“Six reasons to invest in startups from Ukraine.” 

That’s an article featured on TechCrunch this week.

An author, Oleksandr Yaroshenko, argues that Ukrainian IT companies have demonstrated their resilience and ability to deliver outstanding results amid the worst of challenges.

And from my personal experience of running a tech startup during the most challenging months, I can attest he’s 200% right. At YouScan, we’ve recently released so many product improvements that we’re well behind schedule in announcing them! All that while simultaneously caring about the safety of the team, actively volunteering, etc.

It is just one of his multiple points that make Ukraine a thriving hub for future unicorns – the article is worth reading in full (I’ll link it in the comment). 

One of the notable points that he also makes is an abundance of tech talent – and while that’s also true, I’d add “quality”, not only quantity. 

For that reason, some folks have even called Ukraine “a secret weapon of Silicon Valley.” Many startups from the US have been running their R&D in Ukraine for years now.

Our software engineers and AI experts are truly talented – that’s why, for example, at YouScan, with a relatively small team, we’ve been able to develop a world-class image recognition stack in-house. Our tests showed that in many cases, it provides better accuracy than Google’s computer vision, for example (!).

That’s why our cloud infrastructure, which ingests and runs sophisticated AI-powered analysis of 500M texts and images daily (!), is times more cost-effective than other companies have been able to develop (we have some industry data points to compare!).

I can go on, but.. the bottom line is that startups with R&D in Ukraine are uber cool, and that’s just the beginning.