Three major venture capital funds, Moscow-based Runa Capital and Almaz Capital as well as Kiev-based TA Venture, in conjunction with BIONIC Hill innovation park, Ukraine’s first innovation park, are joining forces to establish the Global Technology Foundation (GTF).
Ukraine’s first grant fund specifically devoted to IT, the foundation will provide pre-seed stage grants and support for promising IT-related projects, aiming to facilitate the emergence of a local venture and hi-tech ecosystem in the country.
The founders are focused on incubating projects involving software, Internet, and mobile applications. Among priority areas are public/government services, education, communications and media, game apps, e-commerce, healthcare and medicine, and cloud computing, as well as financial software for banks and mobile devices.
The fund’s officials predict rapid growth in the country’s IT sector. Currently, IT-related activity accounts for just 0.5% of Ukraine’s GDP, and GTF expects that to increase more than five-fold, to between 2.5% and 3% of GDP, in the near future, with the Global Technology Fund itself making significant contributions to that growth.
Crystallizing IT projects
The fund’s typical allocation is UAH 240,000 (approximately $30,000) per project, and its officers plan to award approximately 10-12 grants per year. According to Runa Capital’s senior partner Serguei Beloussov, one of the GTF founders, “Despite the fact that there are many gifted developers and entrepreneurs here with the potential to create hi-tech businesses, there are still no centers for the crystallization of IT-related projects.”
While Beloussov’s fund, Runa Capital, operates globally, fully one-fifth of its current projects are located in or connected with Ukraine. “We wish there were more of them,” Beloussov added.
Viktoriya Tigipko, managing director of TA Venture and a member of the Global Technology Foundation’s Advisory Board, explained the motives behind launching GTF. “We want GTF to create an image of Ukraine as a country with a powerful IT industry,” she said.
“Ukraine has already a gained strong position in the world as one of the major outsourcing destinations, but it also has a huge potential to create its own competitive product companies. In the last couple of years, the IT market in Ukraine has grown up drastically, and more than half of that growth currently comes from the export of IT services,” Tigipko noted.
