Techosystem in partnership with Ukrainian Startup Fund have unveiled the 2024 edition of the Top 100 Ukrainian Rising Startups catalog. It presents 100 of the most promising Ukrainian startups that are shaping the innovative future.

  • The first edition of the catalog was published in 2023 under the title Rising UA Startups: Resilience Edition. It included 100 startups and 49 scaleups selected by a jury of 30 experts.
  • The updated catalog of 2024 is called Top 100 Ukrainian Rising Startups and is "designed to emphasize the uniqueness of Ukrainian startups and their investment attractiveness".

You can download the Top 100 Ukrainian Rising Startups catalog on the Ukrainian Tech Ecosystem Overview platform.

How the startups were selected

50 leading experts of the Ukrainian technology ecosystem were selected to evaluate the startup's innovation, growth potential, and contribution to the ecosystem. Among the experts is AIN Editor-in-Chief Oleksandr Strelnykov.

Key selection criteria

  • Ukrainian origin of the startup: founder is Ukrainian, more than 30% of the team is Ukrainian, the company pays taxes in Ukraine.
  • Startup is founded less than 10 years ago, focused on innovation, has a scalable business model.

Selection stages

  1. An initial list of over 300 startups was created.
  2. The project implementers, in cooperation with venture partners, reduced this list to 200 companies, which were submitted for review by the experts.
  3. The expert committee carefully reviewed the submitted list and formed a final list of 100 most promising startups.

What's in the catalog

The catalog contains detailed company profiles, analytical data about the ecosystem, including team composition, investment attraction, revenue sources, and more.

Insights from the research

  • Most of the startups surveyed were founded between 2021 and 2023, with a peak in 2021.
  • The majority of startups in the catalog are at the seed stage - 70%.
  • The most common product verticals are: healthcare, business productivity, marketing and media, education and finance.
  • The B2B model is the most popular among startups, accounting for 55.1% while ~30% of startups combine different business models
  • The main monetization model is subscription-based, which is used by 75.6% of startups. The second most popular is transactional — 23.3%, while other ways of monetization are still present but in minority: commission-based, Licensing, Freemium, Pay-as-go, and others
  • 43.8% of startups have annual revenue in the range of $100,000-$1 million, 35% earn less than $100,000
  • Ukraine, the EU and North America are the main markets for Ukrainian startups, while startups’ clients and users are also located in the UK, the Asia–Pacific region, Mexico, South American counties, for example, Brazil and Argentina, and others.
  • The most common is grant funding which was received by 67.5% of startups. Startups also received funding from foreign angel investors — 42.5% and foreign venture firms — 37.5%. Regarding opportunities for local funding, 38.75% of startups received investments from Ukrainian angel investors and 35% from Ukrainian venture firms.
  • 16.25% of surveyed startups are bootstrapped.
  • The majority — 77% of startups have raised more than $250,000 of investments. Among them, the biggest share of startups raised $250,000-$499,999 — 28.36%.
  • Most startups  — 77.5% already use AI technologies in their products.