Fresh from winning the 2018 Europe Prize

– awarded last month by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or PACE – Ivano-Frankivsk, Western Ukraine’s second largest city, launches next month a drive to raise $23 million in public financing to recycle a Soviet-era gas meter factory into an incubator for IT and other startups. With 2,000 square meters of already converted, Yuriy Fylyuk, CEO of Teple Misto, tells the UBN that the 5-year goal is to refurbish another 25,000 square meters of the massive Promprylad factory, located on the city center’s southern edge. He said the goal is not to suck tenants out of existing office space, but to create new jobs for the city’s population, which is growing at 4% a year.