ProminentUkrainianstartups
Ukrainian programmers, entrepreneurs, and people with big ideas are already changing the world of technology today. Artificial intelligence training, worldwide job aggregator, and even personal gaming assistant! Ukrainians excite the world with their startups. Here are some of the most prominent Ukrainian startups.
DEPOSITPHOTOS is a content marketplace by Dmitry Sergeev from Kyiv that connects high-quality stock-photos authors with their buyers. Here you can find every image you want: from exclusive photos to vector illustrations. The project was started in 2009 from a little stock and became three years later the world’s fastest-growing photobank. The Depositphotos app is launched for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. Today it reaches more than 201 million images, videos, and sounds!
JOOBLE is one of the leading job search engines in the world among the sites of employment, according to SimilarWeb data. The project was funded in 2006 by Roman Prokofiev and Eugene Sobakarev. The motto of the company is ‘to help any person find a job.’ Today Jooble has more than 90 million visits per month. It’s represented in 71 countries and available in 25 languages.
LOOKSERY is an app startup company from Odesa by Victor Shaburov and Yurii Monastyrshyn. It helps to modify your face during recording videos or photos without any errors or delays! In a few seconds, you can correct your face deficiencies for a little or completely become Darth Vader. All you need is light and a good camera focus. Snapchat bought the startup for 150 million dollars in 2015 and used the Looksery facial recognition technology to photoshop video chats and messages in real-time. A year later, the company opened a new office in Kyiv to create new viral filters for Snapchat.
MACPAW is a Ukrainian software company that creates apps for macOS and iOS. It was founded in 2008 by Olexandr Kosovan while he was studying at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. The company’s main product is CleanMyMac. The app deletes the garbage from your Mac and optimizes it to work as you have just bought it. MacPaw says: ‘We make useful things unboring.’ MacBooks’ producer of applications has over 30 million users worldwide and claims that every 5th MacBook on Earth has at least 1 app by MacPaw.
MOBALYTICS is a personal gaming assistant that helps to perform better in favourite games. Don’t know why you are killed in GTA time by time or can’t find out the secret world in WoW? Mobalytics analyzes and improves the gamers’ performance by evaluating their skills and identifying the weak points. Bohdan Suchyk and Mykola Lobanov created a startup that now connects over 6 million gamers worldwide! In 2020, the company raised an $11,25 mln investment.
NEUROMATION believes that artificial intelligence can be useful. It is a startup by Maxim Prasolov and Constantine Goltsev that trained AI for improving its work. For example, to recognize things, classify and quickly find out information about them. Using Neuromation, different models of AI can be created. It can also improve the performance of other products based on AI, like cameras for facial identification, medical models for disease detection, industrial robots for manufacture.
PEOPLE.AI, Oleg Rohynskyy’s project, is designed to increase companies’ financial efficiency by using revenue intelligence technology. As the sales teams’ work is complex and time-consuming, the main trump card of the project is AI. Providing data-driven solutions helps to consider a large number of factors and predict the results of deals. In 2021, people.ai with a total valuation that exceeded $1 bln joined the Ukrainian unicorns club.
PETCUBE is a solution to the problem of communication between the owner and the animal at a distance! Alex Neskin, Andrey Klen, and Yaroslav Azhnyuk set a task back in 2012 – to entertain a dog so that it would not get bored without a human. And today, pets all over the world have continuous communication with their owners. Best hardware startup in Europe according to The Europas 2014 and top 3 dog cameras in the world in 2019! This small device conveys the love that your cat and dog miss so much when they are alone.
PREPLY is an online educational platform, created by Kirill Bigai, Serge Lukyanov and Dmytro Voloshyn. The platform brings together more than 49,000 tutors of any discipline, including those who teach over 50 languages. Do you have a desire to learn any language? Then this is a must-have! The site uses machine learning, constantly improving algorithms to select the best “sensei” for the student. Since 2012, the year of its foundation, the company is constantly evolving and even has its own video platform. By the way, during pandemic times, the number of lessons on Preply increased by 16%. Recently, the company raised $35 million and planned to double the team.
READDLE was founded back in 2000 by brothers Ihor and Denys Zhadanov. Are there any users of PDF Expert and Spark among us? Then you should know about them as a Ukrainian company that created these programs and challenged Adobe and Microsoft. Even Apple collaborated with Readdle to make it easy for all users to read books and browse files on the web and beyond. By now, the number of users that downloaded Readdle’s apps exceeded 150 million.
RESTREAM is about streaming, as you can guess. It is impossible to imagine the modern Internet without streaming. Alexander Khuda and Andrew Surzhynskyi, the founders of Restream, would agree. This is a convenient platform that allows streaming videos to several social networks – Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and more. The service allows the author to see reviews from all networks on one page. And a unique tool allows you to see all the necessary analytics about the audience. Among the latest success stories is their collaboration with LinkedIn, Typeform, World Health Organization, and raising $50 million of investment in 2020, which is the best result among Ukrainian startups last year.
VIEWDLE is a startup by Yegor Anchishkin and Yuriy Musatenko, who, back in 2006, predicted the need for technology to recognize people and objects in photos. The company was even noticed by Google then. And in 2012, the Ukrainian project was entirely bought by the giant corporation. Now it uses the technology Viewdle to improve Android’s augmented reality and face recognition in their projects. The purchase of the Ukrainian project by Google was a good sign for many programmers to create their own Ukrainian business. With good reason, Viewdle is believed to be one of the most successful Ukrainian startups to date.
All these projects started as ambitious startups from Ukraine, and today they are known all over the world. They are meant to simplify and make our lives better. What is the next Ukrainian startup that will change the world of technology? We do not know. But with all of the above, we can be sure that more and more amazing startups are on the way.
This list of startup companies does not constitute a ranking and is based on UkraineInvest Guide and Ukrainian Tech Ecosystem Overview 2020.
Kateryna Danylovych and Mariia Skuibyd
This list of startup companies does not constitute a ranking and is based
on UkraineInvest Guide and Ukrainian Tech Ecosystem Overview 2020.
Cover photo: Petcube