ITMO Accelerator 2025 Recap: Media Investments and New Partners

Twice a year, ITMO Accelerator runs a three-month course for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to learn more about business strategies and marketing, finalize their products with mentors, build their own business strategy, and find investors for their startups. The best teams in the program pitch their projects at Demo Day. Here's a quick look at how ITMO Accelerator 2025 went and which startup ideas were ranked best.

ITMO Accelerator attracts more and more participants each year. In 2025, the contest received applications from 700 teams from all over Russia, mostly from Moscow and St. Petersburg, 46 of which passed the selection and joined the program and 17 advanced to the final round.

Final pitches are evaluated by experts from the program’s partners. This year, ITMO Accelerator partnered up with Sberbank’s DeepTech Studio, brainbox.vc, Gazprom Neft’s Industrix, Synergy Ventures, and Venture Games. Among its partner network are 20 venture funds and business angels.

In 2025, ITMO Accelerator also started to work with Digital Television Russia – the largest media holding on the Russian pay TV market that has an average of 85 million unique viewers monthly. While venture funds and business angels typically invest in startups, thus gaining a share of the company, the media holding offers a brand-new format of interaction – collaborative projects in exchange for a stake in the company.

“We’re interested in B2C projects with tried-and-tested business and monetization models that can reach people from all across the country. These are, for example, online fitness courses, dating services, or fashion marketplaces. In return, we can help them grow in today’s competitive landscape and marketing blindness. In terms of reach, TV advertising is significantly cheaper than contextual one. Startups with traction and market demand can use this opportunity to promote themselves on TV at a great discount, the cost of which is estimated at tens of millions of rubles. We’re already negotiating potential collaboration with some of ITMO Accelerator’s startups,” noted Vladimir Yudin, a chief analyst for strategy and development at Digital Television Russia.

Vladimir Yudin. Photo by Dmitry Grigoryev / ITMO NEWS

Three teams were selected as winners at the accelerator’s Demo Day. The third place went to RUBI CHAT, an AI service for efficient sales operation management; while the second went to Vibe check, an app for instant messaging with friends and content creation in one tap.

The first place was aIDeepFake, a deepfake detector that demonstrates accuracy up to 92-100% using multimodal analysis along with convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Earlier on, the team became a resident of Skolkovo and the IT Park named after Bashir Rameev.

“I'm so thankful to our mentor Fedor Yesipovich, who encouraged us to stretch beyond traditional models and open a new niche for our product. We developed an MVP and are now pursuing two sectors, B2B and B2C. Our technology can have multiple applications: countering disinformation, content moderation, and assessment of candidates for educational platforms and job interviews in large corporations. Our team aims for fintech as we already have some experience in this field,” highlighted Ekaterina Kornyushina, the founder of aIDeepFake.

Ekaterina Kornyushina. Photo by Dmitry Grigoryev / ITMO NEWS

A special 400,000-ruble grant by Yandex Cloud Boost was shared by two teams, Diplit, an AI tutor in mathematics, and Explain, a time-saving AI bot that can help lawyers find and analyze legal information. The grant can be used for Yandex Cloud’s IT infrastructure and access to other services of the company.

“ITMO Accelerator is the number one university project in the country. Always on point with startup projects. I met some participants, including the winners, at professional conferences, and the fact that they earned first place says a lot about the quality of their projects and teamwork,” noted Dmitry Karandin, a venture partner of Kama Flow investment company.

As noted by Gleb Lopin, a startup mentor and serial entrepreneur, in 10 years, ITMO Accelerator managed to attract major venture funds, have over 4,000 participants, and help launch around 500 projects, 30% of which became profitable.

“I’ve been working with ITMO Accelerator practically from their first day. Since then, the startup market has changed. Previously, startups were seen as a fun “toy,” and now people of all ages come to us knowing that startups are a great way to make money. Over these years, ITMO Accelerator grew to be one of the best and well-recognized accelerator programs in Russia,” concluded Gleb Lopin.