Ukrainian IT investment: the 2019 record and what followed
May 27, 2020Ukrainian tech companies raised a record amount of investment in 2019. Here is what drove it, and how funding, rankings and exports have changed since.
2019: a record year built on three deals
According to DealBook of Ukraine 2020, the annual review of the Ukrainian venture market by the investment firm AVentures Capital, tech companies with Ukrainian roots raised $544 million in 2019, up from $323 million in 2018. It was the first year the total passed half a billion dollars. The report's breakdown chart gives a slightly different total, $542 million.
Three late-stage rounds accounted for 77% of the money. All three went to companies with Ukrainian roots that are headquartered abroad and rely on research and development teams in Ukraine: GitLab's $268 million Series E in September 2019, led by Goldman Sachs and ICONIQ Capital at a $2.75 billion valuation; Grammarly's $90 million round in October 2019, led by General Catalyst; and People.ai's $60 million Series C in May 2019, led by ICONIQ Capital with Andreessen Horowitz taking part.
Most of this capital came from international funds such as ICONIQ Capital, General Catalyst and Goldman Sachs, and DealBook found that foreign investors also provided most of the Seed and Series A financing.
Early-stage funding stayed flat: Seed and Series A rounds totaled $46 million in 2019, against $49 million in 2018. The record came from a few mature companies, not from a jump in new startups.
How Ukraine ranks as a startup ecosystem
StartupBlink's annual Global Startup Ecosystem Index scores countries and cities on three components: quantity of startup activity, its quality, and the business environment. In the 2020 edition Ukraine rose two places to 29th, entering the global top 30, and Kyiv climbed two places to 32nd among cities, eighth in Europe.
Ukraine slipped to 34th in 2021, with Kyiv 48th. After the full-scale invasion it fell to 50th in 2022, and Kyiv to 93rd. The trend has since turned: Ukraine was 49th in 2023 (Kyiv 77th), 46th in 2024 and 42nd in 2025, when Kyiv rose seven places to 68th. The 2026 index put Ukraine 43rd and Kyiv 74th.
2021 to 2025: a peak, a war and a recovery
Investment kept growing after 2019. GitLab listed on Nasdaq in October 2021, Grammarly raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation in November 2021, and DealBook recorded a new high of $832 million for that year.
Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022 cut the total to $236 million in 2022 and $209 million in 2023. It recovered to $462 million in 2024 and $498 million in 2025, when Fintech-IT Group, the developer of monobank, and the language-learning platform Preply became unicorns. Defense tech grew fastest, raising more than $129 million in 2025, and AI companies attracted about $302 million against $104 million for startups without AI.
The state built new tools along the way. Diia.City, a special legal and tax regime for IT companies with a 5% personal income tax rate, launched on February 8, 2022 and now has more than 4,600 resident companies. Brave1, launched in April 2023 to connect defense-tech developers with the military, issued the most grants of any provider in 2024, worth $40 million. IT services exports, the industry's main source of revenue, fell in 2023 and 2024 and grew again in 2025 to $6.66 billion, according to the Lviv IT Cluster.
What this means for companies hiring Ukrainian teams
The talent pool remains large: the IT Ukraine Association counted more than 305,000 tech professionals in September 2026, and our earlier article on Ukraine's IT workforce and salaries gives a 2020 snapshot. The war has made continuity part of due diligence. When choosing a Ukrainian partner, 4K-Soft included, ask how the team handles power cuts and connectivity, whether engineers are spread across several cities or countries, how code, documentation and access are kept so someone else can take over, and which legal entity signs the contract and owns the intellectual property.
