The second stage of SberStudent - a nationwide seed accelerator for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers held by Sber and the Stanford Center for Professional Development - has started. Two hundred participants have been chosen after stage one. After forming 52 teams, they will take Stanford Online's Idea to Market course in entrepreneurship to learn how to develop a startup.

A total of 10,000 students and researchers from 85 regions of Russia competed to join the accelerator. They passed the first stage where they took a course in innovative thinking and tech entrepreneurship, and then built project teams to work on their ideas. After the course, the students were able to deliver 200+ tech projects in fintech, healthcare, media, education, gaming industry, sports, and service automation.

Second stage participants will learn the basics of venture capital investing, financial and business planning, and will get a personal and specially trained mentor who has over ten years of experience in business and projects.

Student teams are presenting their projects to Sber top executives, Sber ecosystem companies, major Russian and international corporations, and investors at the final demo day in September.

I often hear that you can't teach someone to become an entrepreneur, and you need to be a natural with a certain set of traits to succeed in business. Western universities, however, prove otherwise. Building an entrepreneurial environment has long become the norm for them, and now this trend is evolving in Russia. SberStudent has a mission to support this trend and teach university people to find a common language with investors.

Natalia Magidey

Managing Director, SberX, head of Sber's startups ecosystem

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Sberbank of Russia published this content on 13 July 2021 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 13 July 2021 13:52:10 UTC.