Yandex grew 12 startups in two months

The Yandex startup incubator Tolstoy Summer Camp released 12 projects based on the results of two months of work. At an event dedicated to the end of the incubator’s work, the company announced three startups in which it is ready to invest “unspecified amounts.”

Yandex selected for the workshop 22 out of 65 candidates from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan and the USA . Twelve teams reached the finals, but in the end the company offered funding to only three of them.

These were the projects of three mobile applications. The first is Football Second Screen, an assistant for fans of watching football, displaying information about the course of the match and team compositions. The second startup is the Fivecards application, which allows you to scan and store discount cards and store loyalty programs on your phone. The third investment from Yandex will be the startup Speaking Mind for voicing statuses from social networks.

Founders of three finalist startups: Football Second Screen, Fivecards and Speaking Mind

Many good ideas disappear because their authors fail to find money or like-minded people. At the same time, there are companies that are looking for interesting projects and are ready to invest in them. The goal of the workshop is to help talented guys turn ideas into real projects and offer them to the market. And it seems that everything worked out: we see the interest of investors in our finalists and we ourselves are ready to take part in the fate of the three projects. Ksenia Yolkina, head of Tolstoy Summer Camp

The Tolstoy Summer Camp workshop worked on the territory of Yandex from July 1 to August 30 . The company brought teams of young Internet entrepreneurs from the regions and other countries and settled them in Moscow at its own expense. Yandex gave them the opportunity to work in the office together with its employees and under the mentorship of experienced company managers, and also conducted a series of educational lectures.

As Grigory Bakunov, director of technology dissemination at Yandex, told TJournal, after the Summer Camp, Yandex’s mission is completed: startups set off on their own, and they have no obligations to the search engine. in projects such as Tolstoy Summer Camp and the School of Data Analysis Yandex is involved not because it wants to lure the best minds to itself, but because of a sense of responsibility for the entire industry. Ultimately, the entire market will benefit from the emergence of good specialists and successful startups, Bakunov concluded.

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