Winners of OPORA for IT Accelerator Announced
On the starting day of SPIEF 2018, accelerator organizers announced two winners of the first draft that will share the prize of 7 million roubles.
On 23 May the Russian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Forum (the starting day of St. Petersburg International Economic Forum) held the awarding ceremony for the winners of OPORA for IT, the first accelerator organized by OPORA ROSSII and Softline Venture Partners (SVP). The winners are OREG and Orion. They will share the prize of 7 million roubles that includes grants from the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE), a partner of the accelerator.
OPORA for IT accelerator is a joint project by Softline Venture Partners and OPORA ROSSII. It started in September 2017 and aimed to support projects in such areas as cloud technology, mobility, information security, Internet of Things (IoT), digital technologies, LegalTech, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The first draft had 16 teams, and the acceleration programme took three months – between February and April 2018. The accelerator was actively supported by Skolkovo IT Cluster, IBM, the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE) and other partners that include leading foundations and companies, media resources and colleges.
The final part of the programme took place on 27 April, when 12 teams from Moscow, St. Petersburg and Surgut presented their products and the results of their three-month long efforts to IT experts, business angels and venture funds representatives. At the end of the contest, the jury selected two winners:
● First place and the top prize of 5 million roubles went to IREG project team. IREG is a management system for intellectual property rights.
● Second place with a 2 million prize was awarded to Orion project team. Orion is a biometric digital provider.
On 23 May the Russian Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Forum and the awarding ceremony were attended by Andrey Shubin, Executive Director of OPORA ROSSII; Elena Volotovskaya, CEO of SVP, Dmitry Polyakov, Deputy CEO of SVP, as well as representative of 10 other teams that made it to the semi-final.
Check the recent post of SVP’s blog to find out what some of teams think about the accelerator and the first results, as well whether this format is good for a young business.
