Videostreaming Of World Top 3 Leaves Belarus

The company has quietly moved its team to Poland and Cyprus.

One of the largest video streaming companies in the world, the American TangoMe, seems to have left Belarus. The company has disappeared from the list of HTP residents, and Minsk is no longer on the list of locations on the official TangoMe website. The Belarusian legal entity TangoMe is still active, but according to its employees, no one works there. Almost the entire Minsk team has relocated to Poland, devby.io notes.

TangoMe develops the Tango Live streaming platform - an app for live streaming, video calls and messaging. The platform is among the top 3 streaming services in the western market. The app has 450+ million downloads and 10+ million monthly active users.

The Minsk development office of TangoMe was opened in May 2020. According to rumours, the company immediately lured a significant part of the Viber team with higher salaries. In autumn 2020, the company became a HTP resident.

Last year, however, the company's plans for further development of the Minsk office changed. TangoMe opened an office in Poland and moved almost the entire Belarusian team there.

The journalists talked to several employees of the company and learnt some details.

About 130 employees worked in the Minsk office of TangoMe. Last autumn, most of the team relocated to the office in Warsaw, while some employees moved to the office in Cyprus.

"There were two main reasons for the relocation: possible cash flow problems and potential investor/IPO issues. When relocating, the relocatees were paid one salary and reimbursed the costs of "helpers" who handled the residence permit processing in the amount of 2 thousand zlotys (about $500). The move itself and the registration were quite complicated, we had to sort out a lot of things ourselves," said one of the employees.

The Polish office of TangoMe already employs more than 100 people. The Minsk office, according to the interlocutors, "was closed in November 2022. Nobody works through this legal entity now".

From Russia As Well

TangoMe has left not only Belarus, but apparently Russia as well.

The information about the planned departure of the American company from Russia appeared in the Russian media last autumn. Journalists did not find any public statements of the company on the matter.

The office in St. Petersburg opened back in 2015 and was the largest regional division for a long time. However, it is no longer on the list of the company's locations, as well as Minsk.

Also, we have found in the Russian register of legal entities the TANGOME STP LLC, which was registered in St. Petersburg, owned by the American TangoMe. According to the register, the company was liquidated in March this year.

At the moment, the official website of TangoMe mentions 5 locations where the company's offices are open: Tel Aviv, Limassol, Dubai, Warsaw, Kiev. About 50 vacancies are open.

TangoMe inc was founded in the US in 2009 by Uri Raz and Eric Setton and was the first to introduce cross-network and cross-platform mobile video chats to the world.

In 2014, China's Alibaba Group invested $215 million in the project. Other investors of TangoMe inc also include Access Industries and co-founder Zoom.

Today, TangoMe is one of the largest video streaming companies in the world. The company is developing an online streaming app called Tango Live. It is one of the leading online streaming platforms worldwide.

According to the official website, the company employs 350+ employees in five countries: Ukraine, Cyprus, UAE, Poland, Israel. The annual turnover is estimated at $400 million.

TangoMe has become another American IT company that left Belarus. The list now includes such well-known companies as WorkFusion, EIS Group, Softeq Development, Tealium, ArasCorp, Kaseya.

In just 2022-2023, several dozen different IT companies closed/sold their business in Belarus and left the country. Most of them offered employees a relocation option and took on some of the costs. (Only 14% of participants in our July 2022 resurvey - 5,000 questionnaires - indicated that their companies did not have relocate.)

The majority of IT companies from the top 50 have so far preserved their business in Belarus, but the number of employees working in their offices in Belarus has decreased by 1.5-2 times over the last year and a half, according to our estimates. For example, EPAM, the largest IT company in Belarus, has "lost" about half of its staff. The Belarusan iTechArt team was reduced by almost the same amount. The Minsk office of Exadel reduced almost 5 times.

According to official statistics and calculations, the IT sector has already lost about 20 thousand specialists since January 2022. Here we have compared the scale of two waves of relocation - after 2020 and after February 24, 2022.