UNIT.City has prepared a guide to the IT sector of Ukraine. It includes both general data on the industry, as well as a review of the largest technology companies, accelerators, investors and events. The editor of AIN.UA chose the most interesting figures and indicators of the report.

UNIT.City notes that this guide is primarily intended for foreign investors and potential partners of Ukrainian companies. “Our goal was to create a product that Ukrainians would take with them to international events and together with the presentation of their project they represented the country and its achievements in recent years. Over the past 5 years, the growth dynamics of the Ukrainian IT industry is calculated in double digits. Therefore, today is the best time to open or expand your innovative business here. This guide will help international partners to make sure of this,” says Max Yakover, CEO and managing partner of UNIT.City.

General information

  • About 185,000 developers and 4,000 tech companies operate in Ukraine. The technology sector became the country’s second export industry in 2018.
  • 20% of the world’s leading companies have their offices based in Ukraine. Among them are Microsoft, Samsung, ABBY, Huawei and others.
  • More than 100 of Fortune 500 companies use the services of Ukrainian companies. At the same time, 18 outsourcers from Ukraine are in the top 100 best outsourcing companies in the world.

Ukraine in the IT market

  • Ukraine is the largest exporter of IT services in Europe.
  • The country ranks 24 in the world in the attractiveness of software development. At the same time, Ukrainian developers are at the 11th place in the ranking of 50 countries with the best software developers according to the version of the HackerRank portal. And freelancers from Ukraine rank seventh in quality and efficiency in the world.
  • According to UNIT.City, Ukrainian exports of IT services will be $5.4 billion in 2020 and $8.4 billion in 2025.
  • More than 110 international companies and startups have opened R&D offices in Ukraine, more than half of them are located in Kyiv. The largest partners are the USA (45% of companies), the European Union and Israel. The expertise of Ukrainian R&D centers covers games, e-commerce, the Internet of things, as well as work with big data and artificial intelligence.

Investments and startups

  • In 2017, companies and startups from Ukraine and the ones with Ukrainian roots made 44 deals for a total of $265 million, which is a record figure for the industry.
  • The top largest public deals in 2017-2018 included Gitlab with a $130 million round (according to AIN.UA, the round was $110 million), Grammarly with a $110 million round and BitFury, which attracted $110 million.
  • City also ranked the most promising Ukrainian startups. The top five included People.ai, monobank, Allset, Solar Gaps and Kwambio.

IT ecosystem

  • More than 20 cities have created their own IT-clusters. The largest are Lviv IT Cluster, Kharkiv IT Cluster and Kyiv IT Cluster.
  • In Ukraine, there are more than 50 co-workings and hubs. Most of them are located in Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv.
  • Every year more than 1,000 events related to technology, start-ups and investments are held in Ukraine. The most ambitious ones are Lviv IT Arena, iForum and IT Weekend Ukraine.