The participants of the contest, who were pre-selected, presented their projects at three pitch sessions within the framework of the Open Innovations Forum. On the first day, a special track EastBound.LEAP was held for 11 companies that won the Digital Breakthrough. The best projects were recognized as "Digital Village" - ecommerce ecosystem for rural areas and Digital nation - electronic document management platform. The remaining two pitches were traditionally organized on the geographical principle: "Singapore" and "Japan", and the jury of each of the sessions included several investors with invested capital from $100 million to $1 billion.

Following the results of the session "Singapore" the jury chose two winners, which were the projects of Ascent - a platform for trade exchange financing and CT Park - an online service for parking bicycles and scooters. The best projects within the session "Japan" were the projects "Third opinion" and WebGears. "The third opinion is a solution for diagnosing diseases based on artificial intelligence. WebGears provides an innovative platform for developing web applications with interactive 3D graphics.

Startups were evaluated by top managers of such companies as Sales Jet, Sistema Asia Fund, MTS Startup HUB, UMJ Russia Fund, advertising and communication holding Dentsu, Hitachi, IP Bridge, etc.

Each winner received a letter of interest from investors, as well as an opportunity to present their solutions at the upcoming events of VEB Ventures in key international forums.

"I am glad that EastBound is becoming a truly global project. This confirms the interest not only of Russian companies, but also of foreign ones. So this year one of the participants of the contest was a company from Singapore. We also have a positive experience of promoting the projects of the EastBound contest participants abroad, just last week we presented the decision of the two contest participants at the largest Asian technology exhibition, which is an absolute confirmation of the relevance of our competition," - said Oleg Teplov, General Director of VEB Ventures.

Russian high-tech companies with annual revenue of $1 million and offering products 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 EastBound contest.