We live in the days of the rapid technological development and reformation of the world as we know it. It is the time of the brave and the ambitious, the time of the innovators, risk-takers and mold-breakers. It is the time of startups.
Nowadays, Ukraine Startup Map has 397 startups and the country becomes the world’s IT hub, where digital business is developing at enormous speed. In Ukraine, numerous high-quality digital products are created. In this article, we will tell you about the most noteworthy Ukrainian startups, who already shown themselves to be the outstanding figures of the modern business world. Without further due, here they are.
Grammarly Allset Ajax Systems Attendify Competera
MacPaw PromoRepublic Depositphotos YouScan Invisible.io
People.ai Petcube Preply Looksery Readdle
Restream Senstone Mobalytics SolarGaps
SenStone
There are smart bracelets and smartwatches, so why can’t fancy jewelry be smart as well? A startup from Kyiv, called SenStone came up with an outstanding idea of a jewel that translates its owner’s voice to text. This text is organized and stored to the mobile device or if your phone is out of reach, the jewel’s internal memory can save up to two hours of voice.
SenStone is a new way of taking digital notes and staying stylish. There is a SenStone app both for iOS and Android. In the application, you can edit the notes which are saved from your voice, categorize them, create reminders and share your notes.
Without any doubt, this wearable will be of great help to people who experience forgetfulness, who are often distracted or who multitask a lot. With SenStone, you won’t forget your best ideas anymore. As for now, SenStone team is preparing for its Kickstarter campaign, after which it plans to sell its product at about $120 per piece at the end of 2016- the beginning of 2017.
Petcube
Petcube is another amazing startup, whose creators are Ukrainians. Titled the best European hardware startup of 2014, Petcube released three products so far, Petcube Camera, Petcube Play and Petcube Bites.
Kickstarter campaign for the first product gathered $200, 000 during the first fifteen days of the campaign. The project was initially financed by SOSventures. With Petcube, an interactive camera, you can watch your pets from anywhere you are and never have to be apart from them thanks to the amazing functions of Petcube Play and Petcube Bites. The introduced technology aims at bringing pets and their owners closer even if they have to be separated by distance.
The extremely successful crowdfunding campaign gave the startup exceed all the expectations, and Petcube brought over 20,000 pets and their owners closer so far and gathered an impressive amount of investments – $3.79M. The iOS and Android apps for the product are developed in Kyiv, and the Petcube team works in three cities now, namely in Kyiv, San Fransisco and Shenzhen.
Mobalytics
The first Ukrainian startup in history which won the TechCrunch Disrupt in San Fransisco this year is Mobalytics, a personal game performance analytics that helps gamers to train and get better.
The startup won $50,000 at TechCrunch Disrupt and there is no information about further investments so far. Mobalytics estimates user’s in-game performance, defines your strengths and weaknesses and gives your advice on how to become a better player. Based on a game performance index, a diagram is created, in which users can see how they perform in eight areas like Fighting, Farming, Vision, Aggression, Survivability, Teamplay Consistency and Versatility. With Mobalytics, users can level up in their favorite games faster that they dreamt of doing.
TechCrunch says that since E-sports is an extremely promising market nowadays, Mobalytics is an encouraging company for it.
PromoRepublic
Recently, iPromoRepublic got 500,000 EUR from both Ukrainian and Finnish investors. The headquarters of the company is currently located in Helsinki, Southern Finland. According to Crunchbase, this startup received as much as $736,990 so far. Promo Republic created a service which helps small, medium business and marketers create content for the social networks.
This startup only entered the US market, but already managed to conquer hundreds of subscription clients. The service helps businesses and marketers with their everyday content marketing challenges, offering content based on events, holidays, trends and other topical issues. Promo Republic is for those businesses that cannot afford to hire a marketing agency for their promotion but want to grow and realize that marketing is crucial. It allows its users to manage their social media presence professionally.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a free writing app that highlights the examples of incorrect writing and suggests how to correct them. It is built by Ukrainian linguists and language lovers that did not require any external investments to create their top product.
Grammarly was created at the cost of the revenue, received from the sales of the company’s previous product. Now Grammarly is a worldwide known service, with a headquarters in San Francisco and an office in Kyiv, Ukraine. The service is licensed by over 600 leading corporations and universities.
Campus Technology gave Grammarly the platinum award in the Instructional Tools category this year. This smart checker is called the “world’s most accurate grammar checker” by Microsoft Word. Grammarly started with zero investors and a team of less than a hundred people. Now, the followers of this service amount to 7 million in all of the social channels combined and the fanbase of the tool is expanding rapidly. With Grammarly, checking your grammar is fun, quick and easy like never before.
SolarGaps
Since 2015, SolarGaps has been striving to make energy free and accessible for everyone, so these guys invented blinds that can convert sunlight into electricity. Thanks to the special PV (photovoltaic) structures built into the device, the company has developed an energy distribution method that will provide power to offices, houses, and cities.
When you’ll install SolarGaps in the house, the blinds would be able to produce 100 kW of electricity per month and if you’ll hang the “green” blinds on the facade of a building, it will produce 1.5 times more electricity.
Looksery
Looksery is a mobile app acquired by Snapchat for 80 million to change its appearance and video in real-time. The application has gained widespread acceptance of users and media coverage in Western markets, in particular, Vogue and Techcrunch called it “a clever application that lets you change your facial features”, which helped them make substantial profits. And this happened in just a year. Now the Looksery team consists of Ukrainian mathematical geniuses developing new modifications of selfie masks and filters for Snap.
Afterword
Those were five Ukrainian startups you should not overlook. All of them started as original and outstanding ideas that gained success, publicity, and fundings that licked all creation. Now, stay tuned, Ukraine has more to offer!
