Russian businessmen returned from Silicon Valley with investments

A nonprofit organization The personnel reserve - The professional team of the country with the support of the State Club Fund conducted a traditional contest Youth Technologies this year. The award of this year was the internship in Silicon Valley under a program of business incubation SMARTiQ. A lot of Russian businessmen travel to the U.S. for training, but not all of them come back with the result.

Michael Kashafutdinov developed an online editor of audio and video files. The service attracted 50K members during the testing period without any advertising. Michael managed to attract angel investment and attention from potential strategic investors. SMARTiQ gave me the opportunity to work in one of the best accelerators in San Francisco, and patent attorney and investor as well as major potential partners for the development of my project - Michael says.

The second project, which also attracted investment, was the team of Victor Osetrov that used to be the prizewinner in various Russian contests with its application for speech recognition RealSpeaker. During the internship in SMARTiQ I changed my approach to the project and moved from engineering curiosity to business efficiency and established really useful contacts through which we changed the vector and the speed of our project, and have already proven technical superiority of RealSpeaker over analogues, - Victor Osetrov said.

Not surprisingly, that the experts selected few projects in information technology. But it is noteworthy that several winners were the residents of Kazan IT-Park, two of them were recognized by Silicon Valley too.

The Foundation for personnel reserve training State Club allocated grants for the implementation of the competition which was held in accordance with the decree № 127-p from 02.03.2011 of the President of the Russian Federation on The provision of state support for non-governmental organizations involved in the development of civil society in 2011.