Twelve months ago at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Russia had its very own ‘pavilion’ on Startup Alley featuring some of Skolkovo’s best projects. How times have changed…
This year Stanislav Sazhin, CEO of social network for health professionals, “Doctor at Work”, commented that “last year there was a whole crowd from Russia. This year it seems like it’s just me and [Russian serial business angel] Igor Ryabenkiy.”
Sad, but perhaps unsurprising given the current state of US-Russia relations.
However, Sazhin found reason for Russian investors and startupers to be optimistic, claiming that “for the first time in many years I see American startups doing things that have already been done in Russia. The TF Disrupt Battlefield was won by the American profi.ru. In the top-10 at least half were pale imitations of Russian startups – Teledoktor, Gruzobzor, OhMyStats, YouDo. I think that we underestimate ourselves.”
RusBase decided to put this bold claim to the test, so we put together this overview of the top startups at TC Disrupt SF and their Russian counterparts.
First prize in the TC Disrupt Battlefield went to Alfred Club, an app that automatically connects users with local services including cleaners, dry cleaners and grocery/hardware stores.
There is no exact analogue in Russia – profi.ru allows users to find and connect with specialists from a wide range of fields, but it won’t look after all your household needs. Another similar project is iChisto, which allows you to order cleaning services online and recently raised investment from Vyacheslav Semenchuk. FlintCapital portfolio project YouDo is another project in the sector.
- Partpic / No Russian equivalent.
A spare parts search service. You take a photo of the part you need, and the app tells you where you can buy it.
Russia has plenty of online spare parts retailers, but so far none of them work directly from photos.
PatternEQ is a Data Science and Predictive Analytics service for small businesses. The client grants access to its data, and the service comes up with an algorithm to generate the information needed by the client.
The Data Science sector is currently dominated by professional data scientists whose services are pretty expensive – PatternEQ hopes to make these types of services more accessible.
Stanislav Sazhin compared PatternEQ with Russian startup OhMyStats, which isn’t quite right. OhMyStats analyses data for internet marketing purposes, but isn’t so involved in Data Science as a whole.
Shipstr, which aims to become the “Expedia of cargo shipping”, aims to make it easier for small businesses to arrange cost-effective international imports. It allows users to find the best value deal and also to track their order as it crosses the ocean.
Gruzobzor is actually quite different, in that it only works with land transport and doesn’t offer tracking. The closest analogue is annually Zakazovo, which offers tracking for overland transport services.
Stack is a smart light regulator for the home. Unlike other systems, which allow you to manually regulate light using an app, Stack decides by itself how much light you need, and adjusts each lamp accordingly.
Remote light dimming is hardly a new idea, but Stack has taken it and made it much “smarter”, both in terms of the technology behind the service and ease of use. A Russian service in this sector is Houscomfort from Plug&Play Dagestan, which allows users to turn off electrical devices by tapping them.
Vinli allows you to create and run apps for your car. The company has already started small scale production and it also offers apps allowing you to track and fix the speed of a vehicle, as well as a Google Glass app that shows you up-to-date information about the state of your engine and even where to get the cheapest gas locally.
Russia’s Remoto, which is produced by Bright Box, allows users to control their car and carry out various functions. Unlike Vinli, which creates individual apps for different functions, Remoto moves forward by updating existing software.
It seems that Stanislav Sazhin was getting a little bit ahead of himself with his high praise of Russian startups. Far from offering superior services, the Russian versions of TC Disrupt’s top startups could actually learn quite a bit from their American counterparts.
On the plus side, and this could be what Sazhin really meant, at least Russia now has companies offering similar services to cutting edge US-startups, suggesting that the sector is less far behind the Americans than it was a couple of years ago. Cup half full…
