if.team at IT Arena 2025: Semifinals, New Leads and Valuable Experience

IT Arena is one of the key events for the Ukrainian tech community. This year’s participation was both a challenge and an opportunity for if.team to test ourselves, our product, and our team. While we didn’t reach the finals, the experience was productive and inspiring.

The scale of the event

IT Arena 2025 ran on 26–28 September at the Lviv Arena stadium. Organisers expected over 6,000 participants from nearly 40 countries, making it the largest technology conference in Ukraine.

This year the programme was split across five stages: Business, Technology, Product, Startup, and the new Defense stage dedicated to military technology. The startup competition ran with a $60,000 prize fund and an investment pool of over $12 million.

Key results

• Semifinals. We made it to the semifinals with our updated pitch deck. The presentation was exciting but far from perfect — yet the experience was definitely worth it.
• Productive booth. The second day in the expo zone was unexpectedly successful: over 10 real leads, already justifying hundreds of conversations at the arena. A nice bonus was meeting clients who are already using our service.
• Networking. Pre-, after-, and post-after parties are a traditional part of IT Arena. This year they were calmer, which made for easier conversations.

What we took away

A conference of this scale is above all a concentration of the target audience in one place for three days. Over ten leads from the booth is a number that is hard to reach through other channels in such a short time.

Reaching the semifinals with an updated pitch deck showed that our work on presenting the product is moving in the right direction, even if there is room to improve. That is a fair result for a team that invests more time in the product than in stage performance.