Kyiv, Lviv, and then Poltava: the third startup city nobody had on the list

The ranking

Kyiv 19. Lviv 11. Poltava 7. Then a long flat tail — Lutsk and Rivne with two each, then two dozen cities with one company apiece.

The first two are not news. Kyiv is the capital and roughly a third of everything; Lviv has been the second city of Ukrainian tech for a decade and became the default relocation destination after 2022.

Poltava at seven is the anomaly. It is a city of around a quarter of a million people, it has never appeared on a Ukrainian tech map we have seen, and on our catalogue it is ahead of Odesa, Kharkiv and Dnipro — all substantially larger, all with longer technology histories.

The boring explanation, which is probably right

Before drawing any conclusion: seven companies out of 66 is a small number, and a catalogue like ours grows by referral. One well-connected founder in a city brings in three more. It would take very little for Poltava to be an artefact of who told whom about us.

We looked, and the seven are not one cluster. They are in four different sectors and none of the founders share a company history that we can find. That does not rule out a referral chain, but it makes the simplest explanation less comfortable than we expected.

The more interesting explanation

Poltava sits in the centre of the country, roughly equidistant from Kyiv and Kharkiv, far enough from the border to have been comparatively stable, and cheap. Since 2022 it has taken in a significant displaced population, including from Kharkiv — which was a genuine technology city before the war.

That is the pattern the whole tail of our geography data suggests. Ukrainian tech used to be four cities. Now it is thirty, because people moved and then kept working, and because remote work removed the reason to move back.

Half our catalogue is outside Kyiv and Lviv. Ten companies are Ukrainian teams operating from Poland, Spain, Estonia, Portugal, the US and Canada. If you are still sourcing Ukrainian deals by flying to Kyiv for a demo day, you are seeing less than half of it.

What we will be watching

Two questions we cannot answer yet and will revisit when the catalogue is larger.

• Does Poltava hold third place as the catalogue grows, or does it regress toward what its population would predict? Regression is the base case and we would say so.
• Do the relocated companies stay relocated? Several founders have told us they intend to return to Kharkiv. Whether that actually happens is the difference between a redistributed map and a temporarily displaced one.