In August 2021, Oleksandr Konotopskyi's Ajax Systems reached the milestone of 1 million users who have installed a security system from the company.

Currently, more than 90% of Ajax Systems products are exported to 120 countries worldwide, with the primary markets including Middle East, Europe and Africa. It took 10 years for Konotopskyi to reach the first million users, with the company having been established in 2011. Taking into account that at the beginning of 2021, Ajax Systems produced more than 450,000 devices per month, the second million is not far away (a single system can comprise dozens of the devices).

There are thousands of security systems in the global market, so how did Konotopskyi manage to make the breakthrough with Ajax Systems? He says the company has dispelled the prejudice that security systems are something difficult and hard to master: to configure and operate an AJAX system, you need only a smartphone.

How much does Ajax Systems cost today? “I wouldn't sell it for $1 billion,” Konotopskyi said in an interview with LIGA.net at the end of 2020. The company is considering an IPO for 2023.

Almost all the planes in the aero clubs of the United Arab Emirates are made in Ukraine, says Yurii Yakovlev, Aeroprakt founder and aircraft designer. Currently, the planes made by the company are exported to more than 40 countries.

The company, established in Kyiv in 1991 by Yakovlev together with Oleg Litovchenko, another former employee of the state aircraft manufacturing group Antonov, now produces about a hundred light and ultralight airplanes a year. This makes the company the world's third in its industry. The flagship Aeroprakt products are the ultralight A-22 and A-32 models.

Speaking about the creations of his company, Yakovlev calls them “toys”. Those “toys” bring Aeroprakt at least $2.5 million a year in earnings.

“I am happy that I did not move to Moscow once - there is still no successful light aviation projects in Russia,” said Yakovlev in an interview with Ukrainer. “Right now we are defending the independence (of Ukraine), so I am in the right place at the right time."

Petcube is one of the most famous Ukrainian startups. It was founded in 2012 by Yaroslav Azhniuk, Oleksandr Neskin and Andrii Klen.

Petcube products are aimed at pet owners: they allow you to remotely monitor, talk and play (using a laser beam) with a cat or dog via a mobile app. At the time, this was an innovation in the market, ensuring the success of the company.

The company discloses neither the number of devices it manufactured, nor its financial results, although Petcube indicates that the startup reached profitability in 2020.

“We have a simple mission, to connect animals to the Internet and to give them a voice. The first of those objectives is about high-quality interactive communication with our pets when we are not around them. The second is about better understanding of animals through the analysis of large video data amounts created by recording them," says Andrii Klen.

When almost a 10.0 magnitude earthquake happened in California, it caused a violent tsunami. But Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson managed to conquer a 100-meter wave, saving his family and the rest of the city.

What helped the Hollywood superstar in his water feats? The Brig Eagle 780 rigid inflatable boat, produced at a factory near Kharkiv.

If you don't believe it, watch the action thriller San Andreas one more time. The Rock sails this boat for about half an hour there.

The film was released in the spring of 2015. Less than a year later, the BRIG boat manufacturing company from Dergachi, a town outside Kharkiv, entered the US market, making excited headlines in the industry publications all over the world.
BRIG is the same age as the independent Ukraine. The company was created by the brothers Viacheslav and Oleksandr Rodinov, both aviation engineers. In a 2016 comment for LIGA.net, Viacheslav spoke about their ambition to get ahead of the world leaders of the industry, such as France's Zodiac.

In 2019, the industry publication Motor Boat & Yachting wrote about the company from Dergachi, “BRIG isn't just the best-selling RIB brand (rigid inflatable boats, currently the fastest-growing shipbuilding segment, — LIGA.net) in Europe, it is also the largest RIB manufacturer in the world. Not bad for a Ukrainian company that emerged 25 years ago from the ashes of a former Soviet fighter jet factory.”

Ukrainian Beer Company (UBC) manufactures and installs refrigerators as well as beer storage and dispensing equipment. The company has achieved great success in its field.

A few years ago, UBC founder Igor Gumenny said they occupied 20% of the global market in some product categories.

In the early 1990s Gumenny, then a young lawyer, established the company in Kharkiv. At first, Ukrainian Beer Company supplied hops and malt to breweries. Then it began selling refrigeration equipment, eventually establishing its own manufacture.

In the late 1990s, UBC had its first offices in Canada, Europe and post-Soviet countries.

Currently, UBC has four factories in Ukraine (one in Vinnytsia, two in Kharkiv, and one near it), 26 branches all over the world, and over 5,000 employees. It operates in 7 business areas now. In addition to refrigerator manufacturing and distribution, the company designs and makes promotional materials, provides installation services for the food and processing industry, as well as offers equipment and process engineering and implementation services.

UBC has global ambitions: according to its website, it aims to become the world's No. 1 manufacturer of refrigeration equipment for the food industry.

“Titanic”, “Avatar", “Mission: Impossible” — these box-office hits, as well as thousands of others, have a Ukrainian contribution. They were filmed with the help of Autorobot, Cascade and Flight Head camera cranes, developed by the Kiev company Filmotechnik.

Ukrainian engineer and inventor Anatolii Kokush founded Filmotechnik in 1991, the last year of USSR existence. The same year, at a New York trade-show, the company displayed its Autorobot crane, which had no equals in the US market. Later, the Ukrainian invention became known under the “Russian Arm” name in the USA.

The engineering designs of Kokush caught the interest of Hollywood directors, especially for shooting action scenes, as the Autorobot crane could be installed on the roof of almost any vehicle. The remote-controlled crane and camera can smoothly rotate 360 degrees around the car, even if it is moving at a high speed.

The BetterMe apps family is included in the world's top 5 software products for fitness and health.

The apps were created as a result of an experiment by the Ukrainian holding company Genesis in 2016. The experiment proved to be very successful: “BetterMe was launched by Victoriia Repa. She joined us when she was 24, and in the course of her first couple of years with us, she really excelled. We decided to assign her to a project. It was just a test, to design three screens for our first fitness application. She did it, and we decided to create a separate business out of this,” recalls Genesis CEO Volodymyr Mnoholietnii.

Victoriia immediately focused on the North American market, with seven out of 10 Americans being overweight. She started with a Facebook page about healthy lifestyle, which gained an audience of 200,000 followers, even before the official release of the BetterMe app. The app took off as well, with 1.5 million downloads in a year, and 80 million in four years.

Later, the line-up was expanded with apps for men, for yoga, running, meditation, and others.

BetterMe paid off just two months after its release.

There is a village of Gorenka near Kyiv, where an unusual factory has been operating for seven years. It produces wooden 3D construction kits, puzzles and educational toys, 97% of which are exported to 85 world countries.

UGears secret is a deal with Disney: Ukrainian 3D toys are sold in almost all Disneylands of the world, via 700 branded stores.

Under the deal with a global giant, the UGears brand has stayed on the packaging. According to the company, Disney agreed to it for the first time in 22 years.

The idea of developing a wooden 3D construction kit occured to designer Denys Okhrimenko in 2013. Then he made the first versions in his own kitchen. The next year, he met Gennadii Shestak, who invested in the project and became its head. That's how UGears (Ukrainian Gears) startup was created. In 2017, Denys Okhrimenko sold his share in the company for UAH 9.4 million due to differences with Gennadii Shestak.

There is a Ukrainian product used by about every 1 in 50 adults on Earth. It's an app for replacing faces in videos, named Reface.

It took only 14 months for Reface to gain 100,000 million downloads, two to three times faster than for Snapchat or TikTok.

Reface uses a number of neural networks that can substitute your face in videos with DiCaprio, John Lennon or thousands of other celebrities in just a few blinks. Previously, it took weeks to create a deepfake like that, and Reface does it in seconds.

The history of Reface began in 2011, when three students of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy - Roman Mogylnyi, Yaroslav Boiko and Oles Petriv — founded their Neocortext startup for machine learning and visual content recognition. Later, Neocortext was renamed into Reflect, and the number of founders increased to seven. The startup was so good at replacing people's faces in photos that Elon Musk couldn't resist posting a “swapped” photo of Dwayne Johnson with his face. The app went viral right away.

Later the app, now capable of changing GIFs, was renamed to Doublicat. Finally, it was renamed to Reface, gaining the ability to change faces in videos.

The founders plan is to turn Reface into a large social network.

Grammarly is one of the four Ukrainian-origin “unicorns”, startups estimated at more than $1 billion.

It is based on an artificial intelligence system that knows English very well. The service provides users with recommendations for correcting errors and improving their texts.

Grammarly's success stems from a simple idea - a lot of people use written English, and almost everyone makes mistakes.

Grammarly was founded in 2009 by Maksym Lytvyn, Oleksii Shevchenko and Dmytro Lider. Grammarly has now long been a global company with headquarters in San Francisco. But the founders did not forget about Ukraine. In 2019, the company joined the CorrectUA #KyivNotKiev initiative - the Grammarly service began to recommend the correct English transliteration of Ukrainian city names (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernivtsi, Chernihiv, Kremenchuk, Lviv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and others).

In 2020, Grammarly launched an initiative to compose the first open-access annotated Grammatical Error Correction Corpus of the Ukrainian Language. It gives the Ukrainian scientific community more tools to work with in the field of natural language processing.

According to Dmytro Lider, their goal now is to make Grammarly available wherever written communication in English can take place.

The long-awaited innovation from the automaker Audi, the e-tron Q4 off-roader was released in 2021 with a unique augmented reality head-up display.
The product has been developed for over four years. And Audi is its first customer. The integration project of the product into Audi's platform began in 2018.

Thanks to the cooperation with the startup, Audi has surpassed its competitors, including Mercedes and VW. They also developed a similar technology, but it is less convenient compared to the Ukrainian one.

Apostera was founded by 12 like-minded people who worked together at Luxoft company, including Andriy Golubynsky, Viktor Sdobnikov and Olga Mirkina.

In 2017, the Ukrainians registered Apostera in Munich (Germany), as they aimed at the German market. However, they managed to sell the product to Audi at a trade-show in Las Vegas.

The successful project with Audi has given Apostera market recognition: the Ukrainians received contracts with four more car brands and made four preliminary agreements with “leaders of the premium segment of the German and American auto industry”.

“America, Europe, and Korea know us. We participate in almost all AR-related tenders issued by automakers,” the developers boasted in June 2021.

In the early 1990s, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of betting companies in Kyiv. But only one of them made it to the top league of world betting and grew to an estimated $1 billion - Parimatch. It was created in 1994 by Eduard Shvindlerman.

It is also the only Ukrainian company whose ambassadors are legends of world sports - boxer Mike Tyson, mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, FC Juventus, and others.

Why Parimatch of all the hundreds of competitors? In 2011, the company changed its shareholders, management team and strategy. The new head, Sergii Portnov, quickly transferred it to digital rails, not being afraid to invest huge marketing funds in a business that was outside the legal field in Ukraine.

Whereas 10 years ago Parimatch was hundreds of offline offices in five CIS countries, today it is an IT-based platform that accepts 5 billion monthly bids from 1 million customers on four continents.

Parimatch does not disclose its income, specifying only that the average bet size varies in different countries: in Africa it is $1, in Ukraine $5, and in the United Kingdom it's £20. But, if calculated only based on the minimum bid, it turns out that the company's income (5% of the total betting volume) would amount to $3 billion.

In the summer of 2021, Portnov said in an interview with BigMoney that the company is worth more than $1 billion.

Animagrad studio has created the highest-grossing Ukrainian cartoon “The Stolen Princess: Ruslan and Ludmila” (2018), which was distributed in more than 50 countries around the world. It was watched by about 2 million viewers globally, including in China. This is the first Ukrainian film to get into the Chinese film market.

And this is the first Ukrainian animated film with a $3.7 million budget.

Animagrad Studio, now part of FILM.UA Group, was founded in 2012.

 Animagrad's portfolio includes eight animation projects, including four children TV series, three full-length cartoons and one short. Only “The Stolen Princess” and a video dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the Great Famine in Ukraine, “Hungry Spirit”, have been released to the general public.

The most expected studio's premiere is the film “Mavka. The forest song”.

The work on “Mavka” has been underway since 2014. According to the founder of FILM.ua Sergii Sozanovskyi, the budget of the film will be about $6–8 million.

The release of “Mavka” has been postponed several times, and now it is expected in 2022. The distribution rights have already been sold in more than 20 countries.

People.ai was founded in 2016 by Oleg Rogynskyi, a native of Dnipro. This is an automated AI-based CRM system that increases the efficiency of sales departments.

It collects all possible data related to sales managers' performance, analyzes it, makes recommendations, and at the same time helps supervisors understand what is happening in the department, what sellers are doing. Managers do not have to enter all the data on their own, the system does it automatically.

In an interview with BigMoney, Rogynskyi said that after the introduction of People.ai, the revenue of some companies grows two to threefold. Despite the fact that the company keeps in secret how exactly its system works, companies like Red Hat, Lyft, Zoom, Dropbox, Zendesk, New Relic, and Splunk all have believed in Rogynskyi's “magic”.

In August 2021, People.ai became a “unicorn”, reaching $1 billion in capitalization.

Do you remember the 3D animation during Jamala's performance at the Eurovision song contest in 2016? It was created by the Ukrainian studio of innovative audiovisual (AV) technologies Front Pictures. But on-stage super effects are only part of the company's business. In addition, it does installations, dome systems, 3D mapping as well as projects for film and television industries. If you enter the largest planetarium in the UK or Korea, you will encounter Front Pictures technology there.

The company was founded in 2003 by former Leo Burnett advertising agency employees Yurii Kostenko, Vitalii Sliusarenko and Maksym Zaitsev. They started as a printing company, but very quickly the company moved to 3D visualization and immersive multimedia solutions. It was on their interactive media table (i.m.table) that Yevhen Filatov (The Maneken) created his music in 2008.

Since 2010, Front Pictures has been creating 3D mapping shows and installing its digital Fulldome systems. The company combines digital content and technology in its work. Its Screenberry media server is able to “stitch” parts of a video in order to seamlessly project it on a spherical surface.

The Jooble service aggregates job ads in 71 countries and is available in 24 languages. Jooble is one of the world's most popular online resources for recruiting software programmers (although it aggregates job ads in many other categories as well).

The startup had a unique business model: Jooble was the first to start charging not for posting an ad, but for clicks on it. The landmark decision was to enter the global market during the crisis of 2008-2009.

Jooble was founded in 2007 by Roman Prokofiev and Evgen Sobakarev, two friends who knew each other since high school.

Jooble is a global company with more than 500 employees, but its headquarters has remained in Ukraine. The company says it's the principled position of the company's founders.

Jooble's plans for the near future are to achieve a level of efficiency when employers and job seekers find each other within 24 hours. “To that end, we've launched a profile database as an alternative to lengthy resumes for both professionals and executives, as well as a digital recruiter, which is an AI-based system that recommends worthy candidates to employers," said Iryna Paliienko, CEO of Jooble Ukraine, while commenting on the company's future directions.

Every one in five MacBooks in the world has MacPaw applications installed. That is more than 20 million copies, all-in-all.

The company's greatest hit is the CleanMyMac program, written by MacPaw founder Oleksandr Kosovan when he was 21 years old. This made him a dollar millionaire even before graduating from university. But he did not stopped there. The Mac cleaning utility CleanMyMac has been the flagship product of the company for 13 years. MacPaw develops software for macOS and iOS.

It's product portfolio includes ClearVPN, Gemini (a duplicate finder), Hider, and Crypto for secure data encryption and storage. Since 2017, MacPaws operates the Setapp online service, an application store for Мac.

Kosovan says that last year he was offered to sell the company for $300 million. He refused, because money is not an end in itself for him.

In addition to MacPaw, Oleksandr Kosovan is also the founder of the SMRK investment fund. The companies which he and his partner Andrii Dovzhenko invested money in include Ajax Systems, Allset, Preply, AmazingHiring, Competera, and Kitcast.tv.

What unites HBO, Apple, Lacoste, Audi, as well as the bands Twenty One Pilots, Coldplay and ONUKA? All of them are clients of the Ukrainian production studio Radioactive Film (RF). The company was created in 1998 by Americans of Ukrainian origin Darko Skulskyi and Roman Kindrachu, along with their third partner Johann Wolf. Later, they were joined by Yevheniia Yatsuta, currently holding the executive producer position at the company.

It is safe to say that it was RF that “pulled” Ukraine into the global market of music video making and film production. They were the first who gave the world high-quality studio work for a compelling Ukrainian price. This first drove dozens of music bands to shoot their music videos in Ukraine, and later feature length film directors, including Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”) and Tony Kaye (“American History X”).

RF activities have done a lot for the image of Ukraine. For example, songs like Sorry by Nothing But Thieves, What Went Down by Foals, and Kamikaze by MØ emphasize the post-Soviet aesthetics of the Kyiv district Troyeshchyna, but not through the stereotype of a dangerous area, but as a place filled with youth energy. Thus, one music video by another, Kyiv turns in the eyes of tens of millions of viewers from the capital of the poorest European country waging a war into a progressive and fashionable city.

Ukrainian chicken is eaten in 80 countries of the world, it is very popular in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The credit for this goes to the largest Ukrainian producer of chicken meat, Myronivka Bread-Produce (MHP).

The company was founded in 1998 by Yurii Kosiuk, who 10 years later made a successful IPO on the London Stock Exchange. This made him a dollar billionaire.

In 2019, MHP bought the Slovenian poultry producer Perutnina Ptuj for €221 million, with poultry farms located in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. Thus, the company got access to 15 European countries. The same year, the new asset added $271 million to the company's total revenue.

Currently, the company has four brands of chicken meat in the global market, including Qualiko, Sultanah, Assilah, and Ukrainian Chicken.

In 2020, MHP had a $1.9 billion revenue. Over half of it was brought by exports.

St. Valentine's Day 2020 in Chicago: a train of strange black cars passes through the streets of the city, looking more like the legendary AT-AT from Star Wars than the usual cars. No wonder, that was rapper Kanye West delivering a new collection of his Yeezy Quantum shoes. And he did that using Ukrainian cross-country vehicles Sherp.

That wasn't the first time Kanye used cars made by a Kyiv factory: he had previously filmed Sherps in several music videos, he gave them to relatives, and recorded a soundtrack using their honks.

Why do Kanye and other stars like Sherp, a not particularly comfortable and elegant car? Because this vehicle is able to go through almost any swamp and thicket. TopGear hosts called Sherp a “tank for two” after a test drive.

Sherp doesn't only entertain celebrities. The vehicles were used during the recovery operations after a hurricane in the Bahamas and a flood in the Carpathians, as well as in UN missions in Africa.

When you are in San Francisco, do not forget to visit Our Lady of Guadalupe Church at 908 Broadway. Only the facade remained of the church, with its inner space since 2019 turned into a cultural center that includes an event hall, co-living space, and more. The project was designed and implemented by balbek bureau, a Kyiv architectural studio.

The creations of Ukrainian architects can also be seen in the Chinese city of Qingdao, where they designed a two-story business incubator center in an old industrial building (6,000 square meters) in record-breaking time.

In recent years, the ideas of Ukrainian architects have been increasingly in demand in the global markets. balbek bureau is not the only one of its kind. Their competitors such as Sergey Makhno Architects and Drozdov & Partners also do not complain about the lack of orders from all over the world.

3dlook is a virtual fitting room. It was founded in 2016 by two Odessites, Vadym Rogovskyi and Oleksandr Arapov.

The idea of their startup is a system that determines the dimensions of your body based on your photo. The integration of the solution with clothing brands and online stores enables the buyer to better assess whether a particular item would be suitable, thus leading to reduced order refunds.

Currently, 3dlook works mainly with clothing manufacturers and retailers, but the company's strategy is to become a top solution in everything that concerns personalization based on human body dimensions, from clothing and furniture manufacturing, to fitness applications to personalized characters in video games.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought 3dlook an interesting business experience. CEO and co-founder of the company Vadym Rogovskyi says: “Representatives of uniform manufacturers lost access to hospitals because of quarantine restrictions and, accordingly, they were unable to supply products of the right size. We began working with the US company Burlington Medical, which thanks to 3dlook products was able to take accurate measurements of doctors and nurses remotely and produce uniforms in which they can work comfortably.”

The Ukrainian company Enamine is the world's largest supplier of molecules that are used for the discovery of new medications. Enamine managed to achieve this thanks to technological solutions that made it possible to compile the largest catalog of building blocks and screening molecules.

Enamine's library of screening molecules consists of 2.8 million compounds. Screening is the experimental identification and selection of new products of chemical and biological origin being promising for use as medications.

The raw materials for these compounds are building blocks, of which 1.1 million are in the Enamine catalog. These are chemical reagents and intermediate products necessary for the synthesis.

This way, the company is able produce more than 20 billion molecules at a customer request.

Lviv designer Ruslan Baginskiy, 31, has dressed dozens of world celebrities and influencers in his hats, including Madonna, Sharon Stone, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and many others.

In 2015, the fashion brand Ruslan Baginskiy (RB) appeared. According to Ruslan, it's a family business, with his mother managing the production, and a long-time friend Petro Yasinskyi being co-founder and CEO.
Access to the global market was achieved through social media. In 2017, Ruslan wrote a personal message in the Instagram of the model Bella Hadid. After a while, the “Baker Boy Cap” hat that Bella wore to New York Fashion Week caused a furor.

When Kaia Gerber wore an RB hat for the Calvin Klein show, people started talking about the Lviv workshop. Vogue, W Magazine, Elle, and CR Fashion Book all have written about Baginskiy. New York Times as well.

There are several world-legendary video games that were created by the Ukrainian studios 4A Games and GSC Game World, including a series of video games called Cossacks, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, and Metro.

The first two were created by GSC Game World, founded in 1995 by Sergii Grygorovich - it is one of the oldest companies in Ukraine's IT market. In 2005, part of the GSC Game World team moved to a new studio - 4A Games. The new company has succeeded thanks to the games like Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, Metro Redux, and Metro Exodus.

Tens of millions of people around the world every day see the works of artists Volodymyr Manzhos (Waone) and Oleksii Bordusov (Aec). Most of their works are hard not to notice as they occupy an entire building wall.

They have already painted almost two hundred murals, not only in Ukraine, but also in the USA, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Spain, France, Denmark, Romania, Canada, India and other countries.

The artistic duo had beein working together from the beginning of the 2000 until the spring of 2016. Now the artists create on their own.

Oleksii continues to create large-scale color works — on walls and canvases, while Volodymyr experiments with black-and-white murals, focusing on gallery projects.

“We know that our solutions are effective: we already cover 4 million hectares worth of fields in 56 countries,” Ukrainian entrepreneur Maks Poliakov boasted in an interview with the industry publication Via Satellite, when talking about his startup EOS Data Analytics (EOSDA).

The Ukrainian-American satellite data analysis company, founded in 2015, has already secured $1.4 million in funding. In 2020, EOSDA became part of the World Bank's program for crops monitoring in Ukraine (Ukrainian farmers were given free access to the data).

EOSDA is not limited to the agricultural market — the company offers more than a hundred ready-made solutions for five industries. Some of them keep track of deforestation in Latin America, some monitor mining operations in Africa.

Poliakov's space interests are not limited to satellite data processing, this is just a piece of the puzzle of his space business. The Ukrainian is building a space holding group with a company named Firefly Aerospace at its core. According to Bloomberg, Poliakov is one of the three people on the planet who has invested more than $150 million of his own money in a space project, with the remaining two being Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The Headway app is another project of the Genesis online holding. The app enables users to familiarize themselves with the content and main ideas of the best non-fiction books, saving them time on reading.

The app allows to both listen and read short summaries of books about business, motivation, psychology, and so on. A special feature of Headway is the insight cards that allow users to review what they have learned.

Headway was founded in 2019 by Anton Pavlovskyi, Head of Product Development at Genesis. The first version of Headway was released two months later.

The app is used by 7 million users. In the category of "book summary" Headway is number one by the number of downloads. He recently bypassed the German Blinkist. In two years, the Headway team has grown from three to 90 people.

Currently, according to estimates by the profile resource Sensor Tower, Headway generates revenue of more than $1.3 million per month.

When you hear about an institute of Ukraine's Academy of Sciences, production of intellectual products exported to dozens of countries hardly comes to mind. But there are exceptions. For example, the Kharkiv Institute for Single Crystals.

It is the world's second largest producer of artificial crystals. The major part of its products are exported. But one of its products, sapphire plates, is of strategic importance for the Ukrainian army. The light armored vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are equipped with “transparent armor”, which contains sapphire. This allows to “stop” the bullet and reduce the load on the subsequent layers of the armor package.

The Institute's products are used in the Large Hadron Collider, space and aviation industries, healthcare, optoelectronics and military equipment.

The crystals are “baked” at a temperature of 2,000 degrees. The rights to use the Ukrainian baking technology were acquired by Siemens. While the raw material costs $100-150 per kilogram, the finished product is worth several thousand dollars.