Not just ITMO students

ITMO Accelerator is available to a wider audience than just the university’s students and staff. Each year, the project attracts participants from various parts of Russia and neighboring countries. This year, the accelerator expanded its geography – it is not just St. Petersburg, but also Moscow, Volgograd, Perm, Bryansk, Ufa, Irkutsk, Voronezh, Samara, Kazan, Krasnoyarsk, Innopolis, Sochi, Gomel, and some other cities.

This season, ITMO Accelerator received over 350 applications, 53 of which were selected for the program – and only 18 presented their projects at Demo Day. Among the projects proposed were AI assistants for teaching, sales, and HR departments, a digital construction platform, and even next-gen cancer therapy.

Seven new experts joined the project’s mentors’ team – these are ITMO lecturers and entrepreneurs, including those with experience in completing acceleration programs. In the course of the season, mentors helped the contestants develop their projects, shared their expertise on how to produce a competitive product and which tools to use, and taught them to identify the pains of their target audience and successfully pitch their ideas to investors and partners. 

“I was in their place seven years ago. I’ve won accelerators by Sberbank, MTS, and even Visa. I know exactly what’s expected from contestants, which questions they will get at the defense, and how to ace them. For that reason, it was easier for me to share my experience. To be most useful for the participants, I had to speak the language of the real business and sometimes even be tough. After all, it's the result that matters in the end. Often, wanna-be entrepreneurs have no vision of their end goal; they think that an MVP is a prototype of a solution or a technology, but, in fact, it’s what you can get paid for. That’s what you should keep in mind when working on a startup,” notes Kirill Krivonosov, a mentor at the accelerator, as well as the founder and CEO of the service GetMeBack and the web studio iFrog. 

The defense requirements were harsh: participants had two minutes to present their projects and three more – to answer the experts’ questions. The jury consisted of business experts, ITMO lecturers, business angels, and representatives of partner companies such as OBIT, Gazprom Neft, Gazprombank, the National Technological Initiative’s Investment Center, Rostelecom, and Solyanka Agency.

“There were great pitches at the accelerator – in regard to visuals, presentation, and ideas. But to take the next step, the teams need to focus harder on their users. Many were able to cover only a few dozens of people, but that’s not enough. Ahead of them are hundreds of meetings and surveys – or, even better, observations over thousands of users,” stresses Alexey Karlov, a jury member, CEO of Angel Relations Group, and a venture entrepreneur. 

From an AI assistant to next-gen cancer therapy

The third place was shared by two projects. The first is Fuko – a digital platform for efficient communication. The project’s team developed an algorithm that uses different philosophical concepts to analyze input text, generate an answer for the request, and evaluate the main idea. The system can deal with any topic, be it science, education, law, or economics.

Another winner, Galka, is an AI assistant that analyzes phone calls in real time and serves as a prompter that can suggest answers for the speaker. Among its target audience are sales and client managers, as well as call-center operators who can use the assistant to have immediate access to information without having to put clients on hold.

The second place went to ImmOnco, a new cancer treatment in the form of therapeutic platforms with copper-conjugated antibodies. According to the developers, the platforms are expected to destroy tumors without harming healthy tissues. The project is currently in the preclinical trial stage. 

This season’s winner is ExamLab – an online school that helps students enter schools and universities abroad and prepare them for International Baccalaureate (IB) exams. Next, ExamLab will expand their team and find more students and teachers.

“The main takeaway from the accelerator for me is mentor guidance. It saves you a lot of effort and time; mentors help you avoid mistakes, keep your focus on the important issues, and build your own step-by-step action plan. If not for them, we’d have had a hard time trying to figure out what path to take next. I believe what helped us win is that our project is already underway; we have students and some success stories. We showed that we can make profit,” says Dmitry Orlov, the team lead and the founder of the winning project. 

Half of this season’s finalists – nine teams – presented MVPs. Now, they are looking for partners and investors to develop their projects. At Demo Day, they not only received expert feedback but also exchanged contacts with entrepreneurs who showed interest in their ideas.

A special 400,000-ruble grant by Yandex Cloud went to Galka. All the winning teams will be able to occupy separate offices at ITMO Accelerator’s startup loft for the next three months.