Four Skolkovo companies win places on startup mission to Germany

22 августа 2018 г.

Four Skolkovo resident companies have been selected by the Russian-German Chamber of Commerce and partners to take part in Start.up! Germany, an international business mission to Germany’s industrial heartland.

The finalists of the pitching session, held at the offices of FRII. Photo: Russian-German Chamber of Commerce.

Six tech projects were chosen to take part in the mission after pitching their products and solutions to an expert jury whose members included representatives of the event’s partners: the Kirovsky Zavod machine manufacturing plant, Russian Venture Company (RVC), the Internet Initiatives Development Foundation (FRII) and the Skolkovo Foundation.

The four Skolkovo teams selected from among 13 innovative Russian companies in three industrial categories (logistics and mobility, smart city and InsurTech, or technology for the insurance business) to go to Germany in October are:

  1. Navigine, an indoor navigation service that makes it possible to track the locations and routes of clients or visitors to a business in real time
  2. Oz Forensics, which has devised technology for identifying forgeries in scanned images and documents to help prevent fraud
  3. Teplorium, which makes light transmissive constructions that are as energy efficient as light impervious walls, and
  4. Attilan, a virtual reality rehabilitation platform made by Skolkovo resident Motorica and designed especially to help patients learn to use prosthetic hands and arms effectively.

Video: Attilan Space.

The other two winning startups, Robot Vera and MOAR Stack, are also already in close cooperation with the Skolkovo Foundation. Robot Vera, a robot-recruiter made by the company Stafory that can sift through online CVs, call candidates for preliminary interviews and answer their questions, won second prize at this year’s Startup Village at the Skolkovo innovation city, winning 3 million rubles ($44,000). MOAR Stack, a solution that enables system integrators to connect Internet of Things devices directly to a unified network, took first place in the IT category of the Skolkovo Foundation's Startup Tour in Kaliningrad last year. It also won the “superfinal” of that regional tech startup competition, taking home 300,000 rubles.

The six companies will visit German cities including Cologne, Dusseldorf and Dortmund in the country’s industrial heartland, North Rhine-Westphalia, from October 7 to 12. There they will have the opportunity to meet representatives of German companies and accelerators in person at B2B matchmaking sessions organized by the local German chambers of industry and trade, having been selected by the jury as having the most potential to find new German clients.

“Many German companies actively work together with foreign startups,” said Matthias Schepp, chairman of the Russian-German Chamber of Commerce.

“I am sure that Russian startups will be able to cooperate with German business as successfully as projects from ‘startup powers’ such as the U.S. and Israel do,” he added.

Together with Russian startups, entrepreneurs from more than 15 other countries are also taking part in the Start.up! Germany 2018 tour. The entrepreneurs will have the opportunity to exchange experience with one another and to learn how to localize their business in Germany, as well as taking part in international pitching competitions and workshops with key experts from the German startup ecosystem. The business mission culminates on October 12, when the startups will attend RuhrSummit in Bochum, one of the country’s biggest startup conventions.