My name is Arsenii. I was born and lived most of my life in Moscow. My area of focus is petroleum engineering: I graduated from the Russian State Geological Prospecting University and now I am a Petroleum Engineering PhD student at Skoltech. I was active in science and technology entrepreneurship at my last university and developed this area of my life through Skoltech even more.

My life journey in technological entrepreneurship started 5 years ago: my friends and I organized a student subsection of Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) at my previous university. As part of SPE, we tackled our own technological startup projects, consistently attended conferences and participated in national and international startup contests. Even then, I was already inspired by the idea of creating something life-changing. The orderly accomplishment of regular tasks is the spinning nut in the economic machine. For me, I am much more interested in designing this machine.

I first heard about Skoltech around the time I was graduating. I watched several promo videos and realized that it's exactly the place I want to go. I was inspired by the Skoltech entrepreneurship spirit, the idea of connecting science, business and technologies, and opportunities for international cooperation.

I came to Triple Point when it was in its infancy and was at the early stage in the minds of a few enthusiasts: PhD and Master's students at Skoltech. By the way, one of them, Arina Ivanova, is still involved in the project as a CEI coordinator. Triple Point developed gradually and we are all very grateful to Skoltech staff for their help: Alexey Cheremisin, Elena Sokolova, Alexey Nikolaev, Dmitry Kulish, all these people at different stages actively helped the project with finding partners and organizing events.

In the beginning, I promoted the project among students: I maintained social networks and engaged students personally. Now I am more focused on engaging partners and students from other universities.

Initially we focused on private investors, but six months after the first contest we found our first industrial partner, a technological hub for E&S companies, which helps with the organization of the contest's Energy track to this day. Now we already cooperate with 6 companies, launched 3 different tracks, and almost 100 student teams have passed through Triple Point. Some teams continue to develop projects in cooperation with our partners.

Now we are planning to actively involve students from other universities in the competition as we negotiate partnerships with several universities at once.

The ARSY project started with an idea of my close friend from my last university, Vitaly Kazaku. We are both engineers and we were acutely aware that theoretical engineering knowledge is perceived very poorly. Therefore, the idea of an educational platform with AR elements seemed extremely relevant. We entered Skoltech together and started actively presenting the idea at courses and competitions.

We started the project together, now we have 5 people in our team and an experienced mentor, Professor Alexey Cheremisin. We are actively looking for a frontend developer, so in the near future we will be replenished:)

To attract funding, we participated in all the competitions we could find: we went through the whole series of Triple Point competitions, won the Student Startup contest, presented the project at Startup Village and other platforms.

Funding is not the only thing that's important to a startup. Potential customers and partners also play a crucial role, obviously. In addition to pitching, we devoted time to networking at all events: after the speeches, we came to the audience and the jury from the companies, asked for feedback, and collected contacts.

In the future we want to find applications for the AR-platform in other spheres besides engineering education. AR is in demand in medicine, capital construction. So now we are developing both the technical part and looking for areas for expansion.