One of the Russia’s most anticipated nationwide startup contests, Startup of the Year held court with a swarm of young entrepreneurs, concepts and high tech demonstrations last Thursday on the campus of the Moscow Higher School of Economics (HSE). The annual event takes place every December and is organized by HSE business incubator HSE Inc.
Highlights of the competition included awards in a number of categories.
- The Best Technology award went to iBuild App, a provider of SaaS solutions to create and manage mobile applications easily through an online interface. Headquartered in Moscow, the startup has a representative office San Francisco.
- Knopka Zhizni (‘Button of Life’), a medical alert system designed for the elderly and the disabled took home the Most Socially Responsible Project award. The startup already turned heads in June this year at the BIT startup contest.
- The Global Startup award went to CloudBerry Backup, a software publisher from St. Petersburg offering a cloud based data storage and backup solution already used by more than 100,000 clients around the world, including 10,000 users of the paid version.
- The Quick Start award went to Top Delivery, a small but rapidly growing Moscow based company providing nationwide logistics services to e-commerce sites. The startup represents a new generation of players which could lead development of this category of service on a market still dominated by a small number of powerful – but not always cost efficient – delivery service providers.
“In just one year, we have achieved logistics coverage in all Russian cities of more than 1 million inhabitants,” said Top Delivery founder Gleb Nikulin to East-West Digital News. With a fast growing client base keen on better delivery, the startup has already entered profitability but is considering raising funds to accelerate development. Included in the prize Top Delivery won at the competition is free management consulting from global consulting firm McKinsey as well as fund raising assistance from a Moscow consultancy.
According to a spontaneous survey using Mobiety instant polling technology, the Public’s Choice Award went to LinguaLeo, a web based language instruction service that teaches using popular TV serials, books, and contextual dialogues. LinguaLeo recently won BIT 2011, a high profile startup contest in June of this year, and is preparing to expand internationally.
Among other notable startups was MegaTable, based in Perm, which offers an advanced search technology designed for market analysts. The engine quickly retrieves data from various Internet resources and presents them in an ordered way. Analysts can, for example, search and organize data on the musical or movie preferences of the users of social networking site Vkontakte.ru.
“This type of contest is an important part of the development of an innovation ecosystem. These contests evangelize society about innovation culture while providing exposure for entrepreneurs,” said Alexander Nikolaev, Higher Education Program Manager at Intel Russia to EWDN. “Also important is the fact that this contest took place at a university. According to polls, just a few years ago the overwhelming majority of students were oriented toward careers in big corporations or civil service. Now the proportion of students attracted to entrepreneurship and startups has risen significantly.”
HSE Inc. was created in 2006 as the first ever startup incubator in Moscow. The Startup of the Year contest, which has been held annually since 2008, enjoys the support of the Russian Venture Company and the Moscow City authorities as well as from Pruffi.ru, an Internet executive search and recruitment agency.
