A year on from Russia's brutal invasion, Ukraine's VC community is calling for its European partners to continue stepping up to the plate.
That's according to Andrey Kolodyuk, board chairman of Ukraine's Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, established nine years ago after the Donbas was plundered with Moscow's covert assistance.
Kolodyuk voiced his gratitude to peers in the rest of the continent for efforts to get Ukraine the scale-up resources it needs, despite the destruction of many international financing links.
"Thank you so much for all your support, from the humanitarian to the different actions that have been done to support Ukraine and startups.
"And secondly, the best way to help Ukraine is to coalesce with our ecosystem, and everybody's welcome to do so. Let's team up and do something good for the sake of us. Let's do it together - Ukraine has the international projects now in order to ."
Aside from a few weeks early in the war, the ecosystem's ability to plan for the future was never really in doubt, Kolodyuk added.
"The industry has been developed from 2014. We did agile for eight years on how to continue to work, obviously, we didn't expect there to be a full-scale war.
"That's why there are a lot of effort has been developed. And as you know the Ukrainian IT industry, is not only resilient. But in the first few weeks after the invasion last year, billions of dollars from Ukrainian business, the majority of which is IT business, has been transferred to help Ukraine.
"In order for that to happen, as we speak we have a number of programmes that help commercial companies grow and perform."
Ukraine's entrepreneurs have had to toil through conditions unimaginable to most of us. And Kolodyuk attributes their determination to a survival mode of action, only available in times of dire crisis.
Their efforts and skills could soon cement Ukraine's future role as a CEE "tech tiger".
Kolodyuk said: "I believe in some years ahead, Ukraine will be even bigger than Israel, in terms of the ecosystem and the actual numbers. And all of this happened, because the energy of the entrepreneurs became so enormously innovative, because you need to innovate, because everybody is now in this survival mode."
This article is part of Tech.eu's highlighting of remarkable Ukrainian startups on the one-year anniversary of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Read more ...
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