Startup Tour opens door to Skolkovo ecosystem in Kazakhstan

ALMATY, Kazakhstan - The Kazakh stage of the Startup Tour concluded on Friday with several innovations winning a place at the Startup Village in June and, perhaps more significantly, the foundations put in place for of a new era of high-tech cooperation between Russia and Kazakhstan.

The participants of the Almaty stage of the 2015 Startup Tour. Photo: sk.ru

The purpose of the two-day stop in Almaty, the sixth stage of the 12-city tour and the first-ever outside Russia, was twofold: To find the most promising startups and give them the instruments they need to commercialize their innovations; and to create a new cross-border investment community between Russia and its neighbor to the south.

“It was a great event here in Kazakhstan,” said Ekaterina Inozemtseva, Skolkovo’s strategy director.

“Some of the startups have been really enthusiastic. Not all of them – it depends on the industry. If they feel the positive influence of Russia, with the good market and partners, then they are really enthusiastic,” she added.

“We can also speak of many successes with investors: We had an investment event in Almaty the day before the Startup Tour, and we made lots of contacts and connections. Now we will see a lot of people from Kazakhstan in the pitch contest and just as guests. So it was a great event here.”

The end of the Almaty stage marks the half-way point of the three-month tour, and Inozemtseva said certain conclusions could already be drawn.

“The level of startups and their projects is really higher than last year – that’s for sure,” she said. “They are more professional, the presentations are better, the ideas are better. There is more science in the projects, they are really great.”

“I really hope we have just as much success in Belarus,” Inozemtseva added, referring to the tour’s next foray out of Russia, to Minsk next month.

Skolkovo's senior vice president for innovations Vasily Belov, said the event would no longer be known as the Russian Startup Tour:

“After this startup tour, this event becomes international. In my view, this is no accident. This is a great reason to rebrand the entire tour and change all of our promotional material,” he said.

Meanwhile, there was a message of consolation from Skolkovo's top startup expert Pekka Viljakainen to those companies that were not awarded prizes. 

"I have a message for those who are not winners," he said. "If you love your innovation and have a real problem you want to solve, if you don’t get an award today, it doesn’t mean you should stop your startups. We experts make our concolusions on just five minutes presentations," he said.

Pekka Viljakainen. Photo: sk.ru

"But we also make mistakes. If you don’t win today, perhaps think what you could have done better. Perhaps your presentation wasn’t clear enough, perhaps you didn’t explain the problem you are solving. If you believe in your innovation, learn fast, don’t try to do everything yourself, and never, never give up."

The tour is split into the educational day, with master-classes and roundtables, and the pitch sessions, which give local startups five minutes each to convince a jury that their innovation is worth inviting to June’s Startup Village in Moscow.

Prizes were on offer in five tracks in the pitch sessions at the Almaty Management University: innovations for kids, efficient energy technology, industrial technology, biomedicine and IT, the final two of which were attended by sk.ru.

The first prize in the biomed track went to Rashid Uskenov project named Genome Evaluation of Dairy Cattle, which uses an algorithm to determine the milk-producing potential and breeding value of calves as young as six months.

Kirill Tsoi’s animated children’s books won the top prize in the innovations for kids category; Sanzhar Myrzagalym got top recognition in the efficient energy track with his ecoSocket innovation; while the best industrial project was Andrei Bitnerov’s environmentally friendly fire-extinguishing technology.

The most fiercely contested track, IT, was won by Anar Akbarli’s retail scanning system named Pole, which uses algorithms to improve shelf-management efficiency.

The tour returns to Russia next week with a visit to St. Petersburg before rolling into Vladivostok on April 2-3.

A table showing the top places in each track.