By Andrei Skvarsky.
Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, has selected five out of about 1,600 applicant teams as recipients of funding from it after carrying through this year’s iteration of an internal startup accelerator aimed at grooming technology talent in its midst.
The five emergent startups were picked from a nine-team shortlist during last week’s demo day of the 2019 run of the SberUp accelerator, a programme designed to help employees of Sberbank and its subsidiaries to organise technology-based firms that would be parts of the bank’s ecosystem, the lender said in a statement.
One of the five teams has developed a technology to help cashiers at self-service restaurants serve customers by detecting via a camera what food they have on their tray.
Another will be a dating agency that will base its operations on artificial intelligence (AI) and, besides bringing people together, will be able to suggest a venue for them to meet and the theme for the meeting.
Yet another is working on an AI-based cloud service for looking for and assessing candidates for job vacancies.
The winners include a team that is working on a project for Sberbank branches and customer outlets of partner companies to offer a service of selling or leasing mobile phone chargers.
Sberbank will hold a 10 per cent stake in each of the four companies.
The fifth company will be a unit of Sberbank’s retail banking division. It has developed a service to put families with adopted children that are hard up financially in contact with philanthropists, charities or discount shops.
Of this year’s about 1,600 applicant teams – 2.5 times as many as those that had sought enrolment for the 2018 SberUp programme, – only 80 passed an initial round of selection, and only 35 of those were chosen to join the actual 13-week accelerator course.
Nine of those made it to the demo day, and a jury headed by Sberbank CEO Herman Gref and composed of senior managers of Sberbank and Russian Venture Company, a state fund of funds and venture capital market development institution, selected five of them to receive Sberbank investment.
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