This past Thursday, the Ukrainian investment fund Fison announced the winners of its startup contest. In addition to potentially receiving funding from Fison, the four winners will take part in UT GEM, a tech event dedicated to building and tightening ties between Ukraine and the USA. This event will take place on Sept. 18 in San Francisco.
The jury included two figures from the Ukrainian startup ecosystem – Denis Dovgopoliy, founder of the Growth UP business incubator, and Alexander Soroka, founder of the startup investment platform Startup.ua – as well as Rostislav Sedlachik, owner of the asset management firm PIO Global, and Ukraine Digital News chief editor Adrien Henni.
The winners are:
- Luckyprice.net, a generator of coupons and discounts designed to attract and retain customers on e-commerece sites (founder: Vlad Lishafay);
- 2event, a mobile social app for event organizers and attendees backed by business angel Yaroslav Maxymovych;
- HotelInPocket, a mobile app designed for hotels and B&Bs to provide their clients with a new level of social and marketing interaction (founder: Pavel Pochuyev);
- Traqli, a smart notification system that helps publishers build a personalized communications channel with their readers and generate revenues (founder: Alexey Chapko).
Patriotic notes
With Fison’s founder Dmitry Tomchuk in a blue suit and his wife Oksana in a fully yellow dress, patriotic notes were not absent from the cocktail reception, which was held in a top Kiyv (Kiev) hotel. “It may seem that now isn’t the right time for such parties with good wine and live music. But we believe that developing technologies in Ukraine is a step to the future – a future which we want to be happier and smarter for Ukraine than today,” Tomchuk wrote on his Facebook page.
“Ukraine’s main victories of tomorrow will come in the fields of intellectual development and innovation. Supporting startups is an effective way of supporting the country. This is our strength, and this is today’s victory,” Tomchuk concluded.
As reported last week by The Kyiv Post, three Ukrainian startups – Izzly, Publicfast, and Settle – will also be represented on Nov. 4-6 at Dublin’s Web Summit, having gone through a tough competitive process.
