However, market participants warn that the choice here is really small.

[tanjimajuha20]

Fill a niche
Domestic players have received a unique chance to occupy the vacant niche and demonstrate their capabilities in providing cybersecurity for the state and business, says Ekaterina Petrova, Director of the GenerationS corporate innovation development platform. According to her, the rapid development of such areas as honduras whatsapp resource the Internet of Things or cloud services has reached a high stage of product maturity, which has led to increased demand for specialized solutions in the information security industry. The market is receiving an additional boost: not every company in the information security market is ready to make such investments in developing companies, notes Dmitry Vasiliev, Director of the Information Security Department at Softline Group: "This is a positive moment for the market and young participants - an opportunity to get a ticket to enter the market at the time of peak demand for information security."

The number of startups in the field of information security revolves around the number 100, and most of them offer not a complete solution, but a certain technology that then needs to be integrated and developed into a product, reflects Dmitry Vasiliev, Director of the Information Security Department of Softline Group. "When we "dive" into niches and look at individual technologies, we see that these niches will need to be "accelerated" and grown, and this is not only an investment directly in technology, but also in marketing - in the formation of demand and value. We need to be ready for this," the expert summarizes.

Protection against cyber threats has become a necessity, not something from the realm of fantasy, says Dmitry Kurin, Director of Innovation and Investments at MTS and Head of MTS StartUp Hub. Cyber ​​attacks entail not only image damage (as in the case of user data leaks), but also real business losses, he reasons: "Obviously, to prevent their occurrence, mass technological solutions for ensuring information security are needed." Kurin cites data from MTS StartUp Hub, according to which the information security direction in the first half of 2023 began to occupy 6% of the market of young companies: "This number, of course, is still not enough for full-fledged import substitution."

"RTK-Solar" is following the classic path of many corporations, says Dmitry Kalaev. "At first, it seems that the team can make any product on its own. But to reach the point of creating a product with revenue of 100 million rubles per year, you need to work for about three years. So the company comes to the conclusion that it is more profitable to buy a startup with such a product. Then it turns out that there are not many assets on the market that can be acquired, and the company comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to support ideas at early stages and grow them for itself," says Kalaev. "Especially in such a specific niche as information security." Large companies, in order to stay on trend, need to use all three methods of working with new products, he says: internal development, M&A deals, and early-stage investments.

At the same time, according to Dmitry Kurin, an accelerator as an institution does not solve the problem of startups appearing on the market, since it works with ready-made MVPs, tested hypotheses and staffed teams - even if it opens a set of early stages, Kurin believes. In his opinion, in order to increase the number of startups on the market, what is needed is not an accelerator, but a "venture builder", but these are completely different tools and models of interaction with startup teams: "In general, the tools vary depending on the stages of the startup: at the early stages, a venture builder with step-by-step tracking, mentoring is suitable, at later stages, when the company needs to scale, investments are enough."