Ukrainian Startup Awards 2019 - The Fastest, The Biggest, The Most Impactful

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Ukrainian Startup Awards 2019 recognized the most impactful activists and fastest-growing Ukrainian startups in 9 categories. Whom did the community nominate, who won, and what does it mean for Ukrainian startup ecosystem for 2020? Read all about what happened at the awards ceremony at LIFT99 Kyiv Hub on January 24th, 2020!

Why Startup Awards?
Ukrainian startup ecosystem is growing fast. A few years ago, Ukraine was mostly known for its amazing dev power but more and more startups are now recognizing their Ukrainian roots, more and more founders are eager to get started right here in Ukraine!

This means that more startups are being born, but it also means that the local founders can really learn from each other, share their already existing know-how and expertise, and create a wider pool of valuable global contacts by collaborating. LIFT99 is in Kyiv to support these goals and initiating the annual Ukrainian Startup Awards is a great way to spark new conversations, as well as bring visibility for the mega-fast-growing rising stars, and draw the global attention to Ukraine and its potential.

Some highlights? We’re really excited to see that the founders of big Ukrainian startups that have already made it global, like Grammarly (Giving Back Powerhouse 2019) and Restream (Revenue Hack of 2019), are participating at the community-level events, giving back to the ecosystem and supporting the next generation of founders. The importance of role-models can’t be underestimated!

We also saw amazing indicators of growth from Ukrainian startups in 2019, in real hardcore numbers - there are startups in this list here that have grown their ARR in 2019 by 500%, doubled their team-size from 400 to 800, raised millions of $$.

Investment scene is a sensitive topic in Ukraine. Which is why we need to keep the conversation going. It was mentioned on stage that raising a seed-round in Ukraine is quite feasible nowadays, escpecially since some of the experienced Ukrainain founders have turned to making angel investments themselves and are giving back to the community this way; but the next rounds will probably already come from outside of Ukraine. And more often than not, directed to the foreign entities of the startup, despite their Ukrainian roots. How can we change that?

To discuss the highlights further, we led the awards ceremony in with a panel discussion. The focus was to offer context and actionable takeaways around the topics assembled and the names listed in them. Because the 9 categories are not random - they were put together to spark valuable discussions.

Some of the categories are educational in nature, encouraging startups to not get stuck because of lack of funds (Bootstrap Badger of 2019); or when they are raising money, how to do it in a really smart way, with the right people (Wise Wallet of 2019). Other categories are looking at a much bigger picture - like what is the real impact startups are having on humanity and the future of our planet;

The topic of the panel was "Summary of 2019 and plans for 2020: Market expansions, investments, and scaling for Ukrainian startups,” and presented Anna Polishchuk (CEO at Lalafo), Stas Matvienko (CEO at Allset), Roman Apostol (CEO at Mate Academy), and Pavel Karagjaur (VP of Growth at Bolt). The discussion was moderated by Ragnar Sass, CEO at LIFT99.

Read more about the Startup Awards in our blog - https://www.lift99.co/blog/ukrainian-startup-awards-2019

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