As 2017 draws to a close, the number of resident startups fostered by the Skolkovo Foundation has grown to 1,804. The foundation expects that figure, which has grown steadily since Skolkovo’s establishment in 2010, to remain fairly stable now, as some startups grow and graduate from the foundation, and new ones come to take their place, the Skolkovo Foundation’s chairman of the board, Igor Drozdov, told council members at a meeting earlier in December.
The giant Skolkovo Technopark, home to the foundation and many of its startups. Photo: Sk.ru.
Those resident startups have made a total of 147.8 billion rubles ($2.5 billion) in revenue, and attracted 29 billion rubles in investment, creating 27,200 jobs along the way.
Skolkovo residents have obtained a total of 1,200 patents, many of which can be seen in a decorative gallery of patents along the main corridor of the Skolkovo Technopark. About 20 percent of all international patents in Russia originate from Skolkovo.
More than 160 Skolkovo startups have entered international markets. Last month, ExoAtlet, a resident IT startup that makes rehabilitation exoskeletons, signed an agreement with its South Korean partners to set up a joint venture in Japan.
The Skolkovo Foundation now has a total of 91 industrial partners, including U.S. aerospace giant Boeing, which has a state-of-the-art pilot training and research centre inside the innovations city, the Italian energy company Enel, and Sberbank, which opened Russia’s biggest data-processing centre at Skolkovo earlier this month.
Those industrial partners have created 6,300 jobs, and 24 of them have opened R&D centres on the territory of the Skolkovo innovation city. One of the recent additions is S7, which signed an agreement with Skolkovo’s space cluster this year, and plans to open an R&D centre here in the near future.