Close to 400 investors, entrepreneurs and government officials gathered this week at the Omni King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto, nearly two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, for two days of talks on rebuilding the country still under attack. 

“The best way to help Ukraine is to invest in Ukraine,” Oleksandr Bornyakov, the country’s deputy minister of digital transformation told The Logic on Wednesday at the Rebuild Ukraine business conference.

Ukraine has a vibrant tech startup ecosystem, Bornyakov said, but it’s been strained since the war began. He estimates that 60,000 people from the information technology sector alone fled the country in the months after Russia’s invasion. Others have volunteered or been drafted into the military. “Those are huge challenges for the industry from a talent perspective,” he said. 

The global decline in venture capital investing is another barrier, said Hanna Shuvalova, principal at Ukrainian private equity firm Horizon Capital, during a panel discussion Wednesday. “If you add the risks related to the Ukrainian war, then the situation becomes even more complicated.” 

Despite the talent and capital crunch, innovation hasn’t stopped. Bornyakov said that 700 companies have in six months applied for Brave1, a funding development initiative for companies with innovations that can help with the war effort. “Some of those companies didn’t exist a year ago,” Bornyakov said onstage, “and now they have revenue [of] more than $50 million. 

Bornyakov has been touting the country’s tech sector through events like this one since summer 2022. A trade mission last year with a group of founders ended with about $50 million in funding commitments for Ukrainian startups, said Bornyakov.

Last year, the country’s government launched Advantage Ukraine, a platform that facilitates foreign investments in startups there. So far, about 160 projects have been funded, Ihor Markevych, innovation and tech lead for the initiative, told The Logic, though to this point no Canadians have invested through Advantage Ukraine. 

A core message of Wednesday’s event: appeals for funding aren’t just about charity; investing can benefit Canada, too. This country can learn from the cybersecurity expertise Ukraine is developing by thwarting online attacks every day, said Daly Brown,co-founder of Metropolitan AI, an Ottawa-based smart-city firm. Governments can emulate Ukraine’s digital passport, which helps residents file taxes and avoid Russian troops, said Éric Caire, minister of cybersecurity and digital technology with the Québec government. 

Shuvalova, for one, has no doubt investors will leap at the opportunities in Ukraine when hostilities finally cease. “But now, when the access to capital is limited,” she said, “it’s important to invest in Ukrainian companies without waiting for the war to be over.”