Varton

Varton is a Russian technology company, a manufacturer of LED lighting.

The company was founded in 2009 by Denis Frolov, the former development director at Wimm-Bill-Dann group, who decided to start his own business after he learned that the group was planned to be sold to PepsiCo in 2010. Before Frolov had been buying LED lamps for the production, and he assumed that the demand for them will grow. The parliamentary debate of the law On Energy Saving (adopted a year later, in November 2009) also contributed to his choice of business niche. Start-up capital amounted to 40 million rubles of his own and borrowed funds. The company started with sales of Chinese compact fluorescent lamps under its own brand Gauss. Ilya Sivtsev, who previously helped Frolov find suppliers and distribute Gauss products, soon became his business partner, co-owner and executive director of Varton. The decision made in 2010 to reorient to LED lighting, led to making enough profit by the fall of 2012 to purchase an abandoned factory in the town Bogoroditsk of Tula region and to invest 250 million in the launching of the production and enter the corporate market with a new trade mark Varton. By 2016, total investment in the factory reached 1 billion rubles.