Nine Kazakh Startup Teams to Receive Technology Training in Silicon Valley
By Yerbolat Uatkhanov in Business on 28 July 2015
ASTANA –Nine Kazakh tech startup teams have won the opportunity to receive training in Silicon Valley as a result of their performance in the Technation competition, which attracted startup groups from former Soviet Union countries, Europe and Asia.
Photo credit: Forbes.kz
"More than 20 experts in the U.S. will teach our young members of the startup teams. We have many good ideas, but our marketing, business plans and design aren't developed well. The project is partially financed by the Kazakhstan government, partially by Kazakhstan investors," said Deputy Chairman of National Agency for Technological Development Zhumatai Salimov, reported Bnews.
The competition was organised by the Ministry for Investment and Development of Kazakhstan in cooperation with the National Agency for Technological Development and Happy Farm business accelerator.
An expert panel examined 345 startup concepts. Of those, 41 percent were related to mobile technology and 33 percent involved e-commerce. The remainder involved media and cloud-based technology ideas.
Kazakh startup teams were the most numerous and submitted 262 projects, which is 76 percent of all the ideas submitted. Forty-six startup teams from Ukraine presented ideas and 14 came from Russia.
Submissions were also received from Azerbaijan, Belarus, China, Kyrgyzstan, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, the U.K., the U.S., and Uzbekistan,
Experts and mentors of the Technation programme selected the best 80 teams, which took part in working seminars where they created business plans, presentations for investors and businessmen and worked on networking.
The Technation panel then chose the 40 best teams, which were then provided the opportunity to participate in interactive workshops as well as to study how to create startups and how to analyse the investment attractiveness of commercial projects.
Ultimately, nine Kazakh teams were selected to participate in the education programme in Silicon Valley, United States. The panel announced the names of the winning teams in Almaty on July 26. The Kazakh teams are Crystal, Greedy, FastCallManager, Indybo, Mobile CRM, Mangust, AlmaSales, picVpic and BIZMO.