Sber’s youth accelerators SberZ and SberStudent have opened their doors to 53,000 young people with programs to develop entrepreneurial skills for schoolchildren and students. This was reported by the press service of Sberbank.
The company notes that this year the programs have become international – now schoolchildren and students from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan and other countries participate in them.
The SberZ school accelerator has registered 35,000 schoolchildren and students of colleges and technical schools across the country. The average age of the participants is 16, the youngest is 12.
18,000 students, graduate students, researchers and teachers from 600 universities participate in the SberStudent student accelerator.
Training on accelerators will last 8 months, as stated at Sberbank.
In the first phase, participants will listen to a course of online lectures on the foundations of entrepreneurship and the creation of digital products. They will then be able to choose one of four industry paths: artificial intelligence, metaverse, web 3.0, or the social aspect (science, medicine, education, arts).
In the second phase, the participants will form teams and, under the mentors’ guidance, develop their own project’s MVP (minimum viable product).
The best teams will present their developments at a demo day in Moscow, where they will be evaluated by representatives of Sberbank and other large companies, as well as university rectors and business angels.
Members of school teams that win from SberZ will be able to enter the best universities in the country without exams, receive additional USE points and other preferences. SberStudent student teams will receive a grant from the Moscow Seed Fund, and undergraduate students will apply for a grant from the President of the Russian Federation.
“Young people have a growing interest in modern technologies and using them to start their own ventures. This season, 53,000 attendees joined Sber’s youth accelerators — a huge stadium of guys who want to learn about tech entrepreneurship. “We will help them come up with and develop their own ideas, we will show that it is possible to achieve serious business results even at a young age,” said Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sberbank.
Recall that Sber has been running free SberZ and SberStudent accelerators since 2021.