Small technology companies can get a grant for an AI‑based solution
Small technology companies can submit applications to participate in the third round of the “Development‑AI” competition until 20 July. The competition is organised by the Innovation Promotion Fund as part of the national project “Data Economy”. Winners will be able to receive grants of up to 30 million rubles for developing domestic products, services and solutions using artificial intelligence technologies.
The competition is aimed at small enterprises that already have experience in commercialising science‑intensive products and a positive business reputation. Support will be provided to projects that meet the established criteria in the field of artificial intelligence and are focused on developing technologies capable of performing human cognitive functions and delivering results comparable to or exceeding human intellectual activity.
Applications are accepted in five areas: development of fundamental language and multimodal AI models for applied tasks, computer vision technologies, speech recognition and synthesis systems, intelligent decision‑support systems, and promising AI methods for automating intellectual and physical activities.
Winners can receive a grant of up to 30 million rubles. At the same time, extra‑budgetary co‑financing of the project must be at least 20 % of the grant amount, and the implementation period must be either 12 or 18 months.
Micro‑enterprises and small enterprises registered no more than seven years ago, with a staff of 2 to 20 employees and total revenue of no more than 300 million rubles over the past three years, are eligible to participate. Mandatory requirements include holding exclusive rights to the results of intellectual activity, having their own website, not having any active grant agreements with the Fund under a number of programmes, and joining the Code of Ethics in the Field of Artificial Intelligence.
Upon completion of the projects, participants must develop and test a pilot industrial prototype of the product, submit applications to register the results of intellectual activity, and initiate the inclusion of the developed solutions in Russian state registers of software or radio‑electronic products.
Companies with the status of a small technology company (STC) will get an additional advantage during the application review — they will be awarded two extra points.