraine under the Altegio brand. This was reported by “Business Censor” with reference to the Russian media.
On December 20, 2023, it became known about the purchase of VK, which owns the FSB-controlled social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, 100% of a group of companies, developers of YClients — a service for online recording and business automation in the service industry. The amount of the deal is not disclosed, but in in the future, the integration of YClients services into the VK platform is planned. According to NGL.Media, it is about the Sogaz group, the largest shareholders of which are Yuriy Kovalchuk, who is part of the closest circle of the Russian president, and the Gazprom company, which is managed by Alexey, who is close to Putin Miller, as well as Putin's cousin Mikhail Shelomov. The media also identified approximately 500 Ukrainian companies that still use Altegio or Yclients services.
Formally, YClients stopped its work in Ukraine back in 2022 — shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion of Russia. At the same time, the identical Altegio service, which is positioned as a company with European roots, started working. It was allegedly launched by partners and former employees of the Russian company, as YCLIENTS announced the continuation of work in the Russian market and Belarus.
All available data indicates that Altegio is simply a new brand of a Russian company for Western markets, so Ukrainian businesses continue to use the service from a Russian company that has close relations with Russian intelligence services.
However, Altegio (aka YClients) is not the only Russian service that masquerades as a foreign service and continues to operate in Ukraine. In 2022, Syrve also appeared — software for restaurants, which is actually the Russian iiko.
iiko was founded by Russian entrepreneurs David Yan (founder of ABBYY) and Maksym Nalskyi (Pyrus). It deals with software for automating the work of cafes and restaurants, in 2015 the Russian Sberbank acquired its controlling stake. Syrve was created to hide iiko's Russian roots.