French CEO of Unit.City Dominique Piotet, 51, describes himself as a “tech rebel” who arrived in Ukraine looking for a challenge.
The 25-hectare inner-city site that includes a not-for-profit education academy, fablabs and office spaces for tech companies proved worthy of Piotet’s ambitions since he was appointed CEO of the site in 2019.
The park now hosts 110 companies with 3,000 employees and 1,000 students studying in programming schools.
Ukraine’s IT is globally recognized. It brings $5 billion a year to the Ukrainian economy, yet this sector lacks a proper ecosystem to fully develop.
Unit.City is the answer, according to Piotet. It grows at a quick pace, but he wants to go even further and create a large-scale smart city
experiment.
“We want to build the city of the future,” he told the Kyiv Post on Sept. 5, in his office right in the heart of the tech hub in Kyiv.
Ukrainian Silicon Valley
Upon his arrival in 2019, Piotet found in Ukraine what he felt when he left France for the U.S. in 2004 – a land of opportunity.
Before taking his post at Unit.City, Piotet worked in the tech sector in San Francisco, “the heaven of tech at the time,” he said.
After launching a digital strategy company called “Rebellion lab,” which was successful enough to have offices in New York, Paris and Shanghai, he sold it.
“I wanted a big challenge to take me out from my comfort zone,” he said, deploring the change of mindset in San Francisco after Facebook settled there in 2017.
“There was not enough creativity, it became too institutional,” he said, “it lacked the spirit of entrepreneurship and I was bored.”
When he took over Unit.City, which was founded in 2017 by Ukrainian millionaire Vasyl Khmelnytsky as an innovation park to teach programmers and rent offices to tech companies, he decided to make it a large ecosystem to develop tech startups.
He said it was “the chance of a lifetime” to move to a country he did not know other than its strong, young and ambitious tech community.
The project is only at 10% of its growth, he said, and his aim is to make it a real “smart city” in the city of Kyiv.
Upon completion, he wants to make it a hub where 30,000 people could work and live, with two schools, a hotel, a hospital, and restaurants where tech would help people at every level of their life.
“We’re building a city dedicated to people in tech and innovation where they can create something, which wouldn’t be (in) the U.S. nor Germany,” he said.
But building such a city takes big investments, he said.
Investments and strategy
The project is mostly funded by Khmelnytsky’s holding company UFuture Investment Group, which also develops the same kind of hubs in Kharkiv and Lviv.
The real estate developer KAN Development also takes part in the project, but Piotet said that to continue building Unit.City, the hub needs financing, and the European Investment Bank (EIB) recently agreed to take part in the project.
It agreed to lend 50 million euros to finance the construction project that aims to make Unit.City one of the biggest industrial parks in Central and Eastern Europe, the bank reported on July 1.
According to the EIB, the project will also create 549 full-time and 2,400 part-time jobs and will indirectly support the employment around Unit.City.
Piotet said that thanks to this agreement, finances are guaranteed for the next three years, and seven more buildings will appear until 2022.
He said he committed to the EIB to make it a green hub, to reuse rainwater and use sustainable materials, as well as focus on solar energy rather than fossil ones.
Investors claim it could become one of the biggest innovation ecosystems for tech companies in Central and Eastern Europe, a key point for Piotet, who wants to open the hub to international big players.
He said this ecosystem should be solid inside and internationally oriented, because a startup built in Ukraine needs to find a market abroad, and attract foreign investors.
He wants more big companies such as Facebook or Google, but they should be convinced that Ukraine is a good place for business and opportunities.
Challenges
Piotet acknowledged that attracting investors in such a hybrid project wasn’t easy.
“It’s a real estate project, but also a long-term ecosystem, and it takes good communication skills to make it attractive,” he said.
He also said Unit.City is facing a transportation issue. Being in the city implies having access to transport infrastructure such as metro stations, which are far from Unit. City, despite its implementation in the heart of Kyiv.
Existing metro stations are at least one-kilometer from the structure, which makes it complicated for people to come without their cars, and contradicts the idea of a “green city.”
Piotet said he is in discussion with the Kyiv city administration, to help solve such issues.
He is also aware of the looming local elections in Ukraine on Oct. 25, which might bring another team at the mayor’s office in Kyiv, and thus political changes.
Such political changes could put discussions with the city’s administration at risk, but Piotet added that Unit.City can only exist as a long-term ecosystem if it is politically independent.
Being self-sufficient is the key to independence, he said, as well as avoiding politics.
He said Unit.City does not receive any money from the government, which allows it to be neutral.
“A tech ecosystem must be independent of politics, and we want to be neutral,” he said.
However, he does believe in e-government where every paperwork is digitalized, and the question of building a smart city raises the issue of the kind of governance it follows, especially in a city where everyone’s data is potentially collected on a daily basis.
The ethical problem of building a free city while collecting data is a complex one, he said. He added that giving data should be a free choice, with a full understanding of its consequences, and humans should not be the product of a smart city.
Piotet even envisions that Unit.City will have its own mayor.
“With up to 30,000 people, we will need a mayor or at least a structure, and we are still thinking about it.”
Piotet said the solution could reside in giving priority to privacy, and giving the possibility to such citizens to reverse agreements about handing over their data.
Even though this challenge won’t appear at least for another three years, he already put much thought into it.
“When you create a city, you have a vision. Ours is around liberty, equality, fraternity.”
“Maybe that’s the French touch?” he said.
