This past Monday a team of talent scouts from Decathlon, a French chain of sports stores with nearly 50 outlets in Russia, met with a range of Russian startups at Skolkovo, the international tech hub under completion on the outskirts of Moscow.
The meeting was part of a joint initiative of the Skolkovo Foundation, French Tech Moscow, and Business France.
“You represent the future, and the future is really important for us to go where we want to,” the Skolkovo Foundation quoted Fabrice Beschu, CEO of Decathlon Russia and the CIS, as saying to the Russian startups.
“We expect to open between 10 and 15 new stores per year out of the new concept, and what’s interesting for us is that every year now we will have a new laboratory, which means that we’ll be starting from scratch. We try to be open to a lot of new experiences,” Beschu added.
Russian robots for French retail outlets
Twenty-one Skolkovo resident companies were thus encouraged present to test their products in the Decathlon laboratory, which is scheduled for opening next spring in a new Decathlon store in Odintsovo, just a few kilometers from Skolkovo.
Among the Skolkovo startups presented to Decathlon were:
- CardsMobile, whose contactless payment solution allows consumers to store all their discount, bank and transport cards in their smartphone.
- Inspector Cloud, whose computer-vision based solution allows retailers to detect when shelves are depleted of stock;
- Navitek, an analytics system that can monitor numbers of shoppers and how long they spend looking at individual displays;
- Promobot, a much-hyped Russian startup whose AI-powered robots can be used as consultants in stores, exhibition halls, metro stations, etc.;
- RoboCV, a developer autopilot solutions for vehicles, industrial equipment and warehouses;
- Tardis, which develops computer vision and augmented reality systems for the apparel industry;
- Try Fit, which enables people to try on shoes virtually;
- VisionLabs, which has developed a face recognition technology can be used in retail for marketing, security or other purposes, in partnership with US digital giants;
- 7 seconds, which promises to increase online retailers’ revenues with an online credit solution.
From heart attack prevention, to tire manufacturing, to electricity storage
The next day, on Tuesday, it was the turn of French pharma group Servier and its e-health branch WeHealth to meet Skolkovo startups.
In line with Servier’s particular focus on prevention in the field of cardiology, one of the six startups selected to meet with the French company was CardioPlus, which is developing a solution to identify the immediate risk of a heart attack.
“We’ve already shown about 20-25 companies to Servier since the beginning of this year. Servier has selected a couple of our companies and is already signing non-disclosure agreements with them. We have high hopes that there will be licensing deals before the end of the year,” said Ruslan Altaev, development and key partners director at Skolkovo’s biomed cluster.
In December last year two other major French corporations, retailer Auchan and tire manufacturer Michelin, also met Skolkovo startups in search of promising technologies.
The meetings were “a big success,” according to Vera Bunina, who coordinates such events on Skolkovo’s side.
“Of 30 companies that passed the pitching stage with Auchan and Michelin at the first Connect event back in December, about 20 Skolkovo startups made it through to the testing stage, and now they’re at various stages of testing. We hope that several companies will soon sign contracts with Auchan,” she said.
In January 2016 Skolkovo and EDF, the French electricity giant, signed a memorandum of understanding as then-French economy minister Emmanuel Macron met his Russian counterpart Alexey Ulyukaev in Moscow. The partnership was intended to cover the fields of energy efficiency as well as smart grids, smart cities, and electricity storage.
