The upcoming Pioneers Festival is one the major event for entrepreneurship and future technologies. During May 24-25, investment team of Digital Future will join the event to significantly expand its investment footprint in Western Europe. The team is inspired by the recent results of the first AI Hackathon in Kyiv and has broad prospective on finding interesting tech ideals on a global scale.
“We aim to extensively network to find prospective partners as well as promising startups, so we already scheduled our first meetings. It is also interesting for us to look for the opportunities that can help add value to our portfolio companies. In addition, we want to verify some of our business hypothesis, so we are getting ready to meet several international AI startups. We will not be surprised if we will meet some very promising projects that hail from Ukraine”, mentions Victor Kompaneets, Investment Lead at Digital Future.
Pioneers Festival is the annual tech event where startups, investors, and innovators shape the future of technologies. This year Pioneers will get together the community of 2,500 startup founders, executives, and investors in Vienna to facilitates profound business relationships between tech innovators.
Digital Future and The App Solutions teams participated in Collision Conference that took place during April 26-28 in New Orleans, USA. Having returned from New Orleans, Oleksii Vitchenko, CEO of Digital Future shared his view about the event: «It has become a tradition. Every time we go abroad, we get acquainted with very promising startups from Ukraine, which, among other things, can show off a good traction. At Web Summit in Dublin, we met an amazing startup with roots from Ukraine, operating on the global market (as i recently mentioned in my post at Ain post). The same story happened with us at the Collision. We met with a number of interesting Ukrainian projects. And if all goes well, we will close a deal in the nearest future. It is always nice to meet fellows on global scale events. On the other hand, it is sad, that our IT entrepreneurs leave. However, their motivation is clear – they are looking for more developed ecosystems to develop their projects.”
“It is not relevant to compare the investment climate in Ukraine and in the USA. Therefore, it is reasonable that the entrepreneurs go to the United States to search for angels, VC, and customers”, contunies Oleksii.
However, there is also a reverse trend. Some Ukrainian IT entrepreneurs come back home. For instance, Olexander Mykhailenko, whose startup Jeapie was bought by Canadian Mobify as well as Oleg Bilozor, the founder of Replyapp.io, working in the US market. Both of them could benefit from money investments received Digital Future. Digital Future is also focused on the global market and already launched a number of international initiatives, but continues to operate from its headquoter in Kyiv.
“It might sound overconfident, but we want to influence Ukrainian IT space as much as possible. We intend to make improvements that can help transform the industry in general as well as IT outsourcing and tech products development fields. By supporting the tech industry we will create a stronger ecosystem in which Ukrainian programmers and entrepreneurs will be able to create their startups, receive investments and grow successful businesses. So, they will want to stay here”, states Oleksii.