Ukrainian startup Headway becomes part of the global IT community
21 February 2025 16:07
Ukrainian education startup Headway has become the first company to join the global IT network Endeavor through its Ukrainian office. This success of the domestic EdTech company was announced by the Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov, "Komersant Ukrainian" reports.
According to him, participation in Endeavor gives Headway access to a global network of mentors, investors, and partners.
“Every sixth startup in the fund becomes a unicorn. The network includes such well-known companies as Glovo, Amazon, Netflix, and more than 1600 others. And now the Ukrainian Headway,” the official emphasized.
He noted that Endeavor opened an office in Ukraine in October and it was an important step, and the success of Headway was the first cool result of Endeavor’s work in Ukraine.
Endeavor Ukraine called it a “historic moment.”
What we know about Headway
The educational startup Headway has launched five applications for learning through samaritas, games, interactive lessons, and coaching. Its products are used by more than 100 million people around the world.
The company’s flagship is the eponymous Headway app with book summaries. In 2023, it became the App of the Day in the US four times in a row and received the Editor’s Choice award from the Apple Store.
The idea for Headway came from financial analyst Anton Pavlovsky.
“Headway started in 2019 with one app and three people in the team,” Headway CEO Anton Pavlovsky told Forbes Ukraine, “In six years, we have built an ecosystem of 5 educational products that have already been downloaded by more than 130 million people worldwide and have grown more than 100 times as a team.
In 2024, the international ratings Titans of Tech and Top100 Next Unicorns included Headway in the list of companies that have the potential to become a unicorn in the coming years. Global Silicon Valley and Holon IQ recognize Headway as one of the most transformative companies in digital learning.
What we know about the Endeavor community
Endeavor is a network of 2,600 entrepreneurs whose total revenue in 2023 reached $67 billion. In October 2024, Ukraine became the 46th country where the international nonprofit organization Endeavor was launched. Every year, it evaluates about 5,000 businesses, and only 80-90 of them are selected and become members of the organization. Endeavor creates a commission for each of them, which interviews the founders and evaluates their business. For example, Headway was selected by the founders and top executives of UiPath, Nomad, BMB Group, Ding, Coverflex, and Flipkart.
Endeavor’s Ukrainian office was launched to help ambitious Ukrainian startups grow.
“It’s a support network where everyone helps each other,” says Svyatoslav Sviatnenko, managing director of Endeavor Ukraine. According to him, the community can help with preparing for an IPO or M&A, access to quality business education, expansion, or presentations to top investors.
Currently, Endeavor has “dozens” of Ukrainian founders on the shortlist and “several” at the selection stage, Sviatoslav Sviatnenko adds. “Our mission is to bring at least three Ukrainian entrepreneurs to Endeavor every year,” he notes.
What are unicorn companies?
These are startups whose market valuation exceeds $1 billion before going public or being acquired. The name and definition was first coined by Eileen Lee, founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, a company that has made 180 investments since its inception with an active portfolio with an average valuation of $28.8 million. In 2013, Eileen Lee analyzed data on 60,000 Internet companies founded in the United States between 2003 and 2013 and found that only 39 of them reached $1 billion or more, i.e. only 0.07%.
But then the number of unicorn companies began to grow rapidly. It is now easier for startups to receive larger amounts of private funding at the early stages of development, and thus they are able to reach a valuation of billions of dollars before going public.
In Ukraine, as Mc.today reported in the middle of last year, there were six “unicorns” that succeeded in the international market. These are GitLab, People.ai, Grammarly, Unstoppable Domains, airSlate, and Creatio. Some foreign “unicorns” also have Ukrainian roots, including Affirm, Sila Nanotechnologies, BitFury, Revolut, and PandaDoc.
As of mid-2024, according to Crunchbase, there were more than 1,500 unicorn companies in the world. Their total value was more than $5.1 trillion. The most famous of them are: Uber, OpenAI, Airbnb, SpaceX, Pinterest, Didi Chuxing, Xiaomi, and others.
