Russian Forbes about Evercity: Building Cities of Future
Evercity Ecosystem: building Cities of Future
By the year 2050 66% of World’s population will live in cities. Rapid urbanisation brings global-scale problems, such as air pollution, lack of electric energy, pure drinking water and overpopulation. Cities’ demand for technological solutions is forming a global 1,5 trillion-dollar market. Although various solutions already exist, they are fragmented and often quite difficult to implement. That’s where Evercity comes in: an initiative for cities of future that choses and accelerates technological startups in the field of smart sustainable cities, preparing them for investment and subsequent implementation into the infrastructure of dynamically developing cities worldwide.
Bright future of urbanisation
Evercity consists of an accelerator and a VC for the most promising technological projects in the field of smart sustainable cities and implements ready solutions around the world in terms of ground-breaking «Smart sustainable city as a service» concept. The project brings together startups, investors, cities and partnering organisations in a single ecosystem, where data flows create intrinsic value.
The project sets as its goal the selection of best projects in the field of robotisation and drones, Internet-of-Things, innovational financial solutions, artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, blockchain, and their acceleration via security tokenisation. Accelerator’s portfolio projects currently include platform for exchange of genomic data, blockchain solution for carbon markets, IoT cloud platform for smart cities and more.
Evercity team has a major experience in acceleration programs: thus, in 2016 authors of the project created a fintech-accelerator InspiRussia in Innopolis city in Tatarstan. One of its alumnis, fintech company BankEx, raised over 70 million dollars in 2017.
Evercity currently consists of functioning businesses — accelerator and regional hubs, managed by a Singapore-based holding company. Evercity actively collaborates with UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to help its partnering cities reach Sustainable development goals, which boosts its development on international scale.
Results and next steps
In the first quarter of 2018 seed investments in Evercity reached 10 million rubles. In QII the project is set to raise 2–3 million dollars, and 100 million dollars in QIII.
On the 10th of April, the company entered a strategic partnership with «VTB Ecology» LLC in order to create an accelerator of technological startups in the field of green economy (biotechnologies, renewable energy, resources management). Best projects of the acceleration program will be eligible for the company’s support in getting funding from «VTB Capital» group.
Within the framework of project’s global expansion plans, Evercity actively works with Astana’s akimat, Eurasian Economic Cooperation Organisation, international network Fintech4Good, Faculty of applied economy and commerce of Moscow State University for International Relations, Fund of development and support of ecological projects «Russian carbon», «VTB Ecology» and Life.SREDA VC.
A memorandum aimed at creation of a «Smart sustainable cities» acceleration hub was signed with Astana city government within the realisation of international technical park project Astana Hub. Currently the initiative has over 10 state and corporate partners. Creation of a VC and a platform for security token issuance in correspondence with Singapore legislation and other perspective jurisdictions are among Evercity ecosystem’s nearest development plans. Evercity also plans to widen its network of regional Smart Sustainable Cities hubs. Such representative centers are already function in Moscow, Innopolis and Astana.
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Original article: http://www.forbes.ru/article/361183-umnye-ustoychivye-goroda-kak-usluga
