VEB Innovations, together with the Skolkovo and Roscongress foundations, launches the second series of the East Bound contest, which gives Russian startups an opportunity to tell foreign investors about their projects. This time the competition will support developments in the field of artificial intelligence. The finalists will be able to speak at the world's leading business platform SPIEF-2019 and present their projects to a high jury consisting of major investors from the Asia-Pacific region.

Pitch sessions of the finalists of the East Bound competition will be held on the site of the Territory of Innovations within the framework of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which will take place on June 6-8, 2019. The jury will be made up of major investors from China and Singapore. Representatives of the largest companies from these countries are invited to participate, including Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba and other leaders of the technology market.

Entries will be accepted from April 22 to May 13. At the qualifying stage, the organizers will determine 10 teams, which will have the opportunity to reach the final in St. Petersburg. Russian high-tech companies working in the AI field and having pilot implementations of their solutions in Russian or foreign corporations, as well as the availability of revenue can apply. The finalists will include the most developed and promising projects. When selecting the organizers will take into account the readiness of the company and the product to export and enter foreign markets, as well as the level of competitiveness of the project in the international arena.

"Artificial intelligence is one of the most popular and interesting areas of activity today. The technologies based on AI elements are penetrating into various industries and are becoming more and more widely used. Therefore, we decided to devote the second series of the East Bound competition to the topic of artificial intelligence. Foreign companies today are very actively interested in Russian engineers working in this field. And our task within the framework of the contest is to make sure that the most promising and competitive startups have an opportunity to find their investors and develop together with them and win international markets. We want the interest in our developers to turn into not a "brain drain", but the creation of large-scale and successful projects," said Oleg Teplov, General Director of VEB Innovations.

"A pool of unique projects has been formed in Skolkovo, which is currently developing its own deep machine learning technologies, neural network technologies and artificial intelligence technologies. The developments of Skolkovo project companies find their application in a variety of industries - from construction and real estate to logistics, from healthcare (technology of personalized prevention and medicine, digital platforms for search, planning, electronic documentation of medical services) to industry (solving the problems of forecasting, support and optimization of decision-making in real time in the management of production operations, preventive maintenance of equipment, optimization of commodity stocks). Technologies and products of Skolkovo companies have repeatedly demonstrated their solvency in many pilot projects implemented jointly with leading Russian and foreign market leaders. We hope that we will be able to attract the attention of managers of leading corporations to the finalists of the competition," said Kirill Kayem, Senior Vice President, Innovation, Skolkovo Foundation.

"For the Roscongress Foundation, the Territory of Innovations platform and the East Bound competition on the fields of SPIEF 2019 are strategically important projects that are necessary to demonstrate the competitiveness of Russian technologies in the international market. Creation and development of the innovation ecosystem within the framework of the Foundation's projects will help demonstrate and strengthen the status of a high-tech country on the world stage, and form a global agenda of one of the most urgent areas for the development of the world economy. The Fund pays great attention to the digital economy and the activities of innovative companies. Our task is to create an application platform for a lively dialogue between innovators, young scientists and experts. Artificial intelligence has been chosen as a key theme of this year's competition. To date, AI acts as a catalyst for market development. Roscongress sees its goal as supporting a new generation of technology entrepreneurs, and is ready to assist in the promotion and scaling of Russian technologies", - comments the Chairman of the Board, Director of the Roscongress Foundation Alexander Stuglev.

The first series of the East Bound contest was held in autumn 2018. Companies working in the field of information and aerospace technologies, telecommunications, biomedicine and neurointerfaces, robotics, smart city solutions, renewable energy and energy efficiency could participate in the contest. The finalists had the opportunity to speak at one of the three pitch sessions organized on a geographical basis: "Middle East", "India" and "Japan". The jury of each session included investors with a capital of between $100 million and $1 billion. THE JURY CONSISTED OF INVESTORS WITH A CAPITAL OF BETWEEN $100 MILLION AND $1 BILLION.