The OUTEX startup — an application for sports and rehabilitation — won the National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge (NYEC) national competition for innovative business projects and reached the finals of the World Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge (WYEC), where it will compete for start-up capital to start its own business .
On September 6, 2024, Ukrainian Future, a business incubator of the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, announced the winners of NYEC, which is the regional stage of the international youth entrepreneurship competition World Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge 2024. Such a selection took place for the first time in Ukraine. This became possible thanks to the exclusive partnership of the business incubator with the organizer of the global competition - the international organization for the development of entrepreneurial education Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).
The participants of the national competition were 19 youth teams that worked for three weeks on the creation and improvement of their startup projects at the summer entrepreneurship camp BizCamp, organized and conducted by Ukrainian Future according to NFTE standards. The National Challenge became a place where teams had the opportunity to seal their projects, demonstrating their entrepreneurial flair and the viability of developed business models.
According to the decision of the NYEC jury, the first place in the selection went to the OUTEX team, which developed an application for sports and rehabilitation in which AI independently corrects the execution of exercises. The second place is PhAInix — a system of protocols for changing the communication of a drone on the fly. The third Bear Band is a technological complex that non-invasively determines a person's state of health. All three NYEC finalist teams will participate in the annual World Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, which will take place on November 21 in New York, where they will participate in side events of the event and have the opportunity to build their own professional community in a global startup environment.
"I never expected that I will take the first place! I hoped, perhaps, for the second or third, because I was competing with a large number of powerful projects. But as experience shows, it is very important to constantly work and be open to insights, and then you can achieve results!", said Yuliya Tkachenko, co-founder of the OUTEX startup, after the award ceremony.
"All my expectations have been exceeded! I am very satisfied and I hope that with such young people as I saw today, we will win and there is a future in Ukraine!" - shared his impressions of the pitch, member of the jury, general director of the 10Guards cyber security consulting company Vitaly Yakushev.
“Despite the fact that the NYEC officially only has three finalists, every youth team that makes it to the finals is already a winner. During the preparation for the selection, the participants had access to the unique methods of NFTE and experts of the Ukrainian Future business incubator, who have experience in creating successful cases all over the world. And today - the teams had the opportunity to demonstrate the acquired knowledge and acquired skills in practice, during the pitch. The experience of participating in a competition of this level is indeed unique and is a real step on the way to creating a successful startup. In particular, several teams today received an offer to continue working on the development of their projects in Ukrainian Future as residents, receiving access to the necessary material and consulting infrastructure," said the head of the business incubator, business consultant Iryna Bystrova.
For reference:
* Ukrainian Future, a business incubator of the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine — a full-cycle business incubator: with an educational and consulting center, a co-working space, a FabLab prototyping laboratory and a library of materials, which offers services to create and accelerate the growth of innovative businesses.
** Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) is an international non-profit organization headquartered in the USA that promotes the development of entrepreneurial and innovative thinking among young people in more than 20 countries around the world.