The Ukrainian IT industry, as well as the investment area, made significant strides in 2021. Grammarly was the first decacorn the industry received. Its total amount of venture investments exceeded $1 billion in 2021. In addition, Ukrainian venture funds reached a new trajectory by entering the American market. Adventures Lab Founding Partner Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev) and other investors speak about outstanding US projects the Ukrainian funds invested in 2021.
AI solutions for marketers
The Ukrainian funds Digital Future and Adventures Lab invested in Narrative BI last November, a B2B advanced analytics platform. The San Francisco-based startup could raise a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round. In the round, Ukrainian companies were also joined by US funds.
The founder of Narrative BI, Michael Rumiantsau, believes broad analytics plays a crucial role in making decisions instead of intuition. This project represents a no-code analytics platform for Marketing/Growth/Sales teams. It enables them to automatically generate data insights based on company statistics. Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev), Founding Partner at Adventures Lab, notes that the personal qualities of the startup founder played a crucial role in picking up this startup for investing. This year, the project creators are working on launching a full-fledged version.
AI communicate with customers
The Ukrainian fund Digital Future invested in the Ukraine/US project Outloud.ai, an AI-based retail platform that enables users to automate voice communication with customers. This project includes several American restaurant chains as clients. Burger King is among them. The Digital Future Alex Vitchenko founder notices that Outloud.ai integrates a better interaction between a client and a service by implementing voice analysis technology.
Real estate service in the USA
The Ukrainian fund Pragmatech Ventures invested $1 million in an American startup Propertymate, at the beginning of last year. The project was established in 2018 by Ukrainians, Bohdan Hnatkovsky and Sofia Vyshnevska. It has offices in New York, Austin, Kyiv, and Lviv.
Propertymate is a platform where buyers can find all information about primary real estate in new construction homes. The service charges a commission from a transaction only with clients who have carried out a purchase.
The platform is used by major players in the American real estate market like Compass, Keller Williams, and eXp Realty. Its client base incorporates Pulte Homes, D.R. Horton, Taylor Morrison, and Lennar. Over the past two years, the total number of clients has risen 65 times. This project works currently in Austin. It is planning to scale up in Houston and Dallas in the nearest future.
Online notary services
Another American startup OneNotary got investments from some Ukrainian funds like Adventures Lab, U.Ventures, Digital Future, and domestic venture capital funds. It raised $1.75 million in investments last year. The project’s founder and CEO is Ivan Zinkov from Ukraine.
OneNotary is an online US notarization platform that allows one to certify documents remotely. Previously, online notarization was legal only in a few states. Currently, it has been adopted in 39 states. Ruslan Tymofieiev draws special attention to the high motivation of the project team. They strive to enter the global market.
AI assistance for developers
A Seattle-based startup, Spice AI, raised $1 million in investments from the Ukrainian venture fund TA Ventures and other foundations and angels from GitHub and Microsoft.
This platform allows developers to leverage integrated machine learning algorithms in applications. So, they can save time and effort in building software development. The founder is Luke Kim, who previously worked at Microsoft for 10 years.
