"We believe the cloud is where the future of computing lies," says Dimitry Chikhachev, Managing Partner of Runa Capital, a Moscow-based firm that has just invested $500,000 Hivext.com, a Cloud app dev company that will offer a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Azure, the Google Apps Engine, and Heroku.

"As more services and applications move to the cloud, it makes perfect sense that development should also happen there," says Chikhachev. "Hivext is at the front of this movement and we are keen to support strong technology teams with Hivext proving it has the strength necessary to be a success."

"Hivext is targeted at the mass web development community and supports a range of most popular web development languages, from PHP through to Java," according to Hivext CEO Ruslan Sinitskiy. It aims "to provide a platform for developers to create their own applications without being limited to using specific programming languages, downloading specific software or relying on specific data centers."

Hivext.com is currently available in Beta and is scheduled for commercial release by September 2011.

Runa Capital is an early stage venture capital fund that's focused on Cloud Computing and mobile applications. "Our investment strategy focuses on early stage opportunities in Russia, where the venture capital is scarce and deal flow abundant, as well as Russian tech teams abroad," according to Chikhachev. The firm was formed shortly after Russian President Dimitry Medvedev's (pictured) high-profile visit to Silicon Valley in June 2010.