Startup Tour leaves 2 million rubles in Nizhny Novgorod, invites 6 projects to Moscow

The third stage of the Russian Startup Tour concluded this week in Nizhny Novgorod, where two startups won million-ruble investments and six were invited to Startup Village in Moscow this summer.

The finalists and winners from the pitch sessions in Nizhny Novgorod. Photo: sk.ru

Prize places were up for grabs in four tracks in the pitch competition: IT; efficient energy, biomedical, and industrial technologies.

Dozens of startups from Nizhny Novgorod and nine other cities including Voronezh, Ryazan, Saratov and Moscow took part in Wednesday’s pitch sessions.

The winning projects were:  Alexei Umnov’s ‘Ornament’ weather-monitoring system (IT);  Veniamin Agureev’s ultrasound gas-flow meter (energy); Vladimir Samodrov’s ‘Georhythm’ health check system, (biomedical); and a metallization process developed by Ekaterina Runova (industrial).

According to Skolkovo’s Albert Efimov, the foundation’s director of IT projects and one of Russia’s most prominent roboticists, there are no losers on the tour.

“Even if a startup gets negative feedback, that’s great – that helps flag up the weak points of the project, to force the creators to think whether the idea really is as good as they think it is,” said Efimov, who also gave a seminar on Tuesday.

“I’ve seen no shortage of examples where a team comes to one competition with a really weak presentation, and then at the next contest it truly shines – as long as the advice is followed,” he added.

The final two projects won invitations to Startup Village, which are issued at the jury’s discretion, along with Pavel Gerasimov’s ‘Letalo’ project, Svyatoslav Zinovyev’s biochip test system, Sergei Terekhin’s project named ‘Nanopintset’ and an electromagnetic field scanner developed by Mikhail Romashchenko.

Gerasimov and Zinvyev impressed so much that their projects were instantly awarded million-ruble investments from the Fund for Developing Small High-Tech Enterprises.

The three-month tour is now one-quarter finished, having visited Rostov and Tomsk and with nine cities left. The next stop on the tour is in Kazan on March 3-4, followed by Yekaterinburg on March 11-12.

 Of the hundreds to have made pitches so far, around 20 startups have been chosen by jury to take part in the national pitch sessions at the Skolkovo Innovation Center on June 2-3.

The winners will receive further investment and possible Skolkovo residency.

A table showing the top places in each category. Those in bold are invited to the Startup Village; the asterisked projects are given a 1 million ruble investment from the Fund for Developing Small High-Tech Enterprises.