Top 5 Social Network Startup Investors in Latvia in January 2026

Hofmann most recently held the role of musical.ly’s President in North America, where he led expansion efforts to build the world’s fastest growing entertainment social network. Within three months of Hofmann joining the team, app downloads increased from 200 to 400,000 per day. musical.ly hit the top of the app chats in 21 countries and has grownto over 200 million users globally.During his time at musical.ly, Hofmann helmed the company’s global content, brand, entertainment, and talent partnerships, in addition to heading all corporate functions for North and South America. He oversaw the closure of deals with all three major music labels and publishers. Under his leadership, the company closed its largest product partnership with Apple Music, as well as original content partnerships with Viacom, NBCU, and Hearst Digital. Hofmann also orchestrated partnerships with top artists like Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Jason Derulo and 250+ other artists worldwide.In early 2018, Hofmann announced he was moving on from musical.ly to pursue new ventures following the company’s successful merger with Chinese tech giant, Bytedance. He is currently investing in and advising new startups. He remains an ally and advisor to musical.ly. In 2017, Hofmann was chosen by Variety as one of “30 Execs to Watch” for its Digital Entertainment Impact Report and featured by Billboard on its Digital Power Players List: Guiding the Future in Music and Tech. Most recently, he accepted the WSJ Technology Innovator Award. A German native, Hofmann currently resides in Los Angeles.

Mail.ru Group was founded by Yuri Milner and is the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world. It is one of the largest Internet companies in Russia, and the world's seventh largest Internet business in terms of page views. Mail.ru Group operates two of the three largest Russian language social networking sites(Odnoklassniki.ru and Moi Mir@Mail.Ru), the two largest instant messaging networks in Russia (ICQ and Agent), Russia's leading email service, Russia's second largest Internet portal and Russia's largest online games company.Mail also holds strategic equity stakes of 32.49% in vKontakte, Russia's largest social networking site, and 25.09% in QIWI, formerly OE Investments, one of Russia's leading payment-processing companies. It also holds small minority stakes in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon.

Mamba is the number one Russian online dating service, which cooperates with major portals including Mail.Ru, Rambler and MSN.com and over 30,000 others. The company’s database holds over 18.6 million registered users, over 40% of which are active. Mamba primarily targets customers in Russia and the CIS and is also going to launch dating servicesabroad. The business model is centered on the “pay as you go” principle: the users are more inclined to pay for additional instant low cost services, rather than bigger monthly subscription. Company’s billing system is one of the largest in the world with more than 40 possible ways to pay for Mamba’s services. According to various estimates, Mamba controls about 85% of the market.

AdFirst.vc is a venture capital firm designed to co-invest with other VCs in early and expansion stage start-ups. They perform Marketing Due Diligence ads tests for start-ups and help the investor evaluate the reachable audience, check the marketing competencies of the team, and reduce the cost of attracting customers. Testing allows to confirm thecompany's capitalization and eliminate marketing risks. In the future, they oversee the marketing strategy of the project in order to control KPI.

Marat is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in the financial industry and early stage investor. He is the founder of several successful companies, including a consumer finance bank, few e-commerce companies and investment fund. He serves on the board of his several portfolio companies (Bioloka, Wow Cube, F3 and RelesticaHolding), utilizing his knowledge and expertise in Blockchain industry which he joined to in 2013 as a partner in Bitfury Group. In both as a fund and as an angel investor, Marat have invested in 30+ fin tech, e-commerce, blockchain technology, educational, healthcare and gaming companies, providing business expertise and financial & advisory support to founders. Marat has a master's degree in finance & business management and a bachelor's degree in law. In his free time, Marat likes surfing and skiing!