Sergey Tokarev, the investor of RefaceAl and partner of Cyprus IT Forum, talked about the winners of the #HackCorona competition. The event was organized at the national level. Itsaim was to combat the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic in Ukraine.
The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine organized the competition of young IT projects at the national level, then EGAP supported the ministry in terms of organizing the event. According to the officials, 899 teams participated in the hackathon. All of these teams presented their projects during the competition.
One of the presented projects was related to the electronic services to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The projects were related to social, administrative, and educational issues. The main aim of all of the presented projects was to help the country to recover from the pandemic.
The prize fund of the competition was 4 million hryvnias or $143000 USD in the beginning. Sergey Tokarev joined the jury of the competition at the final stage. He added 1 million hryvnias or $35000 USD to the prize fund. Tokarev said, “I learned about the competition when there were 22 teams remained in the final.”
Sergey Tokarev, the investor of RefaceAl, admired the efforts of the participating teams to come up with interesting and useful ideas. He helped the teams by providing them consultation services and increasing the prize fund. The top five hackathon winners are VUIKO, Sluhai, KAZKOZVUK, SkillAR, and Digital Women 2020.
Tokarev liked VUIKO the most. It is a startup aimed to create a marketplace for farm products. He liked the team behind the project, the presentation of the project, and the commercial value of the services. Sergey Tokarev said that he chose this particular project on the base of its relevancy and usefulness for the farmers and entrepreneurs.
Tokarev also supported the Sluhai and KAZKOZVUK projects. He said, “These projects are educational and they popularize literature in Ukraine.” Both of these projects are associated with the creation of audiobooks. KAZKOZVUK has a special feature of allowing Ukrainian children with visual impairments to get familiar with the literature. The prize fund of the competition was shared between these five startups.
SkillAR is a startup based on the idea of interactive distance learning. Augmented Reality is used in a mobile platform to achieve the desired goal of distance learning. Similarly, Digital Women 2020 is a startup that focuses on stimulating the women-owned small and medium-sized businesses in the time of crisis in Ukraine. As for the prize, the winners of the competition requested an amount from the very beginning. The prize fund was shared between the winners on the base of their original requests. Tokarev said, “I simply could not ignore these projects” and added that he appreciated the high level of all the projects.