GovTech Lab Ukraine Demo Day: startups present pilot solutions for public sector challenges

GovTech Lab Ukraine is an open innovation programme that enables government institutions to work directly with startups to design and test digital solutions before scaling them. The programme is implemented by the Global Government Technology Centre Kyiv in collaboration with the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine and the World Economic Forum, with the support of Switzerland within the EGAP Programme, implemented by the East Europe Foundation.

This year, the programme focused on three challenge areas developed together with government partners:

• automated legal assistance for citizens (Ministry of Justice of Ukraine),
• transparent and efficient urban development processes (State Inspectorate of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ukraine),
• data-driven tourism management (State Agency for Tourism Development of Ukraine).

Following an open call that attracted 69 applications from 18 countries, seven teams were selected to join the programme. During the Innovation Bootcamp, they worked with public-sector partners to refine user needs, test assumptions, and develop pilot concepts.

At Demo Day, the participating teams — Revisior, CityTax, Itera, Renovativ.AI (LightMirror), Obriy AI, TechSense, and Arxia — presented their solutions to an expert jury representing government institutions, international organisations, and the GovTech ecosystem.

Each team delivered a structured pitch followed by a Q&A session, outlining how their proposed solution addresses a specific public-sector challenge and how it could be implemented as a pilot in collaboration with a government partner.

The evaluation process was based on cumulative scoring by the Advisory Board during the session. Proposals were assessed across several key dimensions, including:

• clarity and relevance of the public-sector problem addressed and the focus of the pilot,
• feasibility and robustness of the execution plan, including timeline, milestones, and risk management,
• readiness of the solution for deployment in a public-sector environment, including security, data protection, and compliance considerations,
• soundness of the technical architecture and its scalability potential,
• transparency and proportionality of the proposed budget,
• expected impact of the pilot and its potential to generate evidence for further scaling.

The Demo Day marked the final stage of the programme before selecting three winning teams — one per challenge — that will move forward to implementation and pilot their solutions in partnership with government institutions, with funding of up to USD 100,000 per project.