On May 29, Olga Koryakova, CTO and co-founder of RunCall gave a pitch presentation at one of the sites of the international startup conference for hi-tech entrepreneurs Startup Village which was held in the Innovation Center Skolkovo. RunCall made it to the semifinals of the early stage project competition.

RunCall is a voice robot with ready call scenarios that is able to communicate with customers, recognize their answers, create detailed reports on all calls and classify answers.

During Startup Village, we talked to Olga and asked her to share her impressions of participating in the pitch and conference.

– Olga, tell us, why your project participated in the competition.

– The RunCall team took part in the competition by the recommendation of Elizaveta Urosova, director of “Ingria” Business Incubator, when the regional stage of the Startup Tour started in the regions of Russia. We submitted the application through “Information Technology” division, and wanted to win and take a prize. After all, the main prize is two million rubles from the competition partners. Our project currently requires scaling and replacing manual labor. That prize would, indeed, come in handy.

– Your pitch was quite rousing. After your report, there were many questions from the audience. What question did you find most interesting?

– It was “How is our project different from other competing companies in the market?” Our project is unique in that we create script templates for large businesses and they can manage them themselves.

– Your impressions about Startup Village. Did you come by new business contacts during the conference?

– The Startup Village conference is not merely a large caliber meeting and an opportunity to work a couple of days in the open air. At the conference, Overkill Ventures, a Latvian venture fund became interested in our project. Representatives of the fund invited us to a meeting and made an interesting offer. This meeting was significant for our project, because we recently started looking for an investor to help us enter the European market.

– Share your plans for the near future.

– At the moment we have launched several pilot projects with MTS. We have customers
and we are eagerly waiting for new ones. We thank the staff of the B2B MTS department
and, personally, Dmitry Serebryakov, for their tremendous and effective work on launching the joint pilots and developing the project, because all the startups chosen by them secured real customers. This summer, we are going to find out the result of participation in the START-1 program of the Bortnik Fund and figure out if we are going to be residents of Skolkovo.

– Olga, what role did Ingria Business Incubator play in your project?

– This is a community, a co-working with an excellent networking, assistance in promoting our development at the city administration level, the opportunity to participate in presentation sessions with potential partners, including those from foreign countries, e. g. Fukuoka.