Lviv IT Arena 2025

Ukraine’s Tech Resilience at IT Arena 2025

Author: Stefan Schandera, ua.ventures

ua.ventures returned to Lviv for the third time — where defense innovation, AI, and entrepreneurial energy define the future of Ukraine’s (and quite possibly, Europe’s) tech scene.

Key takeaways:

Ukraine’s tech sectors are professionalizing at record speed — with shorter innovation cycles and growing organizational maturity.
Venture capital is flowing, particularly into defense tech, where urgency meets opportunity.
AI and microelectronics are expanding beyond software into core industrial and strategic applications.
Defense innovation dominates, but the hype dynamic is becoming visible — rapid growth, fast funding, and early market saturation.
EU institutions in R&D and innovation appear out of sync, showing administrative inertia that contrasts sharply with Ukraine’s pragmatic innovation drive.

When ua.ventures attended the IT Arena 2025 in Lviv for the third time since 2023, the atmosphere felt both familiar and transformed. The annual event — now attracting over 6,000 participants at Lviv Arena Stadium — has evolved from a classic IT conference into a showcase of Ukraine’s national tech resilience.

Across the board, Ukraine’s tech sectors are professionalizing at remarkable speed — both organizationally and technologically. Innovation cycles are shortening dramatically, and venture capital has become increasingly available, especially in the defense domain, where investment appetite and urgency align. The EU institutions in R&D and innovation, by contrast — at least from what we could observe anecdotally in conversations and panels — seem to be operating on a different planet entirely.

This year’s edition placed an unmistakable emphasis on AI, cybersecurity, and defense innovation — and it’s clear that Ukraine’s tech ecosystem is no longer merely adapting to war conditions but actively shaping the technologies of tomorrow.

Defense-Tech: Acceleration and Maturity

Compared to 2023 and 2024, the defense-tech segment has reached an entirely new level of sophistication — in record time. From swarm intelligence and mesh communication networks to encrypted, autonomous drone systems, the shift toward offline-capable, AI-assisted autonomy is profound. Many of these projects now operate at the intersection of military utility and deep-tech research, a field once dominated by global players.

However, with this momentum comes a noticeable hype dynamic — rapid scaling, quick funding rounds, and valuations that reflect more ambition than maturity. It’s a sign of vitality, but also of a market racing ahead of its regulatory and industrial infrastructure.

For more on this trend, please read our article “What Europe’s Defense-Tech Inflection Point Looks Like on the Ground” with notes from the Defense Tech Valley Summit in Lviv (September 2025).

Lviv IT Arena 2025 with Lviv Arena stadium, bus, and Russian fake drone

Picture: russian decoy drone — a flyable model designed to trigger and deplete expensive air-defense systems, displayed outside Lviv Arena Stadium (© ua.ventures 2025)

Beyond Defense: AI, Software, and the Microelectronics Push

While defense dominated the headlines, Ukraine’s traditional IT strength in software engineering remains a solid backbone. Yet a new layer is forming: microelectronics and embedded systems are emerging as strategic fields, particularly for greater tech independence. AI, too, has moved from buzzword to broad application — powering solutions for education, fintech, and government services, and increasingly seen as a lever against Ukraine’s own talent and workforce shortages.

Missing Green — and Missing Ukraine’s Applied Research DNA

One notable absence this year: sustainability and green innovation. While the EU continues — for good reasons that we don’t intend to question — to champion “green transition,” the theme played virtually no role at IT Arena — understandable in wartime Ukraine, where resilience and defense naturally take precedence. “Green” appeared only as a subtext to energy autonomy or system redundancy.

More surprising to us was a panel on R&D that — in our opinion — badly failed to reflect Ukraine’s vibrant applied-research landscape. Despite the strong hint in the session’s title ("R&DNA of Ukraine"), the EU representative on the panel still managed to focus narrowly on EU programs and procedural funding mechanisms — perfectly echoing Europe’s enduring preference for process over output.

Fortunately, the panelist from the Baltic states offered a more grounded counterpoint — sharing sharp insights into how EU funding frameworks can sometimes trigger the wrong development incentives, and how innovative ecosystems in smaller EU countries have learned to navigate and correct these distortions.

One hopes this is not just one more sign that Ukraine will inherit the EU’s administrative inertia rather than its innovation spirit. Of course, this was only one anecdotal episode — there are at least as many tough, solution-oriented EU managers driving real progress.

The EU has, in fact, provided strong and tangible support for Ukraine’s research and innovation sector — for example through initiatives like Seeds of Bravery (https://seedsofbravery.eu), which actively funds Ukrainian science and startup projects, as well as through numerous joint research programs such as Horizon Europe.

Lviv IT Arena 2025 with participant strolling through the floors of the venue along a sign providing direction to the Tech Stage

Picture © ua.ventures 2025

ua.ventures Side Event: How to Raise your First 100k from Angel Investors

As in 2023, ua.ventures co-hosted a side event at IT Arena, connecting founders and investors across Ukraine and Germany. This year’s event took place at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv — hosted by Angel One, moderated by Christoph Raethke of Angels of Deutschland, and co-organized by Angels of Deutschland, Angel One, and ua.ventures.

The format was intentionally modest but refreshing in its tone: no classic pitch sessions, no startup showmanship. Instead, Ukrainian founders directly challenged the business angels — “What can you actually do? Why are you doing this at all?” — prompting unusually honest and insightful discussions about motives, expectations, and impact. Christoph Raethke’s moderation (and session design), marked by deliberately provocative questions, made the dialogue both intense and constructive.

The session’s focus remained clear: bridging angel investment cultures and exploring how Ukrainian startups can align with both Ukrainian and Western funding logic while preserving their own innovation DNA.

Lviv IT Arena 2025 with side event How to raise your first 100k at Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv

Pitch to the Beat

Another memorable highlight was “Pitch to the Beat 2.0” — a creative, high-energy pitch format organized by UVCA together with Czech N1 Ventures and Kyiv-based iHUB, and supported by the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Ukraine. Participants came from across Europe, the US, and Israel — a rare mix that reflected how Ukraine’s startup scene continues to attract genuine international curiosity and solidarity.

Held in a small Lviv comedy venue, it blended fun, competition, and music: teams pitched in rap or performance form, turning investor outreach into a vivid display of creativity, confidence, and resilience. Beyond the entertainment value, it showed how an ecosystem under pressure can still foster genuine cross-border collaboration — and how humor and lightness remain essential ingredients of innovation, even in wartime. Great job, Ondrej, Dmytro, and teams!

Lviv IT Arena 2025 side event Pitch to the Beat with winners on the floor

Finally

The IT Arena 2025 once again proved that Ukraine’s tech ecosystem continues to defy gravity. While defense innovation naturally dominates, the country’s digital and entrepreneurial energy extends far beyond it. What remains crucial is balance — ensuring that speed and hype are matched by sustainability and strategic depth.

For ua.ventures, Lviv remains more than a tech destination. It is a mirror of a nation’s resilience — and a testing ground for how Europe’s future innovation story might be rewritten from its eastern edge.

Lviv felt calm, with only one air alarm during the entire week — yet the war was never far away: funeral processions passing through the city, soldiers returning from training to the front, reminders of the ongoing cost behind Ukraine’s resilience.

We’ll be back in 2026 — hopefully we won’t meet Ukrainian soldiers at the border again, on their way back to the frontlines.

Lviv IT Arena 2025 with Lviv Arena stadium

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