Russian Startup Tour reaches Kazan

More than 140 startups registered an interest to take part in the Kazan stage of the Russian Startup Tour, the fourth stop on the innovations roadshow that runs Tuesday and Wednesday in the Tatarstan capital.

The Kazan Kremlin. Photo: flickr

The Skolkovo initiative to find the most promising new innovations and invite their creators to Moscow for the Startup Village has thus far visited Rostov, Tomsk and Nizhny Novgorod, and enters the IT Park Kazan in the mainly Muslim republic with renewed vigor.

“At this stage the RST has already registered more than 140 companies that want to make presentations, and that’s a record so for 2015,” said Igor Bogachev, Skolkovo vice president and executive director of the IT cluster.

“More than half of them are IT projects,” he added.

Two dozen of Skolkovo’s existing residents hail from Kazan, including audiovisual speech recognition developers RealSpeaker and smart transport innovators Avtodoria, Bogachev noted.

“I sincerely hope that this stage of the RST will help raise interest in entrepreneurship in participant cities and find the fastest-growing stars,” he added.

Kazan's IT Park.

Registration for the Kazan stage ends Monday. The best-subscribed track is IT, which will feature 19 teams offering everything from mobile apps to smart systems and services. Among the eight energy track finalists are a low-energy air conditioner and a micro hydroelectric power generator. The other two tracks, new industrial technologies and biomed technologies, will see eight and four finalists, respectively.

As usual, the two-day event is split into the educational section, with panel discussions and master-classes, and the pitch competition.

The winners get to compete at Startup Village in Moscow on June 2-3 for financing and possible residency. 

The Russian Startup Tour is the country’s biggest initiative to encourage entrepreneurship and commercialize innovations. It visits 10 cities across Russia and, for the first time this year, ventures abroad with trips to Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Minsk, Belarus.