Exactly three years to the day that a meteorite fell to Earth in the Urals region of Chelyabinsk, the Skolkovo Startup Tour visited the city as part of its nationwide quest to find promising tech startups and give them a helping hand.
Winners of the Chelyabinsk stage of Skolkovo's Startup Tour. Next stop: Magnitogorsk. Photo: Sk.ru
Entrepreneurs from surrounding areas such as the Kurgan, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen regions and Khanty-Mansiisk and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous regions came to Chelyabinsk to present their projects to a panel of experts on Monday.
“Three years ago on this day, a meteorite fell in the Chelyabinsk region,” said the region’s deputy governor, Ruslan Gattarov. “It changed us, and it changed Chelyabinsk, and Chelyabinsk will never be the same. Three years have passed, and today Skolkovo is here – almost like a meteorite. We really want Chelyabinsk to change for the better, for new businesses to appear here and for those businesses to be primarily hi-tech.”
Gattarov said the region was currently developing an instrument-making cluster.
“Right now we are actively working with enterprises that make anthropomorphic robots, and we are going to build a robotics technology cluster on that basis,” he added.
The entrepreneurs pitched their projects in five categories: biological and medical technologies, biotechnology in agriculture and industry, industrial technologies and materials, energy and energy efficiency, and IT. A total of 168 projects – more than half of them IT related – were submitted for consideration in the competition, and the winners in each category will attend the Startup Village held at Skolkovo in June, attended by investors from around the world.
Albert Yefimov, head of Skolkovo’s robotics centre and one of the experts judging the IT category, said that the winner’s project and presentation had been developed well.
“In my opinion, the main problem for the majority of pitchers is a lack of comparative analysis with their competitors, and business plans that are not thorough enough, but that can be remedied,” he said.
The winners were:
IT category
1st place – Ramil Ibragimov, for his Turborender project
2nd place – Pavel Podkorytov, for his Napeleon Publisher project
3rd place – Dmitry Brusyanin, for his Big Brother system for measuring passenger volumes
Energy and Energy Efficiency category
1st place – Kirill Panikarovskikh, for his project to develop a device for purifying gas given off by harmful substances
2nd place – Vladislav Ogai, for his project to make high-viscosity oils ready for transport
3rd place – Sergei Nefedyev, for his project to turn liquid and solid hydrocarbons into synthetic diesel using plasma processing
Biological and Medical Technology category
1st place – Marina Glyadkova, for her Exosupport exoskeleton project that helps in the neuro-rehabilitation of children with motor and cognitive disorders
2nd place – Vasily Dyuryagin, for his project to produce intraosseous dental implants with carbon nanocoating
3rd place – Ivan Zakharov, for his project to introduce 3D scanning technology and 3D modelling into the process of making individual orthopaedic items.
Industrial Technologies and Materials category
1st place – Yakov Busel, for his Proton modular security system
2nd place – Svetlana Karitskaya, for her tablet-laboratory for chemical and biochemical use
3rd place – Gavriil Agarkov, for his composite materials based on titanium alloys project
Biotechnologies in Agriculture and Industry category
1st place – Yevgeny Osintsev, for his project to obtain quality seeds and grain from non-liquid grain material
2nd place – Lina Tsirulnichenko, for her eco-technology project for processing poultry meat
3rd place – Anton Opletaev, for his project to create a new decorative form of the Siberian spruce