New Opportunities at ITMO Accelerator: 400,000-ruble Grants and More Partners

ITMO Accelerator opens applications for its three-month program twice a year and is open to anyone, whether members of ITMO.Family or not. A total of 60 startups participate in the program annually. Once they complete their training, participating teams present their projects at the Demo Day in front of an expert board comprised of investors and representatives of Russian tech companies. Currently, ITMO Accelerator partners with 25 industrial partners and 20 venture funds.

This year, ITMO Accelerator partnered up with several more companies: Uralsib,  Investment and Venture Fund of the Republic of Tatarstan, Gazprom Neft, International Management Institute of St. Petersburg, Netology, Yandex Praktikum, startup community SPB Founders, fund Angel Relations Group, and others.

“We’ve been collaborating with ITMO for a while now, seeing it both as a training ground for future professionals and a university. This year, we became an official partner of ITMO Accelerator so that the program’s participants can count on our support. For instance, startup founders can access our expertise, join a program at Skolkovo, become our residents, and receive grants amounting to several million rubles. To reach out, they would need to simply fill in an application form on Skolkovo’s official website,” says Dmitry Cherkashin, the head of regional development at Skolkovo Foundation. 

Additionally, in 2024, program participants get new opportunities: Yandex Praktikum, one of the partners, now helps startups assemble teams by allowing them to search for specialists among the service’s graduates.

“IT Workshop is a department of Yandex Praktikum where students and graduates of our programs in data analysis, programming, design, management, and marketing can boost their skills by creating cases for their portfolios and getting real-world experience at IT projects. In this respect, our collaboration with ITMO University is perfect synergy: while our graduates build their practical experience developing projects for business, young entrepreneurs get help with growing their own businesses, promoting new ideas, and creating MVPs,” shares Vladislav Sibirev, a project manager at Yandex Praktikum’s IT Workshop.

Moreover, now there are more opportunities for participants to receive feedback from experts and find investors – before the final pitch on demo day, the teams got to take part in Crash Test, a startup pitching meetup organized by ITMO Accelerator, Yandex Cloud Boost, and SPB Founders. 

The accelerator’s first cohort of 2024 completed their training on February 20. Out of the total of 500 applications from teams based in Moscow, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Ekaterinburg, Tyumen, Novosibirsk, and Ufa, 60 teams took part in the program. 19 teams proceeded to the final to present their projects in AI, fintech, and biotechnologies at the Demo Day. 

Four teams were selected as winners at the end of the event. The third place was a tie between Kvibe, a kvas-based drink, and Kipi Finance, an AI-based financial assistant. Second came Neuroscribe, a platform that uses AI to bring together popular neural networks so that users can create custom texts for various business tasks based on available templates. And the first place went to Ideas, a platform for mid-sized businesses that allows employees to suggest initiatives to their superiors. With Ideas, using a special Telegram bot, it is possible to collect improvement ideas, track their status, and conduct analytics. The platform is currently operating at six companies, with further expansions ahead.

Another project, talktut, received a special 400,000-ruble grant from Yandex Cloud Boost. talktut is an AI tutor for studying conversational English. Apart from the grant, the project’s team will now get to develop the project using Yandex Cloud services and infrastructure, as well as benefit from discounts on other Yandex services, such as Toloka, Tracker, Plus, and 360.

All winners received presents from the program’s partners, including Uralsib.

“As potential users and investors, we were primarily interested in fintech startups. It was wonderful to see projects that can have actual practical applications in the financial sector, including at our company. We were particularly impressed by Kipi Finance, a project on financial literacy. Our bank has an innovation department that considers such startups; in the future, we are hoping to continue collaborating with the team and present this project to our company’s management,” says Ksenia Goncharova, the managing director of Uralsib in St. Petersburg.

Vitaly Yanko, the founder of the SPB Founders community, emphasizes that 17 out of the 19 presented projects are entirely novel.

“A current problem on the market is that all of the city’s pitch sessions are attended by the same startups. The absolute majority of startups presented at the Demo Day are brand new, which makes ITMO Accelerator a true hub of original startups,” added Mr. Yanko.

Applications for the next cohort of ITMO Accelerator will open in March on the official website. Follow ITMO Accelerator on VK to stay up to date with the news.