The past few months have seen the emergence of several initiatives aimed at raising Ukraine’s visibility on the global high-tech map – Ukraine Digital News not being the least. Another one is Mappedinua, an English-language, user-generated map of the Ukrainian digital and IT scene launched in mid-August.
Apparently inspired by Israeli start-up map MappedInIsrael, Mappedinua is the brainchild of Ilia Kenigshtein, a tech entrepreneur and investor splitting his life between Ukraine and Israel, and Ivan Pasichnik, the CEO of Ecois, an internationally-oriented Ukrainian startup.
The map displays startups, investors, community centers, accelerators, IT outsourcing companies and R&D centers across the country. Unsurprisingly, Kyiv (Kiev), the capital, shows the highest concentration with 145 IT-related entities, but such advanced cities as Dnipropetrovsk (Dnepropetrovsk), Lviv (Lvov) and Odessa are also highlighted with around 20 entities in each.
One month after launch, the map is still far from being exhaustive, with less than 300 entities displayed in total across the whole country – including just four investors, nine R&D centers and 101 startups.
The initiative is clearly oriented towards international investors and partners. “When a Western firm will look for an outsourcing service provider, or a big venture will want to invest in a Ukrainian startup (which we hope will be the case), they will have the possibility to see all of us,” local tech blog AIN.UA quoted Kenigshtein as saying.
In the current circumstances, attracting international attention to Ukrainian startups might, however, be a challenge. When asked how he intended to promote his initiative internationally, Kenigshtein told Ukraine Digital News that he had “great relations with TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, [Israeli news site] YNet, Geektime, etc.” but declined to elaborate further.
