“Building a startup nation is a new Ukrainian dream” by Andrey Kolodyuk

Andrey Kolodyuk, Founder and Managing Partner of AVentures, has shared his opinion about trends and tendencies of startup and IT industries in Ukraine in article “Building a startup nation is a new Ukrainian dream” for KyivPost.

“Now Ukraine can be compared to Israel, well-known for its booming IT sector, but even more – for the difficult geopolitical situation and the ongoing war threat. Like Israel, Ukraine has limited internal software market. Over 90 percent of its product companies target the global market. We have over 2,000 startups, about 100 global R&D centers, more than 500 outsourcing firms and 100 e-commerce companies. All of them add up to over $5 billion industry’s volume worth as of late 2014. The figure could be higher if it wasn’t for the economic downturn.” – says Andrey.

Full article you can read here

Andrey Kolodyuk is a serial entrepreneur, venture capital investor and a friend of Kyiv School of Economics. Together with George Logush, the President of KSE, he takes places in Supervisory board of UVCA and Brain Basket Foundation.

He started his entrepreneurial career in New York. In 1994, he founded an IT investment firm, which financed its first project, Unitrade. In 2001, he reorganized Ukrinvestcom into a venture capital firm, AVentures. Nowadays Andrey Kolodyuk has founded, invested into and developed over 10 companies in IT, telecom, internet and media. From 2001 to 2005, Andrey Kolodyuk was Chair of the Telecom Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine. In 2008 Andrey was elected as the Young Global Leader in the the World Economic Forum. AVentures invested in 5 companies for the last year, such as AR23D, nuPSYS, Coppertino, CheckiO, StarWind Software. VC fund coinvests with ABRT, Vegas Fund, Almaz Capital, Torben Majaard (founder of Ciklum) and other investors.