From the Urals with innovations: Four teams make Startup Village 2015

The fifth stage of the Russian Startup Tour culminated this week with four teams from Yekaterinburg winning an invitation to the Startup Village in Moscow.

The finalists in Yekaterinburg. Photo: sk.ru

The capital of the Ural Mountains region was the last stop on the 12-city tour before it ventures abroad for the first time in its five-year history to Almaty, Kazakhstan, next week.

At the pitch competition in the Expo Center on Thursday, prizes were on offer for the best innovations in five categories: technology for children, IT, biomedical technology, efficient energy and industrial technology.

In closing remarks at the two-day event, Skolkovo’s top startup expert Pekka Viljakainen noted that participation at Startup Village is “a fight in a big, open contest with other equally interesting and strong projects.”

Viljakainen hugging a winner. Photo: sk.ru

“That’s the best way to see what the competition is like,” he added.

In the kids track, the jury awarded first place to Olga Oshurkova’s workout machine for the eyes. The judges, made up of an expert panel of Skolkovo science directors, saw fit to name two innovators the winners in the biomed track: Evgeny Shuman for his substance to treat ischemic heart disease and Albert Gaidyshev for his automatized developer of major joints.

The top energy innovation was judged to be Andrei Medvedev’s automatic metering of electricity device, while the industrial track provided no top place – the jury handed second place to Maxim Somov’s innovation named Graviton.

Gaidyshev and Medvedev qualify for the pitch sessions at Startup Village this summer, with two third-place projects also invited: Sergei Kolchugin’s Current Boards innovation (industrial) and Oleg Lazarev’s Technovisor (IT).Maxim Pashabekov’s photography website storemood.com was named the best IT project.

The three-month tour has seven stops remaining, next visiting Almaty on March 19-20 and then St. Petersburg the following week. It has so far called in upon Rostov-on-Don, Tomsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan.

Of the hundreds to have made pitches so far, around 30 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.