Ingria draws preliminary results of the VC Day for IT startups

VC Day Ingria, the second in this year, took place on June 19 at the Ingria Business Incubator. Investment sessions launched in 2012 have become a unique place for meetings and negotiations of innovative startups, investors and business angels to attract funding to their projects. The success of innovative sessions attracted attention of the representatives of the Skolkovo Foundation, EMC, RVC and PwC.

This time, the main project directions are services in education, finance, tourism and e-commerce, cloud computing, mobile apps, and telecommunications. There are 63 projects from Birsk, Donetsk, Kazan, Kiev, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Orekhovo-Saint-Petersburg and Togliatti that applied for and completed the training programme in June 2013. There were 21 startups selected at the end of the session.

On June 19, the finalists began to present their startups to 30 core investors including representatives of Runa Capital, Almaz Capital, MC Leader, i-Free Ventures, etc. After presentations, the Ingria team gave participants an opportunity to conduct individual meetings that lasted late into the evening. As a result, investors submitted over 50 requests to obtain more details about projects interesting to them, and to schedule additional meetings.

Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital: Information technologies have penetrated the small business. The emergence of cloud services allowed small firms to introduce CRM, document and accounting management systems. As the needs of small businesses are different from common standard solutions, there is a set of related capabilities.

Alexander Akopyan, EMC: I believe that we should pay more attention to tech startups, or projects at the intersection of the industry and information technologies.

Eugene Levin, Foresight Ventures: IT makes it possible to accumulate a vast array of data, therefore, startups should offer new ways of data processing and correctly identify their market application spheres.