SumIT - results, intrigue, investigations

The summer of 2011 for the start-up community of St. Petersburg was marked by the summer start-up of the SumIT marathon. This project of the Club of Innovators , whose general partner was RVC, was held at the St. Petersburg State University ITMO site and interested hundreds of young technological entrepreneurs, large companies, experts and investors.

SumIT in numbers:

1. during the SumIT site, more than 2,000 people visited us;
2. more than 200 ideas were proposed for possible projects;
3. received more than 100 applications from projects for the Invest Fest investment session;
4. 30 useful lectures, seminars, contests and master classes were held;
5. 3 iPad2, 2 tablets and one iPhone4 we presented to the participants of our competitions;

June 23 was the first post on Habré about SumIT , and now, after 2.5 months, we can answer the question what is SumIT all about ...

First of all, SumIT is a territory where any promising ideas got a chance to become a full-fledged innovative project and attract seed financing. The unique marathon program was built in such a way as to increase the attractiveness of the project for a potential investor through the training of each team member and their teamwork. Within five weeks at the marathon everyone could find a priority direction in the implementation of an innovative solution. It was possible to register an idea or join a team already on June 1 at www.sumit.ru .

Almost the entire St. Petersburg IT-community, students of leading universities of St. Petersburg, as well as the majority of those interested in developing their own startup knew about the summer start-up of the marathon. First of all this contributed, however banal it might sound, social networks and word of mouth. The graph of the number of participants in our events looks like this:

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It is worth noting that the room could accommodate about 90 people, so several times we had to plug in a microphone, lower the blinds and do the show “behind the glass”:



SumIT was held in three stages, from July 16 to August 24, and served as a platform for uniting hundreds of talented programmers, developers, managers, designers, and marketers into start-up teams for interaction with investors. We were very flattered that some participants of the marathon start-up came from remote corners of Russia (Moscow, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod region) and even from other countries. So a few people from Ukraine and Kazakhstan, realizing the opening opportunities, came to St. Petersburg specifically to participate in SumIT.

It all started with the first working days of the marathon - SumIT Weekend, July 16-17, where teams were finally formed. More than 20 mentors and experts consulted and brainstormed in order to transform the idea of ​​anyone who came into a full-fledged project. The IT business gurus inspired young startups with their own example. Anyone could come to this event, find an interesting project for him and join him as a programmer, designer, economist or mentor. SumIT Weekend consisted of 10 fully equipped halls for working on projects: an assembly hall, open Space - a reference point, zones for working on projects, a crash test room and a private room where work was constantly in full swing.

Over the next 38 days I went to Come on, marathon! For 5 weeks in comfortable conditions, the participants worked on their projects side by side with other teams. All residents were provided absolutely free of charge: coworking, air hockey, ottomans, X-box, mentors, consultations and coffee with buns.

On the last day of the university, August 24, the startups waited, like all students, for a session, but only for an investment one - Invest Fest Day . Participants of 16 projects were able to meet and talk face to face with investors and leading IT experts from companies such as VTB Capital, RSV Venture Partners, CMD Holding, Mail.ru Group, Intel, EMC, Oracle, Income, Money Money .

The final stage of SumIT was a gala evening, where representatives of the Innovators Club (SumIT organizers) congratulated all the participants who had reached the end of the finish race, and summed up the previously announced competitions. So, Valentin Golev, became the happy owner of iPad2 for a promising and interesting idea to create an application that could fix forecasts and assumptions, and the author of the ClickGrab project, Jacob Zaitsev, was able to go to the USA for an internship in Silicon Valley at the expense of ITMO St. Petersburg State University .


The performance of Ilya Shirokov, Vice-President of Mail.ru Group, the head of Odnoklassniki, who flew in order to personally listen to the projects and talk about what an ideal startup should be, was a pleasant surprise for all participants of Fest Invest.

List of projects that went to Invest Fest:

1. AvtoFlirt - Alexey Avrutin
2. IT Portfolio - Alexander Krass
3. SmartSport - Artem Kuznetsov
4. Analysis of the DNA genome - Fedor Tsarev
5. Complex remote cardiorespiratory real-time monitoring - Kuznetsov Vladimir Igorevich
6. ClickGrab - Yakov Zaytsev
7. Day2meet - Romanov Egor Alekseevich
8. I Want Hotel - Pavel
9. Annihilatr - Anton
10. Seemap.ru - Alexander Mustafin
11. DisplAir - Michael Bezruk
12. Virtual Marketing Research - Sergey Petrenko
13. SAEX (SEIKS) - Anton Yakovlev
14. Robot George, the world's first conversational English simulator - Ilya Zaitsev
15. AmbiTalk - Vasily Chetvertukhin

In the evening, in addition to these projects, several more spoke at the public session:

1. Rescue Service OnLine. Veselova Maria
2. Umumboo.com Shipunov. Segey Borisovich
3. Alliance Resilience Analysis. Maria
4. BuzzLook. Roxana
5. Logistics Department. Sergey Nevzorov
6. Your apartment. Catherine
7. FAStocks.com. Lev Kuandykov
8. DrinCash. Dmitry Filatov
9. Daystar. Take a video - Download a video - Earn on it. Ivan Kharitonov
10. CrazyGeo. Ruslan Zakharov
11. PHOTONATORTE.RF. Olga Visser
12. Open shop RF Krivoshlykov. Dmitry Vladimirovich
13. Who will be lucky. Davydov Alexander Vasilyevich
14. GoodRoads. Ivalov Egor

All events were held at the address: St. Petersburg, Kronverksky pr. 49, St. Petersburg State University ITMO.

And lastly, I would like to thank everyone who was involved in the SumIT organization: Kudinov Vladislav , Kudinov Mikhail , Andrei Dodin , Vitaly Vlasov , Smirnov Ivan , Simanenkova Nastya , Tekhi Polonskaya , Shabanov Sasha , Pospelov Alexey , Alexander Krass and many others.