The publication NV amounted to rating of the richest IT entrepreneurs in Ukraine. The top spots were taken by businessmen focused on Western markets — Vlad Yatsenko, Dmytro Zaporozhets, and Taras Kitsmey and Yaroslav Lubinets of SoftServe.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 37.3 billion, 7.5 thousand employees
Vlad Yatsenko is the most successful Ukrainian IT businessman today, co-founder of Revolut, a fintech company that has been offering customers the opportunity to use cards, engage in stock trading, cryptocurrency exchange, and ATM transactions through a mobile app for nine years.
Yatsenko, a native of Mykolaiv, has been living in London for many years, and the UK is a key market for Revolut, accounting for about a fifth of its business.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 18.7 billion, 2.1 thousand employees
In 2011, Dmytro Zaporozhets worked for an IT service company in his native Kharkiv. He had to use Microsoft’s GitHub service to do his work. The entrepreneur found it inconvenient, so he developed a similar product with fewer restrictions for internal use and called it GitLab. This is how the open source platform for managing Git repositories (data archives) was born. It allows software development professionals to integrate workflows in a single system and work together on a product remotely.
A year later, the Dutchman Sid Sibrandi joined Zaporozhets with a proposal to monetize and scale the technical solution. In 2018, GitLab became a «unicorn» with a capitalization of $1.1 billion, and in 2021, it went public. Thus, Zaporozhets’s «child» raised more than $800 million, and its capitalization grew to $15 billion.
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, GitLab stopped selling in Russia and Belarus.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 18.5 billion, 11 thousand employees
Taras Kitsmey and his partners, all graduate students of Lviv Polytechnic, including Yaroslav Lyubinets, founded SoftServe in Lviv in 1993. At the time, it was one of the first outsourcing companies in the country.
SoftServe operates in the field of software development and consulting services. Not only in Ukraine, but also in the EU, the USA, Canada, Latin America, Singapore, and the UAE.
In early 2024, SoftServe joined an international consortium that will develop technological solutions for construction on the Moon as part of the NASA program.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 14.3 billion, 1.3 thousand employees
The world’s most famous brands, such as Skechers, Calvin Klein, Under Armour, Puma, Adidas, Jimmy Choo, Nespresso, Campari Group, and many others, have become clients of Astound Commerce. Its founders, Ukrainians Ilya Vinogradsky, Roman Martynenko, and Igor Gorin, spent most of their lives in the United States, where they founded their company in 2000. The IT Ukraine Association has named Astound Commerce the world’s largest e-commerce firm, having launched more than 400 e-commerce sites since its inception. «From research and strategy to marketing and technical support, we build long-term relationships with brands to drive sustainable growth» — This is how Astound Commerce describes its activities on its corporate website.
In addition to the United States, the company has offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Colombia, India, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 12.3 billion, 2 thousand employees
ELEKS has been around as long as independent Ukraine: the company was founded in 1991 by Oleksiy Skrypnyk Sr., his wife Yevheniia, and son Oleksiy Skrypnyk Jr. to fulfill orders from energy companies. Today, this family-owned company is represented in 13 countries and provides software development, consulting, and quality control services.
According to The Global Outsourcing-2022 rating by the IAOP, the company is among the top 100 outsourcing companies in the world.
The company’s developments have been used in Hollywood, in particular on the set of the blockbuster films Quantum of Solace and Spider-Man, and in applications for automating the activities of medical institutions, such as the Doctor Eleks information system.
On February 23, 2022, the day before the full-scale Russian invasion, 57-year-old Skrypnyk Jr. died suddenly.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 11.3 billion, 3.3 thousand employees
Oleksandr Konotopskyi, the founder of Ajax Systems, studied at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, majoring in telecommunication systems and networks. The future entrepreneur started working in his third year: among other things, he sold Chinese alarm systems. Their quality was poor, so in 2009 Konotopsky decided to set up his own production of such systems.
Ajax was registered in 2011, and its expansion in Ukraine began from that moment. However, in two or three years, due to the instability in the country and the outbreak of war, the company stepped up its development in the global market, attracting portfolio investors.
Today, Ajax Systems is Europe’s largest manufacturer of security systems with smart home capabilities. The company has plants in Ukraine and Turkey. In total, Ajax has 2.5 million users in 187 markets.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 10.1 billion, 3.9 thousand employees
Kharkiv was once the home of Victoria Livshits, and California became home to her IT company Grid Dynamics.
Livshits moved to the United States many years ago and founded Grid Dynamics in 2006. The company specializes in providing digital transformation services, in particular for retailers, as well as players in the financial and technology markets. Livshits’ team is considered one of the world leaders in this field, and its clients include such global giants as Google, PayPal, Visa, Raymond James, Tesla, etc.
Grid Dynamics has offices in 13 countries — in the UK, the Netherlands, Mexico, Switzerland, India, Poland, Moldova, and Ukraine — Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro. Four years ago, the company went public with a market capitalization of $898 million.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 7.8 billion, 2.2 thousand employees
Founded in Lviv by Andriy Pavliv and Dmytro Kosarev, N-iX has been developing software for almost anything for over 20 years. Its specialists in offices in 25 countries across Europe and the Americas are engaged in cloud technologies, data analytics, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and more. N-iX’s portfolio includes projects created for 350 clients in manufacturing, logistics, telecommunications, fintech, retail, energy, healthcare, Agritech, and Ed-tech. Among the customers are Bosch, Siemens, and e-bay. N-iX, along with a dozen or so other Ukrainian companies, is regularly included in the world’s top 100 outsourcers, compiled by the international association IAOP.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 6.8 billion, 1 thousand employees
Natalia Anyon has been living in the United States for almost 30 years, and for the last 21 of them, the former Ukrainian citizen has owned and operated Svitla Systems, a software development company she founded that was named one of the world’s top 100 outsourcers by the IAOP.
Svitla’s projects, which enable customers to carry out their own transformation using digital, cloud, data, and other technologies, are concentrated mainly in the United States and Europe. Among Anion & Co.’s clients are representatives of various industries, and the most well-known are payment terminal manufacturer Ingenico.
Svitla has offices in California, Kyiv, as well as in some Latin American countries and even India.
Revenue in 2023: UAH 5.8 billion, 850 employees
Trinetix was founded in 2011 by Ukrainian IT professionals Andriy Ivanov and Alexander Strozhemin. The latter is still the company’s CEO.
Strozhemin has been working in the IT business for over 25 years and previously ran the game localization and sound production studio Plantation Studio. However, the global financial and economic crisis of 2008 made its own adjustments, and he had to switch to developing mobile applications and augmented reality solutions for Ukrainian retail. At that time, it was not mainstream, but American customers paid attention to the developers.
Trinetix is now a non-public service company with about 2 thousand completed projects. In August 2023, its minority stake was acquired by the Hypra venture fund of Igor Pertsia and Dmitry Volkonsky, which could give the business a new impetus for development.
The owners of the service company SPD Technology, Bohdan Khaliapin and Oleksandr Sadovskyi (UAH 0.7 billion in official revenue); Oleksiy Glukhovsky (Matter Labs, UAH 0.7 billion); and Yaroslav Azhniuk, Andriy Klen, and Oleksandr Neskin (Petcube, UAH 0.5 billion), came close to the top 30, but did not make it into the ranking.
