🇺🇦  Our roots are in Eastern Europe. We are actively committed to helping Ukraine refugees with our resources & expertise Learn more  🇺🇦

CEO Message

Update on Our Actions:
Support of Ukrainian Refugees

by Michael Philip  

Founder & CEO, UpTeam Inc

I was born and finished school in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine; graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; I now live in California. For many years, I have been fortunate to work with hundreds of the brightest people in Ukraine and Russia. Since the early days of our company, we’ve relied on the talent of Russian and Ukrainian-educated software engineers, who rank among the best in the world. Never did I ever think we would see what we are seeing in the headlines today.
All of us at UpTeam are heartbroken and enraged by the war in Ukraine and the needless humanitarian catastrophe unfolding. The heavy toll of this conflict has had a deep impact across our employees’ community and families in the region, and around the world.

As rapidly as events have unfolded, we continue to do our day jobs: serving the many ambitious startups and global enterprises who entrusted us with addressing their engineering challenges. At the same time, we have ended our business operations in Russia. We have relocated dozens of our staff and their families from regions affected by the conflict.

Yet above all, we are obligated and committed to take action and render whatever assistance we can to those in dire need. Because for them, it is anything but business as usual.

1. Relocation Assistance to our employees, our ex-employees, and their families

Everyone across our management team is working 24/7 to provide information, transportation, accommodation, visas and all possible support to employees and ex-employees, and to their families. Many, many of our employees trained and/or work across the countries of Eastern Europe. They can now work from our European dev centers in Prague, Berlin, and Montenegro.

2. Donations to help Ukraine Refugees

Wherever they are, members of our teams have personally opened their wallets to contribute direct financial assistance to victims of the crisis.

  • We have also created a matching fund for employees’ cash donations with a 200% match (in addition to our direct corporate charitable giving) to the following charities:
Cash for Refugees
Cash for Refugees
Ukraine Emergency Response
Ukraine Emergency Response
Donate through Amazon Wishlist
Donate through Amazon Wishlist
Help Crashing Russian Propaganda Machine
Help Crashing Russian Propaganda Machine
  • We have given our employees paid days off for volunteering: making calls, booking travel, arranging accommodations for refugees families.

3. Helping to get displaced professionals in the industry

Last, but not least, we are technologists. We have years of experience and expertise in getting students and professionals from different backgrounds into the software industry. It will take a long time to recover from this crisis. We have launched an internship training program for anyone who was affected by the crisis who can benefit from the opportunity. We have a broad industry network and resources to lend a hand to help restore livelihoods disrupted.

We launched UpTeam to give our customers more effective software development teams. None of us imagined that in 2022 this tragedy would explode in our own backyard. We are honored to play whatever part we can to meet these unanticipated challenges as effectively as we can. We owe those who face these sudden unimaginable struggles nothing less.