The World Economic Forum published its annual list of the most promising startups from 28 countries. Two Ukrainian startups were immediately highlighted — the voice startup Respeecher and the quantum startup Haiqu, which was oddly listed as a team from the USA.
- Respeecher – Enabling scalable voice cloning across languages and contexts.
- HAIQU – Developing a new application execution stack for all modalities of near-term quantum computers.
Respeecher was founded eight years ago by Oleksandr Serdyuk, Dmytro Belevtsov, and Grant Riberstav. The startup became known for recreating the voices of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker for Star Wars series, as well as in 2023 for the voice of Viktor Vector in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. The actor who originally voiced the game character passed away in 2021.
Haiqu was founded by former SoftServe top manager Mykola Maksymenko together with an American partner.
In summer 2023, Haiqu raised $4 million in investments during its first pre-seed funding round from the American fund SOMA Capital, Ukrainian u.ventures, SID Venture Partners, Roosh Ventures, and private investors. The round was led by Toyota Ventures and California-based venture firm MaC Venture Capital.
Later, Haiqu was included in the list of the 11 most promising quantum startups in Europe.
