A master’s thesis usually ends with a document. At SET University, it can end with a startup, or an IT solution built for an actual company. The distinction is wonderfully inconvenient. A document can satisfy an examiner; a product also has to satisfy somebody who needs it. For this young Ukrainian university, that extra audience is the point.
SET joins science, entrepreneurship and technology in both its name and its teaching. Its proposition is that technical competence should come with the ability to choose a problem, organize a team and make something useful. In Kyiv, where the university is based, that is also an argument about economic recovery: who will build the businesses that come next?
The launch plan lasted until the invasion
Founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Serhiy Tokarev and the Kyiv School of Economics, SET arrived with ambitions for bachelor’s and master’s education. Its legal registration followed on February 9, 2022. Russia’s full-scale invasion later that month changed the timetable. Before the university could settle into its intended routine, its team had to decide what people needed immediately.
President Iryna Volnytska described the decision in a 2023 interview: the team put short cybersecurity courses and startup bootcamps first. People who had lost work needed routes into another occupation. Digital security had become an urgent concern. The original degree plan gave way to shorter interventions that could reach people sooner.
The appetite was substantial. In January 2024, Volnytska told Times Higher Education that the early cybersecurity course had received 5,000 applications in two weeks and taken on 350 students. Those figures describe the emergency response, not the university’s present enrollment. The first two master’s programs opened in 2023, with an initial intake of 51.
Volnytska’s own route was hardly a standard academic promotion. After years in technology and consulting, she spent six months at a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar, teaching young monks English and learning meditation. Returning to work, she wanted a project with social purpose. Discussions about a new university eventually became that project. The corporate academy she initially imagined became a broader educational ambition.
Put a customer in the examination room
The master’s model takes 18 months. SET offers students the option of launching a startup through its accelerator or developing a useful technical solution for a business as their graduation project. Leadership and project management sit inside the technical education. A working engineer can therefore study how a product gets built and how decisions around it get made.
In a November 2025 interview, Volnytska described the main audience as software engineers with roughly five years of experience. Some already held master’s degrees. They were returning for product thinking, communication and the ability to launch something. That is a revealing customer portrait: someone who can already do the engineering, but wants more influence over what gets engineered.
“teach technology but also how to transform technology into business”
Iryna Volnytska · Times Higher Education, 2024
For that person, SET occupies the space between a conventional degree, a professional course and an accelerator. The degree supplies a sustained academic structure; the project supplies a practical reason to use it. Someone seeking a narrow skills refresher can choose a shorter program. Someone pursuing a company can work on the commercial questions alongside the technical ones.
+ business skills
a company’s IT solution
+ expert feedback
One educational approach. Two possible project destinations.
There is a useful clue in the people SET asks to challenge ideas. Mentor Alexa Sinyachova, co-founder of logistics technology company Moeco and a Techstars mentor, teaches in its master’s program and has worked on its WE.Brave bootcamp. Her university interview emphasizes testing an idea in real life before development. That advice makes the product assignment harder in a productive way: enthusiasm has to meet evidence.
The distinction should not be mistaken for a promise that every graduate becomes a founder. Product work can be useful inside an existing employer, too. A better brief, a clearer prototype or a more convincing explanation of a technical choice can change an engineer’s contribution without requiring a company registration.
The price tag has several entry points
For the October 2026 intake, SET’s admissions page lists four master’s pathways: autonomous systems engineering, AI and strategic technology leadership, AI and cyber defense, and AI and innovation engineering. The engineering degree page describes online study with offline events, instruction in English and Ukrainian, and 90 ECTS credits. This is a substantial course of study for people considering how it will fit around work.
The advertised discounted semester prices run from UAH 70,000 for the cyber defense and innovation engineering tracks to UAH 73,000 for AI leadership and UAH 82,500 for autonomous systems. These are semester prices at the research date, September 9, 2026. Treating them as the price of the whole degree would badly understate the commitment.
Four pathways. Three price points.
There are smaller commitments. SET describes its micromaster’s programs as typically lasting six to 14 weeks, with shorter courses and workshops alongside them. Its nine-week GenAI and Agentic AI for Software Engineering course is listed at UAH 26,800. The syllabus includes practical development work and a final project; applicants need programming foundations and familiarity with Git and command-line tools.
At the other end of the price scale, SET offers recorded cybersecurity workshops free of charge. These introduce subjects such as security risk assessment and application testing. The published offer is explicit about its limits: no completion certificate and no continuing mentor feedback on the old assignments. That makes it a useful introduction, with a different purpose from an assessed degree.
Who pays when the student cannot?
SET describes itself as a nonprofit. Its public offer combines paid education with donor and partner support. Employers can buy team training or commission a course adapted to their business. Patrons can help fund scholarships, infrastructure and entrepreneurial programs. The same institution therefore serves individual learners, company teams and sponsors interested in developing talent.
The scholarship program makes access part of that design. Its listed audiences include Ukrainian women pursuing technology careers, military personnel, veterans, their families and accomplished technology professionals. Selection involves an application and assessment; places are limited. The important planning distinction is between eligibility to apply and an award that has actually been confirmed.
On August 25, 2026, SET announced a particularly concrete example: product company Growly would cover the full tuition of three master’s students. Three places do not make an entire university free. They do show exactly how a corporate contribution can change the cost for a learner. The announced application deadline was August 31.
A Berkeley connection, and a room full of healthtech
SET’s international relationships are part of the educational offer. In July 2023, it announced an agreement with UC Berkeley’s Fisher Center for Business Analytics covering short training and entrepreneurship education. More recently, SET and Tokarev Foundation have advertised a separate full-tuition Berkeley Haas MBA scholarship for Ukrainians. That opportunity involves admission to Haas; it should not be confused with earning a Berkeley degree by enrolling at SET.
The teaching roster gives the international pitch some texture. SET lists finance practitioner Nazar Moroz, with experience in financial modeling and startup economics; cybersecurity leader Bo Vykhovanyuk of Case Western Reserve University; and Google engineer Volodymyr Kirilyuk, whose work connects machine-learning models with usable products. Those biographies show the mix SET seeks: people who can explain both the technical system and the decisions surrounding it.
Generation H takes that applied approach into healthcare. SET and Tokarev Foundation’s 2025 initiative brought eight Ukrainian healthtech startups through a ten-week mentorship program, ending with a September event in Kyiv. The work presented ranged from AI assistance for doctors to medical devices and biotechnology. The program was co-financed through the EU’s EIT Higher Education initiative under Knowledge Rise.
A pitch event is an intermediate achievement. It gives a team a deadline, an audience and a chance to make its argument clearer. Medical technology still has to earn trust in use. The useful feature of Generation H is the concentrated opportunity to develop and question a project with others who understand the field.
The part worth borrowing
The most portable idea here is to give educational work an audience beyond the teacher. Start with a problem someone recognizes. Build a version small enough to test. Invite criticism while changes are still affordable. That is an editorial lesson from SET’s approach, and it can fit a university course or an employer’s internal training project.
It also requires conditions that a good slogan cannot supply: time to work, mentors who can engage and people willing to try an unfinished idea. Learners need the foundations their chosen program assumes. A team building a product needs feedback that can change its direction. Without those ingredients, assigning a startup as homework risks becoming another presentation exercise.
Nor does a university escape the slower machinery around it. Volnytska has described difficulty finding academic staff and fitting fast-moving technologies into accreditation requirements. Those constraints help explain the appeal of practitioner teaching and short formats. A new course can address an immediate skill need; a degree has a longer institutional process behind it. The two formats do different jobs, even when their subject matter overlaps.
SET’s own calendar shows an institution still widening its reach. Its August 2026 news includes the Growly scholarships and announcements about PolyTECH EDU and the UNIT.City-organized Student Startup Fund. Its role varies across those activities. The common interest is a larger community of Ukrainians who can move from learning technology to making something with it. The final assignment is an unusually good place to start.