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In percentage terms, the probability of a startup's success, according to various estimates, ranges from 1 to 10%. Young companies lack the resources to scale, while corporations interested in "nurturing" startups within their structures lack the entrepreneurial spirit and speed.
A way out of this paradox was found in 1996, when the world's first startup studio, Idealab, emerged in the United States — a company dedicated to growing startups either for a specific client request or with an eye on market trends. The primary goal of startup studios, or venture builders, is to create and sell startups.
This practice arrived in Russia relatively recently — in 2012, so at this point there are still not many companies of this type — just over 10. However, even now the industry can already boast notable deals and projects. For example, the studio i-Free has already founded 12 startups (including Russia's first B2B foodtech naLunch and the personal finance management service CoinKeeper, in which MTS invested 125 million rubles), and has also completed more than 14 investment deals, including the sale of the Koshelek service to Tinkoff Bank. i-Free co-founder and Koshelek CEO Kirill Gorynya noted in a Forbes interview that "initially we thought Koshelek would be a modest part of the mobile phone, but then we wanted to put all the best financial services into the app."
At the time of the sale, experts valued the startup at between 700 million and 7 billion rubles: it had 20 million registered users and 300 million digitized cards. The official deal details have not been disclosed.
Another one of Russia's oldest startup studios — TechnoSpark — has a portfolio of more than 30 projects in the fields of medicine, sports, and robotics, and collaborates with giants such as SAP, while health apps from the studio Palta are downloaded by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Venture builders work with startups at the early stages of their development (pre-MVP), provide them with resources and specialists, help improve business processes, and then assist in attracting an external investment round or sell them to corporations. Sometimes buyers come directly with a technology request. In such cases, startup studios either come up with the idea themselves or adapt concepts from foreign developers.
On average, this approach can increase a startup's viability to 45%, notes TechnoSpark co-founder Denis Kovalevich of the TechnoSpark startup studio.
Active work is currently underway to establish such startup studios at Russian universities. According to the Russian Government, 40 universities already have such ecosystems in operation. In the future, the plan is to open 10 to 20 startup studios per year.
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