Ukraine startup ecosystem
The directory currently lists 44 organisations across 2 cities.
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INSCIENCE Conference 2026
Ukraine's largest popular-science and deep-tech conference, with 50+ speakers from 15+ countries, held in person in Kyiv despite wartime conditions. Relevant for deep-tech and science-driven founders looking for research collaboration and talent.
IT Arena 2026
Ukraine's largest tech conference held at Lviv's Arena convention center, attracting 3,000+ developers, founders, and investors from across CEE. Features startup pitching competitions, tech talks on AI, product management, and deep tech, plus strong support for Ukrainian tech diaspora networking.
IT Ukraine Association
Industry association for Ukraine's IT sector, based at the Astarta Organic Business Centre on Yaroslavska street in Kyiv. It runs an IT Industry Development and Advocacy Center alongside the IT Ukraine Global programme, and organises its members into committees covering AgriTech, CyberTech, FinTech, EdTech and AI. It publishes research and annual reports, maintains an events calendar, and lists member IT companies and partners.
Kateryna Chernohorenko
Kateryna Chernohorenko served as Deputy Minister of Defence of Ukraine from 2023 to 2025, overseeing technology modernization and digital transformation within Ukraine's defense ministry during a period of active armed conflict. She is a prominent figure in Ukraine's defense-technology ecosystem and participates in events connecting military innovation with the broader tech industry and investment community.
Kyiv AI & Data Meetup (Summer 2026)
Monthly AI and data-science meetup in Kyiv with 200+ ML engineers, data scientists, and AI founders. July edition focuses on LLM applications and RAG architectures in Ukrainian startups. Free. One of the best ways to connect with Kyiv's deep ML talent pool outside of conference season.
Kyiv International Economic Forum
Non-profit organiser of the Kyiv International Economic Forum (KIEF), one of the largest annual economic forums in Eastern Europe. Since 2015 it has gathered business leaders, policymakers and international delegations to debate Ukraine's economic strategy, investment climate and post-war reconstruction.
Kyiv International Economic Forum 2026 (October 2026)
One of the largest international economic forums in Eastern Europe, bringing together business leaders, government officials and civil society to discuss Ukraine's economic development, reconstruction, investment and global integration. The 11th edition takes place at the Parkovyi Congress Center in Kyiv with keynotes, panel discussions and high-level networking.
Kyiv IT Outsourcing Forum 2026
A long-running in-person forum by Lemberg Tech Business School, with tracks on outsourcing business and sales and marketing, 25+ lectures, and around 300 participants. Relevant for service-business and agency founders focused on sales, delivery, and international client growth.
Kyiv Miltech Conference 2026
Kyiv Miltech Conference is a Ukrainian defense-technology gathering that brings together military end-users, defense-tech startups, manufacturers, investors and policymakers to align frontline needs with industry capabilities and available funding. The 2026 edition features five themed tracks covering business, product development, AI applications, sales strategies and startup showcases.
Lemberg Tech Business School (LemBS)
Lemberg Tech Business School (LemBS) is a Ukrainian educational and conference organization founded in 2009 in Lviv, dedicated to growing the IT industry through mini-MBA programs, specialized schools, and annual technology conferences. LemBS organizes events including AI Day, PM Day, and the IT Outsourcing Forum, and serves as the primary organizer of the Kyiv Miltech Conference, which connects Ukrainian military technology innovators with industry, the state, and investors.
Lidia Smetana
Ukrainian entrepreneur and founder of the One By One brand, building a consumer business in Ukraine. She is an announced speaker at the Forbes Entrepreneurs Forum 2026 in Kyiv.
Lviv IT Arena Side Events 2026
A series of curated meetups, company visits, and investor dinners organized on the sidelines of the main Lviv IT Arena conference. Smaller and more intimate than the main event, these side events are where much of the actual deal-making and hiring-relationship building happens. Most are free with RSVP; some invite-only.
MacPaw
MacPaw is a Kyiv-headquartered software company that built one of the largest independent Mac-only software businesses in the world, with tens of millions of users across its portfolio. Its flagship products include CleanMyMac (the most widely used macOS cleanup and maintenance utility), Setapp (a subscription bundle that gives users access to a curated catalog of more than 240 paid Mac and iOS apps for a flat monthly fee), ClearVPN, and Gemini. Founded in 2008 by Oleksandr Kosovan, the company has remained profitable and mostly bootstrapped, and has become one of the most culturally important tech employers in Ukraine — doubly so since February 2022, when MacPaw kept its Kyiv engineering organization running through the full-scale Russian invasion, set up a dedicated foundation for war relief, and used its in-house research lab (MacPaw R&D) to build open-source tools for the war effort. For the directory, MacPaw is the canonical Ukrainian consumer-software story and a reminder that not every successful European software company looks like a VC-backed SaaS rocket.
Mate Academy
Online IT education platform founded in 2015 teaching programming and tech roles, with an income-share agreement model where graduates pay a percentage of salary after getting hired.
Petcube
Pet-tech company founded in Kyiv in 2012 making interactive pet cameras with treat dispensers, GPS trackers and AI safety alerts, plus a Petcube Care subscription and online vet service.
Preply
Preply is a Ukrainian-founded online tutoring marketplace that matches learners with one-on-one language tutors through a search-and-book flow, a subscription-based lesson plan, and an in-browser classroom that handles video, shared docs, homework, and scheduling. Founded in 2012 in Kyiv by Kirill Bigai, Dmytro Voloshyn, and Serge Lukyanov, Preply now serves millions of learners and tens of thousands of tutors across more than 180 countries, with particular strength in English, Spanish, French, German, and — increasingly — business-skills subjects beyond pure language. The company has raised over USD 120 million from investors including Owl Ventures, Hoxton Ventures, and Point Nine, and officially relocated its headquarters to Barcelona in 2023 while keeping significant engineering operations in Kyiv. Preply is a canonical example of Ukrainian B2C SaaS that became genuinely global and represents a rare European challenger to Cambly, italki, and other US-led language-tutoring marketplaces.
Promova
Language-learning platform with an app, tutoring and conversation clubs covering 12+ languages, adding AI-powered speaking practice and pronunciation feedback. Founded in Kyiv; over 23M downloads.
Reface
Reface is a Kyiv-founded generative-AI company that built one of the first globally viral face-swap and deepfake consumer apps, and has since evolved into a broader synthetic-media content platform. The original Reface app lets users swap their face into short video clips, memes, and GIFs in seconds, and briefly became one of the most downloaded mobile apps in the world in 2020, holding top-5 app-store positions in dozens of countries. The team, built around a group of Ukrainian ML researchers led by Roman Mogylnyi, Dima Shvets, Oles Petriv, and others, turned that viral moment into a real company: Reface Labs now ships multiple consumer AI entertainment products, licenses its face-animation and identity-transfer tech into enterprise creative pipelines, and has contributed to industry initiatives on responsible deepfake disclosure. It is one of the best examples of Ukraine's consumer-AI export capability and a useful counterpoint in the synthetic-media conversation to enterprise tools like Respeecher.
Respeecher
Overview: Respeecher is a cutting-edge AI voice synthesis startup that enables one person's voice to be transformed into the voice of another specific person, with uncanny realism. In other words, it's known for its voice cloning technology. Respeecher's system takes in an actor or user's speech and outputs audio that sounds like a target voice - be it a famous actor, a historical figure, or anyone for whom it has trained a model. This technology has huge applications in entertainment: filmmakers can revive voices of actors from years past, game developers can have characters speak in iconic voices, and creators can produce content where, say, a celebrity appears to narrate (with permission). What makes Respeecher stand out is the high fidelity of the cloned voices - they are nearly indistinguishable from the real person, capturing emotion and intonation accurately. Respeecher provides its tech via a software interface; typically, a voice model is trained on recordings of the target voice, and then a voice actor provides performance which is converted. Importantly, Respeecher emphasizes ethical use: it requires consent from the voice owners and has gained a reputation for an "ethics-first" approach in the emerging synthetic media field. Founding Story (2018): Respeecher was founded in February 2018 in Kyiv, Ukraine by Alex Serdiuk, Dmytro Bielievtsov, and Grant Reaber. Serdiuk and Bielievtsov are Ukrainian, and Reaber is an American speech technologist - the trio met through mutual research interests in speech processing. They realized that recent advances in deep learning could make high-quality voice conversion possible, and they set out to create a system far beyond the rudimentary voice changers of the past. In 2018-2019, they went through the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Accelerator (powered by Techstars) in the US, which gave them industry connections. Early on, Respeecher got a lucky break: it was approached to work on a high-profile but secret project - which turned out to be Lucasfilm's The Mandalorian (Season 2 finale in 2020). The task was to recreate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker as he would have sounded in the 1980s, using Mark Hamill's old recordings. Respeecher delivered successfully, astonishing Hollywood sound engineers. This successful debut put Respeecher on the map in the film industry. In subsequent months, they also worked on a Super Bowl commercial voicing Vince Lombardi (AI-cloned from archival audio). The Ukrainian team, working under NDA, built these groundbreaking demos which then led to word-of-mouth referrals in Hollywood. Product and Use Cases: Respeecher's core product is delivered as a service to content creators. A client provides audio of the target voice (e.g., recordings of a person) and Respeecher trains a custom voice model. Then the client (often a voice actor or the person themselves) provides the new dialogue, which Respeecher's system converts into the target's voice. One notable use case was the documentary short film "In Event of Moon Disaster" - Respeecher recreated President Nixon's voice to simulate him reading a speech that was written in case Apollo 11 failed, and this project won an Emmy Award in 2021 for Outstanding Interactive Media (Respeecher's team was credited for the voice work). Another big use case: Darth Vader's voice in 2022's Obi-Wan Kenobi series - James Earl Jones, aged 91, could no longer perform with the same power, so Lucasfilm used Respeecher to generate Vader's lines using Jones' archival voice data. This was done with Jones's consent (he effectively authorized the AI recreation of his iconic voice). The result was so good that audiences thought Jones had recorded the lines himself. Outside of film/TV, Respeecher has been used in video games (e.g., to recreate voices of deceased voice actors so characters can return), and in music - in 2022, it enabled artist Aloe Blacc to perform a song where his voice was converted to sound like the late Avicii's voice, as a tribute. Researchers and archivists have also shown interest in using it to restore voices for people who lost theirs (like throat cancer patients), although that's still experimental. Traction and Achievements: Though a B2B company, Respeecher gained public fame because of the high-profile nature of its projects. By 2022, virtually every Star Wars fan and many industry professionals had heard of Respeecher due to media coverage of its involvement in resurrecting Luke Skywalker's youthful voice and Darth Vader's classic tones. The company has a relatively small number of clients (dozens of studios, game companies, etc.), but each project is high value. Its technology earned it an Engineering Emmy Award in 2021, and it won TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield (audience choice) at CES in 2020. In terms of funding, Respeecher raised about $1.5M in early 2020 (around the Techstars time), and as of 2021 it had raised over $3M in total from investors including Techstars, ff Venture Capital, and Acrobator Ventures. The team remained fairly lean (under 50 people) but comprised specialized AI researchers and sound engineers. Financially, Respeecher's revenue grew with each Hollywood contract; while not public, one can infer that by 2022 it was profitable or close, given the repeat work from Disney/Lucasfilm and others. One of Respeecher's achievements is also on the ethical front: in 2023 it was one of ten companies (alongside OpenAI and TikTok) to sign the Partnership on AI's framework for responsible media, committing to practices like obtaining consent, watermarking AI content, etc. This proactive stance has made them a trusted partner in an area often seen with suspicion (deepfakes). The war in Ukraine did pose a challenge - much of Respeecher's team was Kyiv-based, and during the Russian invasion in Feb 2022, the team amazingly continued working (the Obi-Wan Kenobi Vader voice project was completed in the spring of 2022 while Kyiv was under threat). This dedication further earned them respect in the industry. Key Partnerships: Respeecher's notable partnerships are with major studios like Disney/Lucasfilm, and with game studios such as CD Projekt Red (who used Respeecher in 2023 to voice a character in Cyberpunk 2077 in Polish, whose original actor had passed away). It also collaborated with the creative team of the documentary "Val" to recreate actor Val Kilmer's voice, which he lost due to cancer (Kilmer and his son provided the training data). Each successful partnership validates the tech and leads to more clients. On the academic side, Respeecher worked with medical research to explore giving people who lost their voice (e.g., ALS patients) a chance to speak in their own reconstructed voice - a heartwarming application of the tech. Future Outlook: Respeecher sits at the forefront of AI in media. The demand for voice cloning is likely to increase - whether to dubbing movies in a star's own voice across languages, bringing historical figures' voices to life for museums, or personal uses (with permission, someone might license their voice). The company's focus will be to maintain quality leadership as big players (like Microsoft or Google) also invest in voice AI. Respeecher's Ukrainian origin is a source of pride: it shows that despite adversity, Ukrainian tech can lead globally in innovation. The founders have expressed interest in eventually developing real-time voice conversion (currently it's not instant, it takes some processing time) and making the tech more accessible perhaps in creator tools. But they tread carefully to avoid misuse. In summary, Respeecher is a Ukrainian deep-tech startup that achieved what was once sci-fi - lending voices across time and space - and has done so responsibly. By powering some of Hollywood's most iconic moments with AI, it has cemented itself as a trailblazer in synthetic audio. As long as movies and games want to push creative boundaries, Respeecher's technology will likely be in the credits, helping the impossible become possible in voice. Sources: en.wikipedia.org, failory.com, techcrunch.com, youtube.com.
Restream
Restream is a Ukrainian-founded live-streaming platform that lets creators, brands, and event organizers broadcast a single video feed simultaneously to more than thirty destinations — YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, X, and dozens of others — while managing a unified chat, analytics, and recording layer across all of them. Founded in 2015 by Alexander Khuda and Andrii Surzhynskyi, the product removed one of the most painful operational blockers for independent broadcasters (having to pick a single platform at the expense of every other audience) and became a go-to tool for podcasters, gamers, educators, and B2B marketers running webinars at scale. Restream raised venture funding from Insight Partners and others, and relocated its commercial operations to Texas while keeping engineering in Kyiv. It is one of the most globally adopted pieces of creator-economy infrastructure to come out of Ukraine.
