Demo Day: Accelerator 2024

On December 10, at the venue of Samara University’s Startup Centre, the final project defenses within the NTI (National Technological Initiative) were held as part of the interuniversity accelerator “Space for Life”.

“Space for Life” is a free crash course on entrepreneurship and launching startups. For 3 months, external experts and business trackers spoke and showed in practice how to launch own business.

In 2024, besides Samara University, the participants were as follows:

1.    Vavilov Saratov State University of Genetics, Biotechnology and Engineering.

2.    Ogarev Mordovian State University.

3.    Samara State University of Economics.

External experts, mentors and business trackers helped young people launch their startup project, regardless of the proposed field – from artificial intelligence and VR to new materials. For the training, startup teams (from 3 to 7 persons) were formed from scratch.

The participants’ projects were evaluated by the expert jury:

·         Svetlana Kishkina, Head of the Kuybyshev Centre for Innovative Development of the Kuybyshev Railway.

·         Oleg Belousov, Deputy Director of the technopark ”Vernadsky”.

·         Egor Ryabkov, CEO of ELKHIMTECH LLC.

·         Victoria Kokareva, Director of Technomedic LLC.

·         Maria Usacheva, Marketing Director of MakBush coffee production.

·         Igor Kukoev, Head of the Research Department for Technological Development of Data Analytics at DIGITAL AGRO LLC.

·         Marina Letunovskaya, R&D Project Coordinator at Lumax LLC.

·         Elena Bogatova, Director of Samara University’ Startup Centre.

·         Aleksey Brumin, Advisor to the Rector’s Office at Samara National Research University.

Aleksey Brumin: “I listened to many projects at their various stages even during my training. I would like to mention those projects that listened to the comments and made adjustments by today’s defense. It’s good that these young people have already had such reflection and sensitivity”.

Following the evaluation results, the 4 best projects were traditionally selected:

·         the 1st place: Angelina Davydova, with the Rene natural cosmetics project. The winner will receive the grant of 100,000 rubles for further development.

·         the 2nd place: Konstantin Gaponov and Fedor Matorin, with their application combining dialogues in all Synapse messengers. The project will receive 50,000 rubles.

·         The 3rd place was shared by the mobile robot for processing storages with hazardous chemicals (Arkady Klyuchikov, Igor Kurochkin, Nikita Samokhin, Yury Grepechuk, Aleksandr Isaev) and the autonomous power system for trucks (Konstantin Matkin).

More information about each of the projects can be found at the link.