The growth of IT companies in Russia has surpassed last year's figures by 64%.

      Analysts from Rusprofile have recorded a significant increase in the number of business registrations in the information technology sector. From January to June 2026, nearly 37,000 new companies and individual entrepreneurs appeared in Russia, which is 64% more than in the same period last year. The total number of registered IT entities reached 273,000 by the end of June, with 68% of them being individual entrepreneurs, reports the newspaper "Kommersant."

      The Ministry of Digital Development links this dynamic to the continuation of existing state support measures and the expansion of the range of organizations that can apply for accreditation. In the first half of 2026, more than 500 new companies received accreditation, and the total number of accredited organizations exceeded 21,000. The agency also points to an increase in the number of people employed in the sector: according to a study by the Higher School of Economics, in the first quarter, it amounted to 102,000 people, bringing the total number of specialists close to 1.2 million.

      However, experts interviewed by the publication suggest a more cautious interpretation of the statistics. The CEO of GraphTech, Yuri Vasilenko, notes that when registering, companies often list IT codes from the OKVED as additional rather than primary activities, so the 64% increase does not necessarily reflect a growth in the number of organizations for which IT is the core direction. Moreover, he points to an opposite trend: many IT companies are experiencing staff reductions of up to 30%, including developers and engineers.

      Among the factors influencing the surge in registrations is legal restructuring. The CEO of ITECH, Evgenia Kruglova, explains that some companies are closing old legal entities created for Western vendors or outdated tax schemes and opening new ones—already under current working conditions and the diminishing benefits for IT starting in 2026. Another possible reason, according to information security expert Yuri Dratchenin from Kontur.Egida, is related to the lowering of the entry threshold for development due to modern tools, including AI assistants, which allow small teams to launch projects faster with lower costs.

      However, the CEO of AppSec Solutions, Yuri Sergeev, draws attention to the risks: code generated by artificial intelligence without secure development practices often contains vulnerabilities and architectural errors. He adds that the speed of new service emergence already far exceeds the speed of their security testing.

      Yuri Vasilenko summarizes that the key factor behind the surge in registrations is the reassessment of business models: large companies are spinning off internal IT divisions into separate legal entities to obtain benefits, while some programmers leaving the staff are going into outsourcing, setting up their own companies. "This is not the creation of new jobs, but the redistribution of existing personnel between different forms of employment," the newspaper quotes him. At the same time, the registry shows that by the end of June, more than 5,000 organizations are in the process of liquidation, reorganization, or bankruptcy.