Investors are ready to plow up to $20 million into joint startup projects between India and Russia, the Skolkovo Foundation reported last month.
“At Skolkovo alone we have 70 registered venture funds that want to invest in [Russian-Indian] innovation projects,” Skolkovo Vice-President Igor Bogachev was quoted as saying. “We could be talking about investment from $10 million to $20 million by the end of the current year.”
Bogachev was speaking on day two of the IndiaSoft industry conference in New Delhi on February 13th, where 15 Skolkovo startups exhibited their innovations.
“We believe there’s huge potential for the creation of join Russian-Indian high-tech enterprises,” Bogachev said from the conference. “The strengths of Russian developers lie in the ability to think up completely new products, while for Indian developers it’s actually creating and producing them once the blueprints are there.”
News of the potential investment in joint projects came a day after Skolkovo and the Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council (ESC) of India signed an agreement to create a cluster of Indian IT firms at Skolkovo.
The agreement is part of a deal overseen by President Vladimir Putin in December, when Skolkovo president Victor Vekselberg and ESC executive director DK Sareen shook hands on a broad cooperation accord between the two countries.
No timeframe or value was put on the agreement to house offices of Indian IT companies at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, a 400-hectare site to the west of Moscow.
DK Sareen, speaking at the signing of the agreement, noted “the scope for enhancing cooperation in the IT sector” between the two countries, which have seen renewed interest in cooperation.
“The excellent [Skolkovo] ecosystem along with the expertise both the countries have in IT can be used for developing newer products and solutions, not only for the needs of both countries but also for third-country requirements,” Sareen said.
Representatives from top Russian IT companies including the likes of Anton Voronov, VP of Innovations at ABBYY Language Services, Alexander Dorzhiev, co-founder at AlterGeo and C3D Labs CEO Oleg Zykov, who have long been doing business in India, also expressed their desire to increase investments in the country to proactively help accelerate the Digital India drive, a pet project of the Indian prime minister.
The cooperation agreement was initially given direction when a delegation of scientists, educators and ministry officials from India visited the Skolkovo Foundation last September on a fact-finding mission to study the opportunities available for Indian students and startups in Russia.
- Russia Beyond the Headlines, a global media project sponsored by Russian publishing house Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and the New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation announce the publication of a new collection of essays on the future of Russia-India relations. Entitled A New Era: India-Russia Ties in the 21st Century, the book is an attempt to critically reflect on the current state of Russia-India relations, and give practical advice on how to improve the relationship between the two countries. This book will appear in bookstores in India on March 20. An e-book version is available for download from Amazon and Google Play. Pre-orders of the print version of the book can be made here.
