Slise.xyz, a Web3-native advertising platform, had announced its plans to be acquired by Web3 Media Ventures, a Web3 and adtech investment firm. The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

Slise shared the news exclusively with AIN, posing the startup as a Ukrainian-founded company. However, AIN, with the help of Molfar OSINT Agency, has researched the company’s background and discovered that its co-founders have close ties to russia.

About the deal

  • The startup is to be acquired by Web3 Media Ventures, an investment firm founded by crypto entrepreneurs with over 50 years of experience in blockchain.

  • The firm holds equity and digital asset holdings in Web3 and adtech platforms, focusing on crypto-enabled advertising since the early days of Bitcoin.

  • Web3 Media Ventures plans to integrate Slise into its portfolio next quarter, offering enhanced advertising experiences for clients and partners. The Slise team will transition the Slise.xyz business under W3M Ventures management, while the core personnel focus on Dise.app, an AI-powered Sales CRM for crypto teams on Telegram.

Slise’s possible connections to russia

Slise was founded in 2022 by Y Combinator alumni Oleksii Sidorov, Dmitry Radkovskiy, and Aditya Mehta. 

As discovered by Molfar, Dmitry Radkovskiy is a russian citizen who has worked in various russian companies including Mail.Ru, a russian holding, and Crazy Panda Games, a Limassol-based company with the majority of employees working in russia, as seen on its LinkedIn page.

He has also developed three blockchain projects (1, 2, 3), one of them was created as part of the russian team at the Hong Kong Hackathon. 


Image: Russian team at the Hong Kong Hackathon

Nevertheless, Radkovskiy, possibly born in Izhevsk, currently lives in London and had been registered as a private entrepreneur in russia up until October 2024.


Screenshot from russia's public register

Griffin Kao, one of the co-founders and advisor in Slise, has been working at Grishin Robotics, a venture capital company founded by russians Dmitry Grishin and Sergey Nikulin, since 2022.

Grishin is a co-founder of the russian state-owned Mail.ru Group. According to his Linkedin, Grishin left Mail.ru in May 2022, just four months after the russian invasion in Ukraine.


Screenshot from Grishin’s LinkedIn profile

Oleksii Sidorov, a Ukrainian member of the founding team, published several war-related posts on his TG channel starting from February 24 2022. 

In these posts, he called the russian war against Ukraine ‘Russia's inhuman aggression’, but noted that ‘all Russians I know are good people’, and that he ‘really loves the Russian people’ and that ‘we all (both Ukrainians and Russians alike) have become victims’ (1, 2, 3).


Screenshot from Oleksii Sidorov’s Telegram channel

He only blamed Putin for the war and called the russian army in Ukraine ‘conscripts who are going there as cannon fodder, not of their own free will’. As of July 2024, according to russian officials and reported by Reuters, 190,000 people have volunteered to fight in Ukraine. In 2023 the number of signed contracts reached 490,000.

Why is it important

It has been almost 3 years since russia launched its fullscale invasion of Ukraine, continuing destroying Ukrainian cities and killing its citizens. Many countries have imposed sanctions on russian individuals and businesses, but russian-founded businesses found numerous ways to evade the legal regulations and continue earning money from unsuspecting customers.

Exposing russian businesses and russian-linked company founders helps put economic pressure on russia by disrupting funding channels and reducing investment in companies that may support Kremlin goals or simply pay taxes in russia, which helps it pay for the unjust war.

UPD: 22:15

Oleksii Sidorov addressed AIN with comments regarding Slise's possible ties to russia. AIN shares some of his comments below for our reader to get better context on the situation:

Dmitry Radkovskiy has a residence permit in the UK and cannot be in the Russian Federation for political activity against the authorities. He actively opposes the war and the Putin regime. According to international standards, he passes all KYC as a person not connected to Russia. His participation in the project does not create any ties with the Russian Federation.

Griffin Kao is a US citizen, Asian-American, born in Philadelphia, works at Google. We worked with him for 3 months, and he has no stake in the company. I think he only heard about Russia on TV and has no idea who Grishin is. His past work experience has no influence on Slise today, especially since he no longer actively participates in the project.

My post was written on the first day of the war. I do not take back my words, on the first day of the war we were all shocked and had limited understanding of the situation and access to information. My first reaction was to call for peace and to fight Putin (which I still believe to be true), although of course today, 3 years later, my views on the actions of Russia and Russian soldiers are completely different [AIN asked to provide his updated stance on the war — ed.].

Slise does not work with enemies, does not do business in the Russian Federation, and does not serve clients from the list of sanctioned countries.