Ukraine’s Tech Scene Keeps Growing

This September, I traveled to Ukraine to visit my software development team in Odessa. The Black Sea Summit, one of Ukraine’s largest tech events, coincided with my stay, so I jumped at the opportunity to get to know the local tech community a little better.

This year, the Black Sea Summit was held for the second time. The event attracted over 700 tech experts, and featured a number of sessions and workshops. The ones dedicated to inspiration and growth were my favorites.

More than 30 world-renowned speakers shared the latest industry trends with the audience and showcased the best practices to attract investment and foster innovation. I was very excited to listen to Wendy Dent, Mark Tyurell, Andrew Kolodjuk, Rich Strombuk — the  Technology Pioneers who have greatly influenced the business and society according to the World Economic Forum.

Patrick Kramer, the Chief Cyborg Officer of Digiwell, was one of the headliners. During his presentation, Patrick implanted a chip in a hand of one of the volunteers from the audience, who, as a result, became the first Ukrainian cyborg. The chip can store payment details and contact information, and even open locks without a key.

While international speakers were talking about new technologies, young Ukrainian teams were presenting their startups. Ukraine is home to Europe’s largest tech talent pool with its 74 000 specialists, and the fourth largest supplier of IT professionals in the world, so I was very interested in seeing what kind of cool new tech is coming to life here. These are the six startups that won the first round of Seedstars Ukraine at the Grow Stage: BioSens, a portable device for quick food diagnostics; Viosk, a tool that allows to create video adverts automatically; Protokol, a service for decoding speech and converting speech into text; DeviceVoice, an IoT solution for the vending industry; Glash, a video-stabilization technology that runs on smartphones and action cameras, and allows to create extreme sport videos; and Gorilla, a service for ordering food from different restaurants.

The BioSens developers brought the first prototype of their device to the conference. The invention is easy to use: just put in the product such as milk or juice on a special biosensor and in 15 minutes view the information about the concentration of bacteria and mycotoxins in the product on your smartphone. Speed is the main advantage of this new tech since the same type of analysis can take up to two weeks in a lab.

Of course, such a great conference wouldn’t have taken place without the support of multiple sponsors, and I take great pride in the fact that HYS Enterprise, our software development partner, was among them. Kudos to the entire Black Sea SummIT team for all the work they put in to make the event happen!

Jan Willem Tromp