3 stages of Belarusian IT: how the Hi-Tech Park has turned into a whole economy in 20 years

But this model has an interesting predecessor — Belarus’s Park of High Technologies. Like Astana Hub, it operates on an extraterritorial principle, provides tax incentives to residents, and selects companies upon entry. This year, the Park celebrates its 20th anniversary. This means Kazakhstan has a rare opportunity to observe how such a model evolves over two decades.

Belarus launched the Park of High Technologies in 2005 with the idea of creating a separate environment for IT companies featuring state support, benefits, and clear rules. Over 20 years, the Park has gone through several stages: from the first residents and IT service exports to large technology companies, FinTech, and a regulated cryptocurrency market.

Let’s examine how this model has changed and what aspects of the Belarusian experience might be useful for Kazakhstan.

How the IT Ecosystem Was Created

Let’s start with the main architectural decision. The PHT is not a territory but a legal regime: Decree No. 12 of 2005 made the park extraterritorial, which was a smart move. A company can operate in Minsk, Brest, Gomel, or a district center and equally benefit from support: exemption from corporate income tax and VAT, and a preferential personal income tax rate for employees. In return, they pay contributions to the park fund equal to 1% of revenue. The state effectively told the industry: we are investing in you through favorable conditions; build.

The second important detail of the design is that support is not distributed on a request basis. To become a resident, a company must protect its business project according to a form approved by Council of Ministers Resolution No. 403: activities from an established list, specific measures, and planned service volumes. The Secretariat of the Supervisory Board prepares a conclusion on feasibility, the project itself undergoes an assessment of its level of scientific and technical development, and insufficient innovative content serves as grounds for refusal. The final decision is made by the Supervisory Board.

In essence, this is due diligence at the entry stage: before issuing a package of support to a company for decades, the state evaluates whether it is truly facing an innovative project.

The model gained traction quickly. The first number in the resident registry is EPAM Systems — a future giant with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

How Belarusian IT Entered the Global Market

In 2016, The Wall Street Journal published a piece on the “Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe.” In 2017, Financial Times visited the park with a report on the mechanics of this machine: benefits, export model, cluster. Euronews recorded $700 million in exports and 24,000 employees in 2016, and in 2018 discussed the digital dream of Eastern Europe.

The grounds are more than substantial: World of Tanks from Wargaming, Viber, the MSQRD app acquired by Facebook in 2016, and products from residents on the phones of a billion people in 150 countries. By 2021, computer services would account for 30% of the country’s total exports.

In December 2017, the state made the next systemic move: Decree No. 8 “On the Development of the Digital Economy.” Belarus was one of the first in the world to build a comprehensive legal framework for the blockchain industry: cryptocurrencies, tokens, smart contracts, and ICOs received legal status, and the park’s regime was extended until 2049.

The logic is the same as in 2005: a new product concept and a new market require new legal mechanisms, and instead of waiting, the state creates these mechanisms. International experts call the decree a breakthrough, and WIRED visited in 2019 to study the phenomenon.

The market responded with action: a record 319 new residents in 2019 alone, and exports surged to a peak of $3.2 billion in 2021.

During these years, the ecosystem proved the main point: it nurtures world-class products. PandaDoc, whose Belarusian branch became a PHT resident in 2017, was valued by investors at $1 billion in September 2021, and its document management software is sold in 130 countries. Flo, a women’s health product with Belarusian roots, reached a billion-dollar valuation in 2024. Two unicorns in a country with a population of less than ten million is an indicator not many economies can boast of.

How IT Became Part of the Economy

The early 2020s became a stress test for the entire industry: global turbulence, market restructuring, and the distribution of teams across countries. It was precisely during this test that the quality of the design became visible.

Resident exports stabilized at $1.8 billion in 2023 and 2024. The domestic market grew to a record 2 billion rubles, up by a third year-on-year, and now accounts for 25% of revenue: technologies that were previously written for export began to systematically work for the domestic economy — from banking to transport.

The geography of sales diversified: if previously 85-90% of exports went to Western countries, now about 60% does, with the rest coming from new markets.

At the same time, the influx of residents accelerated: 91 new companies in 2024 compared to 64 the previous year. The composition of new entrants shows that the jurisdiction is attractive to international capital: among the newcomers are companies with investments from the UAE, Russia, and Turkey, including the VK holding.

Extraterritoriality also worked perfectly: more than a hundred resident companies operate outside Minsk, meaning the regime truly reached the regions and did not remain a capital-centric story.

FinTech — A National Project

It was during the third stage of the park’s development that the results of this model became most evident. The most resilient projects were those creating technological infrastructure, many of which were implemented by residents who had passed the selection and expertise procedures in the early stages of the PHT’s development.

The company LWO, “Light Well Organization,” has been a PHT resident since 2013. The second company in the group, “LWO International,” received resident status in 2018. Outside Belarus, LWO is less known than game development companies, but within the country, its solutions are widely used. Its portfolio includes not only banking software but also the standards for electronic documents of the Republic of Belarus, information security standards of the National Bank, key information systems of the State Inspectorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the 2019 digital census conducted using tablets.

A company trusted with developing standards for the National Bank is effectively participating in shaping the rules by which the market operates.

The main product of LWO was seen by almost everyone who traveled on public transport in Belarus. The payment service “Opalati,” created jointly with Belinvestbank, became the first QR-code-based service in the country that works without a bank card. It combines an electronic wallet, commission-free transfers in chats, payment via ERIEP, and the ability to pay for fuel at gas stations via QR code directly at the pump.

The service was announced in the fall of 2019, and from the beginning of 2020, it began to be implemented in public transport. Borisov connected QR-code fare payment in February, and in April, Pinsk became the sixth city where this opportunity appeared.

It is telling that regions were among the first to receive the technology — LWO Director Oleg Kondratenko told Onliner about this.

By 2024, the service operated in Minsk, Brest, Vitebsk, Gomel, Grodno, Mogilev, Baranovichi, Bobruisk, and other cities. QR-code payment was available in “Sante,” “Sosedi,” “Corona,” “Hippo,” and, according to the service, at more than 8,000 other trading partners.

According to the company, in the first two years, approximately one in four mobile internet users in the country used the service, and the acceptance network grew to 51,000 points.

Parallel to this, LWO develops software for remote banking services for Belinvestbank — internet and mobile banking, manages a project for remote services for legal entities for Paritetbank, develops the cloud-based cash register solution LKassa, and a credit scoring system for individuals based on neural networks.

If one were to look for a national leader in banking fintech of the 2020-2024 period, it is not a startup with an impressive pitch deck, but a company whose portfolio includes the digital census and projects for the National Bank.

The second storyline in the same vein is Tectus Media, a company from the first sixty in the PHT registry. It is part of the Israeli ePlane group, which Office Life included in the top 10 Israeli investments in Belarusian IT.

The group’s product is an AI marketplace for aviation spare parts for a global market worth $80 billion annually. By 2020, the platform processed over $50 million in applications per month from more than 4,000 industry companies. Among its clients are national carriers El Al and Air India.

And now, the structure of this story itself: airlines from two countries purchase spare parts for their aircraft through a platform whose engineering part was created, among others, by teams from Minsk and Brest. This is innovation export in the most literal sense — and precisely the model for which the Park of High Technologies was created.

New Market, New Rules

The way the state accompanied the cryptocurrency market deserves separate analysis, as it is a rare example of consistent regulatory logic.

First, in 2017, the new class of assets was legalized, allowing the market to grow: crypto platforms, exchanges, and mining appeared. Then, when the market became mass, mechanisms for quality control were introduced: Decree No. 367 of September 17, 2024, established that from September 20, individuals in Belarus can only buy and sell cryptocurrency through licensed operators — PHT residents.

The Park published a list of 13 companies allowed to work with tokens; among them, for example, the crypto platform WhiteBird, a resident since 2020.

This is exactly the same philosophy as at the park’s entry: a new product concept and a new market require new mechanisms for assessment and admission, and the state created them instead of banning the phenomenon entirely.

For the consumer, the result means a transparent, regulated market with verified players. For the park, this is the status of a full-cycle fintech jurisdiction: instant QR payments and electronic money on one end, regulated tokens on the other — all within a single legal regime.

What Was Built in the End

Over 1,000 residents and more than 60,000 employees. $1.8 billion in exports and one in four rubles of revenue in the domestic market. 13 licensed crypto operators. A payment ecosystem living in buses and stores across the country.

Three lives — and each with its own result: a bold bet, global recognition, mature infrastructure.

And the main conclusion for us and for those studying models of state support for innovation. It is not the benefit itself that works — it is the combination: support plus evaluation. Due diligence at the entry stage to ensure resources go to projects with real innovative content, and timely rules for new markets so that innovation does not remain in a gray area.

20 years later, this combination looks less like an exotic experiment and more like a working textbook.