Country’s robust education system creates close to 40,000 graduates a year in technical studies and the government aims to get this number to 100,000 by 2020, according to Medium.
Despite shaking economy, IT has always been one of the most stable industries with much higher salaries, which makes it super attractive for people and drives more interest.
Coupled with more than 200,000 IT professionals and low labor costs, Ukraine’s IT outsourcing sector thrived in the recent years. The highly skilled and young workforce of the country stands out from competition at the EMEA region with superior quality and fast execution.
Growing from 0.06% of the GDP to 3.3% -more than 50x- in the past 5 years, Ukraine’s IT sector will soon become number one export of the nation. It is no surprise that more than 100 multinational tech giants opened their R&D offices in Ukraine including Samsung, Boeing, Siemens and Oracle.
Read alsoUkraine cyber security firm warns of possible new attacksServing customers from international markets, the new-age Ukrainian startups are still very much rooted domestically with all of their development and R&D offices still in the country, giving them a real cost advantage.
Great startup hubs need a home-run style victory that unlocks major capital resources. Ukraine is close to such a domestic break-out with Grammarly (raised $110M), Paymentwall, bpm online, Genesis, Readdle and Jooble en route to become the first unicorns.
Unlike the user base and geography acquisitions in adjacent markets, tech giants are acquiring Ukrainian startups like Looksery (by Snap), Viewdle (by Google)or Maxymiser (by Oracle) for their team and technology to leverage country’s growing talent base.
Read alsoUkraine's IT-startup wins international contest, EUR 100,000 investment”Ukrainian teams have extraordinary work ethics, putting in long hours and making up for any lack of resources they might experience in their local ecosystems. They can address hard problems and are usually on the cutting edge of the latest tech, AR and cryptocurrency being just a couple of examples,” says Eveline Buchatskiy, One Way Ventures.
Increasingly companies are launching their US operations at earlier stages while still keeping development back home. Petcube, Allset, Preply, Mobalytics, Sixa and People.ai are all examples of Ukrainian entrepreneurs competing on the global playing field since inception.
VC funds like AVentures, TA Ventures, Wannabiz and Imperious emerged to take advantage of the geo-arbitrage opportunity and support Ukrainian entrepreneurs grow globally.
Read alsoStartups might save Ukraine economyTop tier investors like Khosla, General Catalyst and Index have invested in Ukrainian entrepreneurs with domestic software development operations and CVC’s like Intel Capital and HP Ventures joined the Ukrainian Venture Capital Association to leverage the innovation potential.
Early stage funds and accelerators like 500 Startups, Techstars and Y Combinator are continuously scouting around the country to detect savvy entrepreneurs and capitalize on the opportunity to connect them to the US.
The country has a strong technical education system and a growing talent pool of engineers joining the workforce that become the fundamental infrastructure to create an innovative economy.
Locally incubated global success stories increase the investor appetite for Ukraine as the country becomes the next startup nation. The necessary components are falling into place to create tomorrow’s tech giants, Medium wrote.
