Ukrainian startups in 2026: what 66 company files actually look like

The shape of the catalogue

Most writing about Ukrainian tech is about six companies. Grammarly, MacPaw, Readdle, GitLab, Ajax, Preply — the same names, in the same order, in every article. They are not representative. They are the exceptions that got big enough to be visible from abroad.

We built the catalogue to see the rest. A founder files their company, an analyst checks what can be checked, and the file goes live with the verified parts marked as verified. Sixty-six companies have been through that since October 2025.

That is a small number and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is not the Ukrainian market. It is the part of it that has been through our process, and it is already enough to show a distribution that does not match the one in the coverage.

Almost everyone is earlier than you think

Eighty-five percent of the catalogue is pre-seed or earlier. Six companies are at seed. Four describe themselves as growth stage.

The median ask across the whole catalogue is $175,000. The mean is $333,413, which tells you there are a handful of much larger asks pulling the average around — the usual reason to quote the median instead.

If you are an investor used to European seed, the number to sit with is $175,000. That is not a seed round in Berlin. It is closer to an angel cheque, and it is what a Ukrainian pre-seed company is typically asking to reach the milestone that would make a seed round possible.

Sectors: AI is here, but so is everything else

AI/ML is the largest named sector at nine companies. It is not a wave. It is roughly one in seven, sitting next to education, marketing tooling, SaaS and a long tail of everything else.

Below four companies: blockchain (3), healthcare (3), agritech (2), cleantech (2), sports (2), and one each in gaming, e-commerce, cybersecurity, transportation and IoT.

The spread between the top and bottom of that table is the part worth noticing. A fintech company on our catalogue asks for about 6.7 times what an edtech company asks for. Some of that is genuine capital intensity — payments infrastructure costs more to build than a course platform. Some of it is founders anchoring on what they have read that companies in their sector raise elsewhere.

Ten companies could not be placed in a named sector at all. That is our classification failing, not theirs, and it is the single largest bucket in the table.

Where they are

Kyiv is first with 19 companies and Lviv second with 11. Together they are 45% of the catalogue, which means 55% is somewhere else — across 30 cities in total.

Third place goes to Poltava, with seven companies. We did not expect that and we wrote about it separately. After that the distribution goes flat fast: Lutsk and Rivne with two each, then Odesa, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv, Mukachevo and a couple of dozen others with one apiece.

Ten of the 66 are Ukrainian companies operating from outside the country — four in Poland, two in Spain, and one each in Estonia, Portugal, the United States and Canada. They are on the catalogue because the team is Ukrainian and the work is Ukrainian, whatever the registered address says.

What this does not tell you

Three limits, stated plainly, because a distribution presented without them is worse than no distribution.

1. 1Self-selection. These are companies that chose to file. Founders who are heads-down and not raising are not here, and they are probably the better-run half of the market.
2. 2Ask is not raise. Every funding figure in this piece is what a founder is asking for. We do not publish closed rounds we cannot verify, so nothing here is a round size.
3. 3Sixty-six is small. Estimates of the Ukrainian tech company population run into the thousands. Treat everything above as a description of our catalogue, not a measurement of the market.

We will publish this again when the catalogue has doubled, with the same breakdowns, so the two are comparable. If the distribution moves, that will be worth more than this snapshot.