A program called ITMO Accelerator helps aspiring young business owners sell their ideas for the first time. It includes networking with investors, mentor support, and seminars on marketing and company strategy. Since its format changed in 2020, the ITMO Accelerator has been involved in over 220 startup ventures.
Similar to the previous year, Yandex Cloud Boost, which gives the accelerator’s winners 400,000 rubles in financial assistance to begin and grow their businesses using Yandex Cloud infrastructure and services, is partnered with the program. Moreover, elite developers receive savings on a variety of Yandex services, including Toloka, Yandex Tracker, Yandex Plus, and Yandex 360.
Out of the roughly 530 applications that the ITMO Accelerator received in 2023, 60 were chosen for the program, and 22 of those were presented on Demo Day.
Three startups were founded by the season’s winners. Sberbank also recognized a number of projects, including the video call transcription tool mymeet.ai, the customer retention video analytics platform GrifOn, and the holographic security marking Hololipss. One legal audit session was provided to the AI beauty consultant MakeupChick and the AI-based barbershop aggregator IT Barbershop by the legal boutique Dostigatsiya. On December 20, the top developer will be announced. This developer will earn a grant of 400,000 rubles from Yandex Cloud Boost.
Summary and transcript of virtual meetings
The service mymeet.ai, which can transcribe any audio or video content in 58 languages, came in third place. All you have to do is import a recording of a previous meeting into the system or ask a specific bot to join your Zoom or Google Meet channel. The platform can accurately translate Russian audio to text up to 96% of the time. It can also separate the final transcript into chapters, list the speakers, and create a meeting summary. Researchers, team leads, product and project managers, and HR personnel are the main users of the service.
The service makes use of ChatGPT, several of its proprietary neural networks, and the speech recognition model Whisper. There is a 180-minute free plan and a subscription available for the program; currently, there are about 50 paying subscribers.
Components for noise canceling with an integrated air supply
The project MetaTech, which creates noise-canceling panels that let in air while producing silence, came in second.
The product integrates two technologies: sonic black holes (a phenomena of constructions that prevent soundwaves from escaping once they are inside) and acoustic metamaterials, which absorb noise because of their periodic structure. MetaTech is twice as affordable, five times as effective at canceling noise, and able to be produced in any size or shape when compared to similar goods.
AI advisor for the cosmetics industry
The MakeupChick project, an AI-powered service that selects ornamental cosmetic goods according to price, quality, and user skin type, took first prize. This is how it operates: the user fills out a survey, the software evaluates their answers, and it suggests a line of cosmetics. The inventors claim that no competition offers a service like this: all comparable devices only function with care products, not with decorative ones, and not everyone can afford a personal stylist (an appointment typically costs 3,500 rubles).
The writers have already carried out thirty in-depth interviews, determined who their target market is, and verified their premise that roughly thirty percent of website visitors are eager to buy their suggested products through the website. The project will turn a profit through these purchases; according to the business plan, the team will get 10% of each transaction.
