UBBC attended this week’s Tech Uk’s U.K- Ukraine Tech Bridge event. Tech Bridge is the platform that facilitates collaboration and support to Ukraine via the UK’s tech community through a digital trade agreement. It has been a successful initiative for both countries, enabling hybrid, seamless working between Ukraine to UK and global countries, with Ukraine’s tech sector growing 13% this year and offering much needed income and investment to the country.
Unsurprisingly, key growth sectors are Defence, Cyber and Fintech, Crypto and Healthtech as Ukraine is now one of the leading countries in these areas, with strong emergent innovation in AI, Robotics and blockchain. 2024 alone has seen global investment into Fintech of $52bn and the second half expects $32bn into AI for which UKR is well positioned to capitalise.
Sponsors included the UKR Ministry for digital transformation, UK’s International development, IT Ukraine, Tech Uk, Abt. Alex Bornyakov the deputy minister for Digital transformation said Ukraine is the most efficient ecosystem for development of tech businesses in the world and is confident they will reach their goals for the year ahead in AI, blockchain and through collaboration with UK. 300,000 people are employed in Tech UKR in 2,000 companies.
Tim Kay deputy chief scientific officer at UKDBT, and Andre Kolln deputy director of UKR early recovery dept FCDO said the work achieved in the last year includes building a tech ecosystem and sharing this between UK and UKR, tech access across the entire country in all sectors, supporting UKR’s resilience with partnerships and investments, development of new drone and bionic technologies and information modelling. Igor from the London chamber of commerce, said they are supporting startups and Ukrainian tech companies with basic, practical support in the UK helping navigate company and networking opportunities with introductions to Financial Services and other sectors. Inga from Palantir discussed use of data to plan civic responses to reconstruction and where and how best to allocate priority resources and investment in UKR, with a new modelling platform. In future this will enable reconstruction of smart cities, the infrastructure ecosystem and piloting of new planning techniques.
Overall, speakers from Ukraine IT expect to focus more on partnerships and collaboration with UK in both tech and non tech sectors, more skills training and development, as a significant shortage of AI skills and literacy globally and generally in UKR ( due to war), will slow expansion of the sector, expect UKR to interact with global companies now and in the future as their business internationalises, and further investment for both startups ( via City of London investors and USA ) and established companies wanting to modernise and look at sectors like Insurance and fintech and data.
UBBC can facilitate introductions to IT Ukraine who have representatives in UK for collaboration and investment across the tech sector, for those who want modernise their systems and product offers or invest in talented start-ups. Contact: A.goodall@ukrainebritainbusiness.org