Two Skolkovo Foundation resident companies won awards at the Startup of the Year ceremony held on Friday evening at Moscow’s Digital October technology entrepreneurship centre.
Flying the flag for Skolkovo were Fibrum, which makes virtual reality headsets, and Hudway Glass, a system that makes driving in low visibility conditions safer by projecting the route onto the vehicle’s windscreen.
Skolkovo startups Fibrum and Hudway Glass were given the awards at the ceremony on Friday. Photo: Sk.ru.
Fibrum, a resident of Skolkovo’s IT cluster, won the Best Hardware Startup category, as well as the People’s Choice award, while Hudway Glass won the Global Startup category.
“In 2015, we launched sales of Fibrum PRO headsets across Russia in stores such as re:Store, M.video, Know-How and more than 40 online stores, and sold about 7,000 headsets in just five months,” said Alexei Svirsky, a representative of Fibrum. “In addition, we developed and launched 26 virtual reality apps that soared to top positions on Google Play, the App Store and Windows Phone, having been downloaded more than 5.5 million times,” he said.
Svirsky said his team was delighted to have been recognized by the Startup of the Year awards. “We’re also eternally grateful to our users, who believe in our project, use it, and keep track of our success. I’d like to thank them for their votes, which ensured that we got another prize in the People’s Choice award.”
Global Startup winner Hudway Glass last year raised more than $600,000 on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter for the production of their product. That was more than six times as much as the project’s developers – engineers Ivan Klabukov and Alexei Ostanin from the city of Izhevsk – had initially sought. The project’s developer, RIT Innovations, is a resident of Skolkovo’s space and telecommunications cluster.
The winners in the awards, which were founded in 2008 by the Higher School of Economics, were chosen from among several hundred startups by an expert commission.
Earlier this month, Russia Beyond the Headlines published its list of the Top 50 Russian Startups, of which 24 were Skolkovo residents.