Microsoft Foundation allocates $40K to develop Choister startup

A regular meeting of Microsoft Seed Investment Fund resulted in allocation of $40K grant for the developers of an intelligent search platform Choister. This project of data aggregation system and poorly structured information search using complex queries was recognized as one of the best startups by the results of the seventh selection held by Microsoft seed investment Fund working in partnership with Skolkovo and leading venture capital organizations of Russia.

The purpose of Microsoft seed investment Fund is to support promising IT projects of beginning Russian entrepreneurs, to provide start-ups with necessary funding and connections with professional investors to promote their business development - Gaidar Magdanurov said, the managing director of the seed investment Fund of Microsoft in Russia. - Choister project was recognized as promising by Fund’s experts. I think that it is the right time for businessmen from our country to make another breakthrough in search engines.

More than 200 applications were filed by June’s meeting of the Fund. Choister platform analyzes the search results from different sources on arbitrary criteria: search engines, web sites, social networks and local PCs - and provides search results in the most convenient form of comparative tables, graphics, or review and etc. Results are automatically supplemented as new data comes. An important advantage of Choister platform is its ability to analyze and compare information that enables people to get results on their most complex queries, for example, when searching an apartment or a car, when several different factors should be taken into account. Moreover, Choister can unite users into a single network, in order to enable them to use common data to refine the results and work together.

The weakest point of search engines today is the search and comparison of complex products and services. If you are looking for something simple (like address, cafes, organizing, image, etc.), you will find it almost immediately among the first few links provided by a search engine. However, if you are looking for something complicated, requiring comparison and analysis (apartment, vacation home, car, insurance, credit, etc.), you have to do a great job on your own comparing and analyzing information from different sites. Choister allows you to automate this process so that you have passed a long phase of gathering the information from different sources and get the most current data in various formats, suitable for comparison and further work with. In other words, Choister simplifies the problem of choice. And we are very grateful to the seed investment Foundation of Microsoft for the opportunity to develop and improve our service, - Alexey Nizovskii says, the founder and managing director of Choister.

The seed investment Foundation of Microsoft awarded grants to eighteen beginning Russian IT-companies totaling $765K over the past year and a half of its work. The Foundation intends to support a total of 100 Russian startups over 10 years.