Sberbank has selected thirty start-ups that completed the acceleration at the joint Russian-American accelerator of Sberbank and 500 Startups. Sberbank also decided to invest up to RUR 120 mio in them, corporate website reported.
More than half of start-ups received offers on cooperation from major Russian companies that took part in the Demo Day of the accelerator. As a result of the acceleration, seven teams were selected. Their products were recognised as having foreign market potential. The participants of those teams will be sent to Silicon Valley (California, US) where they will take part in a four-week educational course under the Silicon Valley Exchange Program. Seven teams that will be sent on the foreign internship will present their projects to international investors and corporations in San Francisco.
The Russian stage of the accelerator of Sberbank and 500 Startups lasted for 10 weeks. The thirty strongest start-ups, selected by experts of Sberbank, 500 Startups and representatives of twenty-five of the project’s partners, were educated by American mentors under the original accelerator programme. During it, the teams attended more than 200 hours of lectures and workshops given by twenty-five mentors from Silicon Valley, tested 192 business hypotheses and attracted 164 large clients.
Projects in e-commerce, telemedicine, cloud technology, lifestyle, big data, AI, IoT, robotics, blockchain, VR and AR, machine learning, fintech and other areas of the digital economy took part in the accelerator.