Young entrepreneurs from the Tallinn University of Technology won the first prize with their food products temperature indicator Timey at an international student startups’ festival in St Petersburg, Russia.
From 24-28 June, HSE St Petersburg – a subsidiary of the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics – hosted the International University Startups & Spin-Offs Festival (HSE Fest).
Teams from universities of the US, Israel, the UK, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Turkey, Estonia and Russia gathered at HSE St Petersburg. For four festival days, the participants attended the events of the acceleration programme – the leading Russian and foreign experts shared with them their knowledge in the field of marketing, fundraising and PR.
Chemical indicator
Young entrepreneurs from the Tallinn University of Technology received the first prize of USD10,000 for the business development with their project called Timey – a start-up company producing small-scale chemical indicators showing whether food products are stored and transported at the right temperature.
Timey’s technology allows not only controlling the quality of products – in case of any malfunction, it helps indicate at what stage of the supply chain it occurs. Thus, its technology helps avoid disputes between the manufacturer and the vendor regarding the responsibility for the damaged product.
“We are going to split the money into two parts. We’ll spend the first one on producing the stock of indicators, so that we can satisfy the needs of companies as quickly as possible,” Tatiana Zaretskaya, one of the developers at Timey, said in a statement. She added that the second part will be spent on patenting. “The Estonian market is not so large, so we are to enter the international market.”
The participating startups at the festival gained more knowledge on how to enter the business environment, how to interact with clients and partners, how to structure the project and present it in the best possible way.
At the final pitch session, the teams explained how they were going to advance and commercialise their products. The startups were evaluated by an expert jury, headed by Mikhail Oseevsky, the president of Rostelecom, the largest digital services provider in Russia.
Cover: Tatiana Zaretskaya and Laurent Läheb accepting their award at HSE Fest.
