Big business is in constant search of technology: in conditions of fierce competition it is innovations that allow maintaining key advantages and even getting ahead. That is why today we are witnessing another round of the “hunt for startups. We talk about how the SberUnity platform helps all participants in the Russian venture capital market find each other simply and at minimal cost.
“Startup Hunting: record after record
This year, the “hunt for startups” has reached its peak. According to a study by analytical company Dsight, the volume of venture deals with Russian startups in the first half of 2021 more than tripled compared to the same period last year and set a record of $1 billion, and the number of deals in which corporations and corporate venture capital funds participated more than doubled during that period (359 during the six months of 2021).
However, the growth of interest in startups by large corporations is a global trend. Global venture capital investment by corporations and corporate funds set an all-time record this year at $268.7 billion, up from $251.2 billion a year earlier. This was reported by Reuters in July of this year. Most of the deals were with software, e-commerce, digital health and financial technology companies, whose products and services were in high demand during the pandemic.
Everyone has their own infrastructure
As competition intensifies, corporations are having to look even harder to innovate for their businesses, and startups are bringing more and more promising new developments to market. How can a corporation navigate through this sea of proposals and find exactly what it really needs?
The innovation industry in the States is historically fragmented. In order to “flatter themselves” to this or that major investor, startups literally pound the doorsteps and try to make the “right” acquaintances. According to the Startup Barometer 2021 survey, 84% of startups in the United States want to work with corporations or are already working with them.
Realizing the undeniable importance of innovation for business, large companies and corporations spare no time or resources. They build their own infrastructure to work with startups – they use such tools as gas pedals, venture studios, business incubators, hackathons, and so on. They build scouting themselves or turn to specialized operators for services.
The problem is that each corporation is building such a system separately, because of this it is often not able to see all proposals on the market, because for a long time there was no single universal database with relevant information on startups on the Russian market.
One platform for everyone
There are platforms for direct connections between startups, venture investors and big technological companies. These are the well-known Crunchbase, ProductHunt, F6S and a number of others. Crunchbase appeared as an additional project of the media publication Techcrunch, and is therefore more of a showcase of publicly available information, rather than a service that would allow users to connect with each other, as well as to design various services on the platform.
The platform base is formed solely by the participants themselves: corporations, investors, and startups. They fill out their profiles themselves, and the development team thinks through mechanisms to ensure that startups keep their information up to date.