A look at Ukraine's thriving tech sector amid war; National Bank of Ukraine: tech firms brought in $3.1B in revenue from January to May 2022, up from $2.5B YoY
David Segal / New York Times : Tweets: @dlepeska and @moatazr Tweets: David Lepeska / @dlepeska : Daryna Hameliak, who generates leads at Avenga, once hastily ended a sales call at her parents' home in Irpin because she heard missiles landing a few miles away. “What's really frustrating are the clients who work w/ Russian companies,” she said. https://www.nytimes.com/... Moataz Rashad / @moatazr : An interesting way to help if you're open to outsourcing! https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months into the invasion, Ukraine's tech sector is doing what looked impossible in March, when startups were mapping escape routes for refugees instead of shipping code: growing. The National Bank of Ukraine counts $3.1B in tech revenue for January–May 2022, up from $2.5B a year earlier.
The Times' portrait runs through Avenga, where lead-generation staffer Daryna Hameliak takes sales calls from Irpin with missiles landing miles away — and her sharpest frustration is clients who still work with Russian companies. That grievance ties Ukraine's gains directly to the mirror-image story of Russia's accelerating tech isolation.
First-order effects
- Avenga and its peers are closing deals from inside the war zone — staff like Hameliak generate leads through missile strikes near Irpin, making uninterrupted delivery the product being sold.
- The National Bank of Ukraine's figures confirm export tech kept generating hard currency through the invasion's first months, revenue untouched by damage to physical infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- Western buyers pulling away from vendors tied to Russian firms — exactly what Hameliak complains about — redirect outsourcing budgets toward Ukrainian teams just as Yandex and other Russian companies isolate from Western markets.
- Engineers unable or unwilling to leave the country have concentrated in Lviv's tech hub, preserving delivery capacity inside Ukraine rather than losing it to emigration.
Third-order effects
- Wartime resilience is becoming a durable operating model: later reporting found 500 of Kharkiv's 511 pre-war tech firms still running, suggesting dug-in, distributed operations can survive sustained attack.
- If the divergence holds, Eastern Europe's engineering market splits into two blocs — a battle-tested Ukrainian export sector and an increasingly cut-off Russian one — with client politics deciding which side gets the contracts.
The trend: War is stress-testing Ukraine's export-tech sector into a case study in distributed software delivery, with revenue growing under bombardment while Russia's tech industry isolates.