A Challenge That Became a Springboard: The a-Gnostics Transformation Case in an Interview for AIN.ua

Global challenges — war, the rise of artificial intelligence, and economic instability — have significantly reshaped the landscape of the Ukrainian IT business. Yet every crisis hides new opportunities. It is precisely this instability that has driven Ukrainian IT companies to shift their focus. In an article for AIN.ua, the IT Ukraine Association shared statistics on the segmentation of the IT market, while ITU Member a-Gnostics shared their transformation experience.

 

According to the IT Ukraine Association’s “Digital Tiger: the Market Power of Ukrainian IT — 2024” research, as of 2024, over 8,600 legal entities were operating in the Ukrainian IT market, with 2,100 of them being active and verified. 47% of companies operate under a service model, 31% develop and promote their own products, and another 19% combine both approaches.

 

This distribution illustrates that Ukrainian IT companies are not only confidently operating in traditional sectors such as FinTech or e-commerce, but are also actively expanding their presence in critically important areas, including defense technologies, cybersecurity, public services, and energy,

— notes the IT Ukraine Association.

   

In just two years of full-scale war, large companies have lost around 20,000 specialists, and IT service exports have declined by 4–6%. This forces companies to look for new niche products.

 

a-Gnostics is developing a software product called Pro-gnostics for forecasting electricity consumption (current accuracy — 98%) and an industrial AI system focused on anomaly detection in industrial equipment and predicting failures.

 

Since 2016, the company has been developing R&D in the field of machine learning, and by 2019, it already had its first commercial clients in Ukraine for its electricity consumption forecasting solution. The key advantage of the product lies in the use of machine learning and AI technologies. After 2022, when access to some critical data became restricted, the team shifted its focus to the global market and began working with clients in North America.

 

In 2016, we launched an R&D direction in machine learning and data analytics. That’s how the project — a solution for electricity consumption forecasting — was born. Our first experiments were in the domestic market, and by 2019 we had our first commercial clients in Ukraine,

— says Andriy Starzhynskyi, CEO of a-Gnostics.

 

The transformation process included:

 

• collecting new data from open sources relevant to the U.S.;
• localising offerings for each state (market zone), considering regional specifics;
• analysing specific client data and tailoring the solution to their business needs;
• legal registration of the company and opening a bank account.

  According to Starzhynskyi, the entire transformation process — from the first MVP to a full-fledged SaaS product with clients in North America — took about 5–7 years, with two years being the active global scaling phase.  

Click here to learn more about the company’s transformation.