The New Industry Ventures fund (a joint project between Gazprom Neft, Gazprombank, Russian Venture Company (RVC) and VEB Ventures) has become an “electric” resident at the St Petersburg Energy TechnoHub, and is investigating potential investments in companies specialising in working with new energy technologies — specifically, alternative energy.
The New Industry Ventures fund’s collaboration with Energy TechnoHub participants will give the latter access to the fund’s investment opportunities — providing a further financial stimulus for developing promising business projects in energy generation and storage, system automation, and production robotisation.
More than 50 cases, available to TechnoHub “residents”, have already been posted on its online platform. Together with the Hub’s project office, New Industry Ventures’ specialists will select the most promising ideas for developing these cases from developers and producers, and assess the potential for involvement in project financing.
“Our fund has made several investments in technology companies this year. We’ve invested about RUB100 million in a company developing multi-lateral well-finishing technologies, for example, and in October joined a project on developing downhole tractors, used for delivering geophysical equipment to horizontal oil-well sections. We can see that a world-class ‘ecosystem’ — bringing together universities, scientific and research centres, start-ups and major corporations from the same area, all of them looking for answers to challenging problems — has been developed within the St Petersburg Energy TechnoHub. This is a highly favourable environment for speeding-up the development of technology projects with considerable potential for being monetized.”
Tatiana Morozova CEO, New Industry Ventures fund
“Partnering with a venture fund opens up further opportunities for raising finance for our residents’ projects — something which will speed-up our developments and further improve the quality of the technology products available to our country’s energy industry.”
Andrey Vlasov Head of the St Petersburg Energy TechnoHub Project Office for Gazprom Neft
The agreement on launching the St Petersburg Energy TechnoHub project was signed at the end of 2019 by St Petersburg Governor Alexander Belgov, Gazprom Neft CEO Alexander Dyukov, and CEO of the Agency for Technological Development (an independent non-governmental organisation (NGO)) Vladimir Pastukhov. This document envisages joint activities in attracting industrial and energy corporations’ engineering departments to the city, as well as supporting the establishment of local technological start-ups and project teams. The number of high-tech companies in St Petersburg is expected to increase six-fold by 2030 as a result of the TechnoHub being established there. This will allow major orders arising from R&D and engineering projects in the energy sector — in which about RUB100 billion a year is invested in Russia — to be concentrated at enterprises and research centres in the city.
The “New Industry Ventures” fund was established by Gazprom Neft, Gazprombank, Russian Venture Company (RVC) and VEB Innovations in 2019. The fund is focussed on promoting high-tech products on the Russian market, as well as start-ups involved in developing the oil and gas industry, the fuel and energy sector, and Russian industry more broadly. The fund’s priorities include developing technologies for the exploration, production, processing, transportation, distribution and utilisation of hydrocarbons; energy transmission and storage; implementing innovative solutions in the construction of industrial infrastructure; managing major projects; and more.
