St. Petersburg’s Ingria Techno-park and the Speech Technology Center (STC), developing innovative speech technology systems, have signed an agreement on cooperation, magazine The AngelInvestor reports.

Under the agreement, STC will provide expertise and support to selected innovation projects and is considering investing into projects developed by the residents of Ingria Techno-park’s Business Incubator.

STC is especially interested in technology projects at the pre-seed, seed and growth stages. The company will provide expert services to projects and bring in mentors for fast development of supported start-ups. Besides, STC is willing to exercise technological exchange with Ingria’s residents.

Irina Kalashnikova, CEO of Ingria Technopark, “Big business shows growing interest in Russian start-up products. Business is willing to act as strategic investor as well as consumer of innovative products and services by young companies. To meet the latest trend, our Business Incubator has developed the “offline-marketing” program to help residents find good contracts.”

Mikhail Khitrov, CEO in STC, “New products by young specialists have always been of interest to us. This is one of the reasons why we set up the Department of Speech Information Technologies last year at the St. Petersburg National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (NRU ITMO) in order to train and support young specialists and their projects. Ingria Techno-park Business Incubator gives us the opportunity to meet start-ups and facilitate their development in St. Petersburg.”