Past weekend investment foundations took the opportunity for the first time to learn about research interests of the laboratories at Innopolis University .

Representatives of Runa Capital, Rosinfocominvest, FRII (Foundation for Internet Development Initiatives), arrived to tell how foundations choose projects to invest in.

Innopolis University presented projects on recognition of human activity types based on random video data, automatization of thorax diseases diagnostics, and development of an operating system for autonomous cars.

Konstantin Vinogradov, investment analyst of Runa Capital, identified 4 features of a startup that his venture fund is ready to support: complicated technological product, large global market, growing scalable business, well-balanced experienced team. Konstantin Vinogradov pointed out that “Russia is a wonderful R&D-base for a global technological startup. Today I would recommend developing IT-solutions for vertical markets, cloud B2B products and products based on complicated technologies, for example, machine learning.”

Konstantin Tryapitsyn, Investment Director of Rosinfocominvest directed the students’ attention on to the negative appeal of a yet another platform for aggregating customers and sellers as compared to a knowledge-intensive project. Primarily, the first option fails in the business logic and prospects to scale a business-model on the basis of stable competitive advantage. Konstantin Tryapitsyn appealed to the students: “You are in ideal, literally laboratory conditions for testing your inventions. University will forgive your mistakes, but the real business will not. Use your time at the University to build a really close-knit team with a broad experience and knowledge.”

Maxim Chebotarev, leader of the FRII investors club, the largest European seed fund: «It’s easy. An investor looks for a startup, that solves an important problem with many clients willing to pay plenty of money if the problem is solved. The FRII’s Accelerator provides investments on early stages. Nevertheless, we are expecting already formed teams, who made the first sales of their product.

The event has become the first one in the planned series of meetings between venture investors and researchers, students and postgraduates of Innopolis University.