New Partners, AI, and Deep Tech: Highlights of ITMO Accelerator's Latest Demo Day

This season, ITMO Accelerator received over 600 applications, 13 of which made it to the Demo Day; the startup ideas ranged from AI and IT to robotics and innovative industrial solutions.

The list of ITMO Accelerator’s partners continues to grow annually. This season's lineup welcomed Gazprom Neft’s Information and Technology Operator (a subsidiary of Gazprom Neft and a developer of IT solutions for the oil and gas industry), Yandex Cloud (offers cloud infrastructure grants for startups), OBIT (an IT solution operator), Rostelecom (a telecom operator), Cian (an online real estate platform), and others. Among other experts on the board were representatives of venture funds, business development agencies, law firms, and other specialized companies. 

For the first time, the event was personally attended by Nikita Razhev, the head of startup programs and commercial initiatives at Yandex Cloud. He was impressed by the high level of presentations and projects.

“As we offer grants for our cloud services, we’re interested in supporting student initiatives. I was also surprised to see that this season’s lineup included both IT startups and deep tech projects for the heavy industry,” shares Nikita Razhev. 

Based on the jury’s decision, the third place was shared by two projects. The first is Anizo – an AI video and audio monitoring system that analyzes the behavior of pets to alert their owners of early disease signs. Another winner, PEROchernila, produces green luminescent perovskite-based inks that can be used both in stationery products and as an active layer for optoelectronic devices.

The second place went to Siberia, an innovative paint coating that can be applied on wet surfaces to protect underwater infrastructure from corrosion and fouling without taking it out of service. 

This season’s winner became AEGA – a service that helps businesses appear in AI engines such as Perplexity, Google SGE, and Yandex.

“AEGA helps businesses appear in AI-generated recommendations and search results. Perplexity, Google, and Yandex generate immediate results based on their language models, and users don’t need to click the links to get the information they search for. Our service promotes business through these AI engineers; it helps companies get additional reach and therefore new clients,” says Ernest Amdiy, the project’s founder. 

As per tradition, Yandex Cloud handed a 400,000-ruble grant to the program’s winner. The team can use this money to purchase subscriptions to the company’s infrastructure and other services that can help grow their startup.

“We see startups as potential partners that we can bring to the B2B market. We’ve noted the most intriguing projects and are going to reach out to the developers later to go into more detail about their startups and discuss how we can bring them to real clients. Personally, I have my own shortlist of three projects with the most relevant applications for businesses, and I’d like to test them,” notes Mikhail Telegin, the deputy general director for strategic projects at OBIT.

Applications for the spring season of ITMO Accelerator will open in March. You can apply via the project’s website; follow them on VK or Telegram for the latest updates.