Billionaire Yuriy Kosyuk, the owner of Ukraine’s largest agricultural holding Myronivsky Hliboprodukt, known as MHP, is now investing in the information technology sector.
Kosyuk is partnering with two enterprises – tech cluster Radar Tech and Agrohub – to organize a startup accelerator MHP Accelerator for IT startups working on agriculture projects. Agrohub is owned by Yuliya Poroshenko, the daughter-in-law of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
Yuliya Poroshenko is the author of the project. At a press event on Nov. 14 at Kyiv’s Frat Social Club, she said that a culture of innovation is not being developed in Ukraine. “If we want to keep the pace with the fourth industrial revolution, we also need to develop our agriculture sector,” Poroshenko said. If not, successful startups will continue moving outside of the country, she said.
Until now, Poroshenko has been keeping a low profile. She married Oleksiy Poroshenko, the eldest of the president’s four children, in 2013, and they have two children.
According to her LinkedIn account, Poroshenko has five-years experience as an associate at McKinsey & Company, a top global consulting firm. She received her masters of business administration from INSEAD business school and her undergraduate in operation research and mathematics from Saint Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics.
Her startup accelerator is now in its initial stage and is accepting applications from startups. It will select 10 applicants who will then present their projects after two months of preparations.
The startups will work on projects based on MHP’s requests. The holding’s areas of interest include: biotechnology, digitalization, production innovations, procurement systems, energy efficiency, corporate management, packaging, and recycling. In return, the startups will get access to the holding’s data and work with MHP experts.
Kosyuk, who used to be a deputy head of Poroshenko’s administration in 2014, will not specify how much he invested in the startup accelerator, saying that “it’s insignificant.”
The businessman, worth of $1.2 billion according to Forbes, said he would rather have others pay attention to the results of the participating startups than to his investment, and said that he considers buying one of them. “Perhaps, we will be able to find something that no one did before,” Kosyuk said. “And we will make the country, the company (MHP), and the authors of the project richer.”
