Empat

Empat is a software company, but the pitch it makes is unusually plain for an industry fond of jargon: it builds the whole product, end to end, and it starts by asking questions before it writes code. Founded in Kyiv in 2013 - first as a small shop called Schrodinger's Cat Laboratory, then merged and rebranded to Empat in 2018 - the company has spent more than a decade turning briefs into working software.

The name is not decoration. Empat comes from "empathy," and the firm treats that as a working method rather than a slogan: research the user, understand the business, then engineer. Its own description of the work is "full-cycle software development grounded in research, empathy, and technical excellence" - covering system architecture, engineering, UI/UX design and go-to-market under one roof.

What that means in practice is that a client does not have to assemble a chain of vendors. Empat handles the discovery, the design, the build and the launch. For a startup that has never shipped software, and for an enterprise trying to modernize a legacy system, the appeal is the same: fewer handoffs, fewer seams, fewer of the gaps where projects usually fail.

The evidence is in the client list. Over 300 digital products have gone out the door across 17 countries, for names most readers will recognize - Porsche, Panasonic, Heinemann, CBRE - and for organizations like Transparency International, alongside a long tail of startups and scaleups.

In a crowded market of Ukrainian and global development firms - the field includes giants like SoftServe, EPAM and Ciklum, and boutiques like Netguru - Empat competes on delivery discipline rather than scale. Its distinguishing move is combining a startup studio's product instinct with an outsourcing firm's operational rigor. Clients repeatedly cite three things in public reviews: technical depth in AI and cloud, project management that hits dates, and UI/UX that turns a vision into something usable.

The business model is straightforward B2B services. Revenue comes from project-based custom software delivery, dedicated development teams billed per engineer, and product engagements. A third-party estimate puts annual revenue near $15.2M. There is no disclosed outside funding - Empat grew as a founder-owned company under Nazar Gulyk, which is part of why its 2026 leadership handover matters.

That handover - founder to internal operator - is itself a signal. Igor Repeta joined in 2022 as a project manager, built the operating model as COO, and took the CEO seat in February 2026. Gulyk stayed on as Founder and Partner. It is the kind of deliberate succession services firms rarely manage cleanly.

Where Empat fits in the market, then, is the reliable middle: bigger and more disciplined than a freelance collective, more hands-on and product-minded than a giant offshore vendor. For a founder who needs a partner that ships, or an enterprise that needs software without the seams, that middle is exactly the point.