What has happened in the Ukrainian tech market in October 2021?
Available at: TechUkraine
R&D, new offices in Ukraine
French military-industrial firm Thales that specializes in the development of high-tech products for defense and security, aerospace, and transportation, intends to open an office in Ukraine and has already appointed a director – read
Tel-Aviv based Bringg, a cloud platform helping retailers and logistics providers to scale up and optimize their customer experiences and logistics operations, opened office in Kyiv in October, additionally to Lviv – read
Appsulove, a Belarusian company developing mobile applications and games, has opened an office in Kyiv. The game studio plans to hire up to 50 professionals – read
The largest Ukrainian tech company EPAM will open a new office in Ivano-Frankivsk at Promprylad.Renovation, an innovation center on premises of an old plant, – read, as well as in Zaporizhzhya – read
Solarisbank, Glovo, BlaBlaCar, Lyft, Revolut have recently opened R&D centers in Ukraine. The article is about the case study of the Solarisbank R&D and why Ukrainian cities are attractive for international tech companies – read
Venture capital and startups:
Founded by Ukrainian Dmytro Zaporozhets, the DevOps Platform GitLab is taking over Nasdaq and Times Square with a valuation of $15 billion – read
Ukrainian Depositphotos and Crello have been acquired by global design company Vistaprint, the design and marketing partner to millions of small businesses around the world. According to TechCrunch, the amount of the deal is $85 million – read
Ukrainian SOC Prime, the world’s largest threat detection marketplace where researchers can monetize their content, closed $11.5M in Series A funding led by DNX Ventures, together with Streamline Ventures LLC and Rembrandt Venture Partners – read
Founded by Ukrainian Dmitri Lisitski Influ2, the first person-based marketing platform, raised $8 MLN Series A from Rally Ventures. In 2020, the startup raised $3.4 millionby One Way Ventures, VentureFriends, as well as a venture capitalists – read
Facemoji, a plug-and-play tech platform to help game and app developers put avatar systems into their apps with the startup’s SDK, has raised a $3 million seed round led by Play Ventures, with participation from Twitter and Ukrainian Roosh Ventures, alongside some angel investors – read
Ukrainian Let’s Enhance raises $3M Seed round to further develop Claid, end-to-end automated image processing platform that helps marketplaces automatically edit, optimize and deliver user-generated content with AI – read
Competera Pricing Platform, an AI-powered platform helping retailers to set optimal prices, raised $1.5 mln from Flyer One Ventures, and American angel investors. The new round of investments will help the company to scale up in the USA market – read
Ukrainian Party.Space, a virtual event platform that is in between games and virtual events, has raised $1 million to scale up its metaverse-themed virtual events business. The round led by EQT Ventures, with participation TAVentures, Day one Capital, ICLUB – read
Kazakhstan’s largest financial technology firm Kaspi.kz has signed a purchase agreement to buy Ukraine’s subsidiary of Kazakh BTA Bank. According to Forbes Ukraine, the transaction could cost up to $9 million. With BTA Bank’s banking license and Portmone’s payments licenses, Kaspi could launch its Super App financial service in Ukraine – read
Founded by Ukrainian serial entrepreneur Denis Belkevich and former Christie’s COO Roxanna Zarnegar, the New York-based Art+Tech startup accelerator Fuelarts raised $500K from philanthropic funders – read
Ukrainian SAAS-startup Choice QR, with offices in Ukraine and Czech Republic, that develop QR-menus, delivery and takeaway for cafes, raised € 400 000 investments in pre-seed round in addition to previous € 300 000 – read
The US firm specializing in virtualization software Virtuozzo has purchased the Ukrainian developer of cloud service Jelastic – read
Ukrainian-american startup Outloud.ai, frontline intelligence platform for offline retailers, raised investments from VC Digital Future. The amount of investment is not disclosed – read
The Ukrainian Startup Fund (USF) has announced the results of the 30th and 31st Pitch Days: 6 pre-seed stage startups became winners and received $25,000 grants, 4 seed-stage startups got $50,000 each – read
The winners of the ІТ Arena 2021 Startup Competition: Mosqitter – $20000, Zeely – $18000, Caretech.human – $15000 – read
Kyivstar will possibly acquire a fixed-line operator, Datagroup. The deal may be worth about $100 million, it became known to UBR from informed sources – read
Aristocrat Gaming, an Australian gambling machine manufacturer, bought Playtech with Estonian and Israeli origin in order to consolidate the assets. The price agreed by the parties is A$5 billion ($3.7 billion). In Ukraine, Aristocrat Leisure Limited has been known since 2017, after it purchased the Israeli game publisher Plarium with offices in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odesa for $500 million – read
Scopely, a US-based mobile game developer and publisher with an office in Ukraine, announced the acquisition of GSN Games, the gaming division of Sony’s Game Show Network (GSN) in a deal worth about $1 billion – read
Social Impact Award Ukraine 2021 winners by Western NIS Enterprise Fund, VPLYV Fund, SAP, SILab Ukraine, Ukrainian Social Venture Fund, and International Renaissance Foundation as part of the EU4USociety initiative: IONKID, CupToU, Check It, Challity – read
Ecosystem news:
Ukraine is joining the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program, which has a budget of almost € 100 bln – read
The first-ever Ukrainian Pavilion at Web Summit 2021 unites domestic businesses, government institutions and tech-wired enthusiasts in order to present the booming Ukrainian tech ecosystem to the world – read
Ukrainian Clusters presents new ranking of Ukrainian Unicorn startups divided into four groups: Active Unicorns, Future Unicorns, Former Unicorns, and Foreign Unicorns with Ukrainian roots – read
3 tech companies with Ukrainian roots featured at Newsweek’s America’s Most Loved Workplaces 2021: Gitlab, EPAM, Capgemini Engineering (ex-Lohika) – read
2 tech enterprises are among the the TOP 100 largest private companies of Ukraine by Forbes Ukraine: EPAM (Profit – ₴942M. Revenues – ₴10,4B), SoftServe (Profit – no data. Revenues – ₴9B) – read
Starting in November, Ukrainian unicorn Grammarly’s writing suggestions will be directly integrated within the Samsung native keyboard on Samsung devices with OneUI 4.0 software – read
Founded by Ukrainian Max Polyakov, Firefly Aerospace has successfully completed NASA’s Critical Design Review of its Blue Ghost lunar lander and is on schedule for September 2023 lunar mission. The 2023 Blue Ghost mission will be the first of what are expected to be yearly lunar surface missions for Firefly – read
Ukrainian biotech company A.D.A.M. will print human bones in the US. In 2018, Kwambio Ukrainian 3D printer manufacturer, together with WeFund Ventures presented their joint human bone and organ printing project ADAM. In August, 2020, FDA confirmed 510(k) eligibility for A.D.A.M. biopolymer and bioceramic bone implants. FDA clearance is expected in 2022 – read
Ajax Systems has been announced as a finalist in 2 categories at this year’s Security & Fire Excellence Awards. Ajax new outdoor detector with photo verification MotionCam Outdoor was shortlisted for Security Hardware Product Innovation of the Year. The company will also compete for the title Security Hardware Manufacturer of the Year – read
Forbes Ukraine featured Odesa tech entrepreneurs on the cover of September magazin: Artem Borodatyuk – Netpeak, Denys and Igor Zhdanov – Readle, Vadim Rogovsky – 3DLOOK – read
Kharkiv FED, the mechanical processing manufacturer for the aerospace industry, has signed agreements with European industrial firms to implement an air taxi project – read
Ukrainian Netpeak Group launched the online university of up-to-date knowledge Choice31. Founder of Odesa-based Netpeak Group, the group of companies with the main mission “move from the third world to the first without changing our geographical location”, Artem Borodatyuk will invest in the digital project up to $1 MLN – read
The team of entrepreneurs, engineers, founders of Reface, Pawa, Zibra AI launched AI HOUSE that aims to put Ukraine on the global Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning map – read
Ukrainian medicine search and delivery platform Liki24 launches a mobile application for iOS and Android to improve the user experience. Pharmacy on the screen will provide access to 40,000 products from more than 5,000 pharmacies – read
Signing the memorandum of cooperation with key stakeholders which develop the Ukrainian tech ecosystem and push it forward via the project 360 Tech Ecosystem Overview: BRISE Capital, Center42, Ukrainian Startup Fund, Ministry of Digital transformation, SaaS Nation, TechUkraine, Ukrainian internet association – ІнАУ, LIFT99co, We Challenge, reactor.ua, Netpeak – read
On 11 October, representatives of business and government gathered at the EBA IT Conference by European Business Association to discuss the state of IT, tech education in Ukraine, prospects, and challenges of IT development – read
Key educational achievements in IT education for the 2015–2021 by IТ Ukraine Association: 12 systemic educational projects involving 72 companies and over 48,600 participants; educational conferences Synergy. IT Business & IT Education and IT Ukraine Education Summit – read
Kharkiv IT Cluster with the support of USAID Competitive economy program made the research of the labor market, softlanding for developers and tech specialists in Kharkiv – read
2 Ukrainian esports players win The International, the biggest esports event by prize pool and viewership. The team consisting of two Ukrainians and three Russians won $18.2 million from a record prize pool of $40 million during the Dota 2 online game event in Bucharest – read
Commencing the cooperation between TechUkraine and All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition – the largest public association of the advertising industry in Ukraine. The sides will develop MarkTech and AdTech sectors for further win-win cooperation and successful collaborations between the tech ecosystem and the advertising industry.
During 7-9 of October in Lviv, ІТ Arena 2021 gathered global changemakers, the most inspiring thinkers, Ukrainian and international tech community, and key stakeholders of the sphere. TechUkraine visited 3rd day of the event and wrote the article with the reflections on it – read
An online publication that is aimed to gather information about the market situation Investors Book 2021 begins collecting entries – join and make an important contribution to the development of Ukraine’s new economy, just fill out the form – read
The overview of the fintech landscape in Ukraine and abroad, and the showcase of the success story of Ukrainian fintech outsourcing cooperation between Daxx and Vive, a Netherlands-based startup – read
dev.ua undercovers the newbies on the Ukrainian startup landscape – software for smart homes, voice assistant, medtech solutions, etc – read
Government news
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Oct. 5 vetoed a bill legalizing cryptocurrency in Ukraine and sent it back to parliament for changes. The bill that passed the Verkhovna Rada in September says that the virtual assets market would be regulated by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU), the National Securities Commission (NSC) and a new independent regulatory body that would have to be created – read
The team of the Ministry of Digital Transformation presented the main projects of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the progress of our country on the way towards digital transformation to the delegation from Estonia during an official visit. Diia application, the world’s first passports in a smartphone, digital COVID-certificates, Diia.Signature, Diia City and other projects of the Ministry of Digital Transformation – all these create a new digital culture in Ukraine – read
During the trip to France, the Ukrainian delegation visited the international security exhibition Milipol Paris, which brings together professionals from this sector at all levels. The Ukrainian top official spoke about the progress made by the Ministry of Digital Transformation in the two years of its existence. Mykhailo Fedorov shared Ukraine’s experience in combating cyberattacks. Participants also discussed the need to consolidate efforts to combat cybercrime – read
The Ministry of Digital Transformation will cooperate with the Czech Republic in the field of digitalization: smart city, Diia City, interaction through the Entrepreneurship and Export Promotion Office, cooperation at the regional level – read
The Strategy of Intellectual Property Development will be approved in Ukraine for the first time. It was drafted with the participation of international and national experts and the document provides for the disclosure of the powerful potential of the intellectual property sector, inventory of IP objects for further protection and commercialization. The strategy is a list of measures that will be developed and implemented by the Government to stimulate and strengthen the effective creation, development, management and protection of intellectual property at the national level – read
The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine adopted a resolution “On the Unified Ecological Platform EcoSystem” which defines EcoSystem as a national environmental automated information and analytical system integrated with the Diia portal. EcoSystem is designed to provide access to environmental information, as well as – effective electronic interaction between government, business and community to obtain administrative services in the field of environment protection – read
Within the 23rd Summit between Ukraine and the European Union, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen commended the significant development of Ukraine in the digital sphere and highlighted important aspects of joint activities in the future, including the introduction of 5G, which will help move closer to the EU internal market – read
Ukraine presents the potential of the space industry to the world at the thematic week “Expo2020: Space Week”, a weekly event “UA Space Focus” in the pavilion of Ukraine within the Expo 2020 in Dubai – read
Reports
Ukraine venture capital and private equity markets overview 2020 by UVCA – read
Ukraine is number one by RA Capital – read
CEE Software Development M&A report 2021 by AVentures Capital – read
Coming of age: Central and Eastern European startups by Google for Startups, Atomico, Dealroom – read
European PE Breakdown by Pitchbook – read
Via TechUkraine, VentureBit, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Forbes, KyivPost, dev.ua, AIN, Dealroom, UBN, USF
