[1] DST Global's founder is Yuri Milner and its co-founders are Saurabh Gupta, John Lindfors, Rahul Mehta and Tom Stafford.

[3][4] Yuri Milner founded Digital Sky Technologies (now known as VK) in 1999[5] that through acquisitions has become a leading Russian language website in terms of users.

[6] In 2010, Digital Sky Technologies changed its name to Mail.ru Group and successfully completed an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange.

Notable investments of the DST Global include Facebook,[12][13] Twitter,[12] WhatsApp,[12][14] Snapchat,[12] Spotify,[12] Alibaba[12][15], Toutiao/ByteDance[16][17][18] and Xiaohongshu.

[19] A Kremlin-owned firm, VTB Bank, put $191 million into DST Global, which used it to buy a large share of Twitter in 2011.

A subsidiary of the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom funded an investment company that partnered with DST Global to buy shares in Facebook, reaping millions when the social media giant went public in 2012.

The US government sanctioned VTB in 2014 because of the Russian military intervention in Crimea, but DST Global had sold its stake in Twitter by then.

[21] In addition the firm donated $3 million to Stand With Ukraine, a GoFundMe initiative launched by Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher to help the refugee and humanitarian relief efforts.