The Skolkovo Foundation began accepting applications Monday for the pitch sessions at Startup Village, Eastern Europe’s biggest innovations conference, at the Innovation Center on June 2-3.
Last year's Startup Village attracted around 10,000 guests to the Hypercube. Photo: sk.ru
Attendance at the third annual Startup Village is expected to hit 10,000 people, including innovators, students, scientists, investors, media and others from Russia and abroad.
“This year we’re expecting a big influx of decent, high-quality projects,” said Skolkovo’s strategy director Ekaterina Inozemtseva.
A pillar of Startup Village is the pitch sessions, which see hundreds of companies present their innovations to a jury in the hope of winning up to 3 million rubles in prize money; while the finalists claim 300,000 rubles.
The contest is open to Russian and foreign startups alike, so long as their innovation corresponds to one of six tracks:
“Considering the huge flood of projects last year, we have split into two pavilions the IT contest; we have created a separate contest for space technologies, and a separate contest for nuclear technologies,” Inozemtseva said.
“So there will be more projects, they will be more interesting, and the winners will receive more prize money than last year,” she added.
A number of the entrant startups will come from the Russian Startup Tour, which is entering Kazan on Tuesday on the fourth stop of a 12-stage trip.