Two projects of St Petersburg University students win the Student Start-up competition
Student teams from the Graduate School of Management at St Petersburg University have won grants of 1 million roubles from the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises to launch their new businesses.
In 2024, over 6,000 students from all over Russia applied for participation in the Student Start-up grant programme. The contestants were offered seven main areas selected for this year projects: digital technologies; medicine and health; new materials and chemical technologies; new devices and manufacturing technologies; biotechnology; resource-efficient power economy; and creative industries.
As part of the competition, the competing teams had to present their project in five minutes and answer the questions of the expert jury. The main criteria the experts focused on were the start-up’s technological feasibility and commercialisation potential and the applicant’s qualifications.
The Student Start-up programme is implemented by the Russian Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises within the framework of the federal project "University Technological Entrepreneurship Platform". The programme aims to provide grant support for start-up projects developed by students of Russian universities.
One of the 2,000 start-up projects supported by the Foundation is a project developed by Mark Rozhdaev, a second-year master’s student in the Master in Management programme at St Petersburg University. His start-up AiGenda develops a technological solution based on speech recognition and transcription technology converting voice to text.
"Practice shows that employees spend 20% of their working time on minute-taking and analysing online meetings. The reason being, if the information is not recorded in time, there is a risk of losing it forever. With the AiGenda software, transcription takes no more than five minutes. The transcript helps to keep records of important information, preventing its loss and ensuring that useful information is available in the future," Mark explained his idea.
Transcription will require connecting the bot to an online conference or uploading an audio recording to the platform. The recording will be processed within a few minutes. After that, the user will receive a transcript with speaker separation and the meeting’s minutes.
The second winning start-up project presented by St Petersburg University students is GreenGusto. The start-up team proposes to produce confectionery products with edible hemp, taking into account individual customer wishes. The start-up founders are: second-year bachelor’s students Timur Dovletov, Arkadii Ianovskii and Atamurad Dzhumaev, and a third-year bachelor’s student Danil Molchanov. The team is developing their product under the guidance of a mentor as part of the entrepreneurship internship organised by the Center for Entrepreneurship of the Graduate School of Management at St Petersburg University.
"The support provided by the Center for Entrepreneurship of the Graduate School of Management at St Petersburg University and its specialists, who were always there to guide us, played an important role in our project’s success. Also, I would like to stress that the Graduate School of Management provides the students with a solid knowledge base and opportunities to try their hand on and start their own business. You just need to be audacious to try!" said the GreenGusto team members.
The grant of 1 million roubles can be spent on setting up a knowledge-intensive company: registration of a legal entity; purchase or lease of equipment; and registration of intellectual property rights.