DUBLIN, Ireland – On the first week of November, the Irish capital greeted 42,000 people who came for the Web Summit conference for the last time. Starting next year, the event will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, where the authorities appear to have been more supportive to its needs.
This year’s summit, however, was as massive as ever, and attracted more than a dozen teams from Ukraine to come and show what they’ve been up to. We’ve taken a stroll around the stands in the overcrowded RDS Arena to meet Ukrainian startups that made it through the conference’s selection process.
An Odesa-based product company that employs about 60 people, KeepSolid is working on a budget-friendly VPN service VPN Unlimited, the CoreSign e-signature solution, and KeepSolid Phones. The latter is a mobile app that allows users to get a local phone number in virtually any country in just a few minutes.
This startup, which has been in stealth mode until about four months ago, targets enterprise clients that spend hundreds of thousands dollars monthly on cloud platforms. QRhythm, the team of which is distributed between Lviv and Stockholm, provides a load/pay balancing solution that starts and shuts down virtual machines of different kinds in order to save money and ensure the stability of the system.
Founded in Ukraine earlier this year, .io offers its clients a simple and understandable analytics system. Working mostly with e-commerce and media websites, .io claims to have more than 30 paying clients, including Forbes, McDonalds, Lenta.Ru and Kyivstar. The team told the Kyiv Post that the Web Summit brought the startup several new clients.
Best described as “Eventbrite for children-oriented events,” Kids in Town is a platform for email newsletters that will tell you where you can go with the kids over the weekend. The startup already works in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa and Lviv. Kids in Town founder Sergiy Belinski told the Kyiv Post that the immediate plans are to enter the Polish market and widen the coverage in Ukraine.
This Kyiv-based startup plans to become no less than the “GitHub for hardware teams.” A spin-off of an outsourcing firm DevEngineering, DIYZER offers a version control system that is compatible with the most popular prototyping tools. The project is still in the works, so the team came to Dublin to gather feedback from the hardware developers community.
Built by a team of young developers based in Cherkasy, LucidLMS is a WordPress plugin that allows to build an online course on your website in no time. The plugin is sold for $99 per website with a discount for multi-domain installations. The team currently targets the markets of North America.
This fintech startup based in Kyiv is a quick loans provider, offering its customers to borrow up to $500 in just eight minutes at an APR of 409%. The money comes to the customer’s bank card right immediately after the decision has been made. The startup has interesting expansion plans: the team is gearing up towards launching the service in Mexico.
The Footurum mobile app is for people who want to develop certain skills, which could be virtually anything, from marathon running to anger management. Launched in November, the app is, simply speaking, a platform that connects experts in certain areas to those who need their experience in order to learn something new.
Another fintech startup, Swipebank is a “branchless” bank, where everything is done online, through a mobile app. There’s still a real bank at the backend, although the team preferred not to tell which one until the app is launched. Funded on the pre-seed stage by FISON, SwipeBank plans to launch in beta by the end of the year.
Odesa-based team of 20 odd people is working on an event social network, which appears very well thought through and good-looking. Yeed works in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Dublin. The startup has been self-funded so far but is currently looking for a seed round to keep improving the application and support geographic expansion.
A movie social network at a very early stage of development, Dipolium has been founded by two students who met in KPI university in Kyiv. Both founders are pursuing a Master’s degree now, one in Kyiv and the other in the UK. The team wasn’t looking for funding or partnerships on the Web Summit, but rather came to gather feedback from real users.
The only hardware startup in the list, Kray Technologies builds cargo of different capabilities for business customers. The team names industries like agriculture and oil and gas among those where the drones could be used. Units in the works are much bigger than copters you’d normally see around, measuring a couple of meters in diameter and being able to deliver 20-30 kg of payload. The team from Kyiv and Lutsk targets markets outside Ukraine and currently has two functioning cargo drones.
The well-known Ukrainian startup headquartered in Odesa is a frequent guest at the Web Summit. The company works on a widely popular suite of apps for OS X and iOS, including PDF Office, PDF Expert, Scanner Pro, Spark, Calendars 5 and others.
Another successful startup from Ukraine, Attendify admitted that one of the reasons to come to the Web Summit was to offer the conference itself to work on its platform. The startup with offices in Kyiv and Palo Alto has developed a native app builder for events of any scale. Its customers include Google, Aol, Cisco, Philips and other major tech companies.
Freelance writer
Andrii Degeler can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT
coverage is sponsored by Looksery, Ciklum, Steltec Capital and SoftServe. The content is
independent of the donors.
