Two major Ukrainian IT companies (Kharkiv-based Nix and Lviv-based N-iX) have clashed in a legal battle over similar names. After two decades of peaceful coexistence, Nix initiated a lawsuit demanding that the competitor’s trademark be declared invalid.
(News supplemented with a comment by N-iX)
Two major Ukrainian IT companies (Kharkiv-based Nix and Lviv-based N-iX) have clashed in a legal battle over similar names. After two decades of peaceful coexistence, Nix initiated a lawsuit demanding that the competitor’s trademark be declared invalid.
(News supplemented with a comment by N-iX)
Forbes Ukraine reported on the start of the trial. According to the published documents, Nix filed a lawsuit with the Commercial Court of Kyiv back in April 2025. The company is demanding that the certificate for the trademark «NX», which belongs to Lviv-based N-iX, be declared invalid. A preliminary court hearing is scheduled for November 11.
According to DOU, Nix has over 1,800 employees, although its revenue is unknown. In turn, Lviv-based N-iX operates with a team of 1,660 specialists, and its revenue in 2023 amounted to UAH 4.8 billion. N-iX’s clients include global brands, including Bosch, eBay, Siemens, Inditex, and others.
Representatives of the Lviv company, in a comment to Forbes, noted that the lawsuit came as a surprise to them. According to them, the N-iX brand had been publicly used since 2003 after abandoning the old name Novellix, and at that time they were unaware of the existence of the Kharkiv company’s TM.
In the lawsuit, Nix emphasizes that it began using the designation «NIX» even before N-iX’s first attempts to register its trademarks, and therefore has a priority right to the brand. In 2021, the Kharkiv company filed a number of legal objections to the registration of the trademarks «N-iX» and «N-iX.com». At the same time, after the Lviv company opened an office in Kharkiv, it temporarily used the old name Novellix to avoid confusion in the local market. The office was closed after the start of a full-scale war.
Lawyers note that the similarity of names is a critical factor in TM disputes, especially if companies operate in the same industry. In Ukraine, when registering trademarks, visual and phonetic similarity is taken into account, and a hyphen is usually not considered sufficient to distinguish brands.
The dev.ua editorial team reached out to N-iX for comment, but at the time of publishing the news, there was no response yet.
UPD 30.07, 8:50 In a comment to DOU, the N-iX company, against which the Kharkiv NIX filed a lawsuit, stated that this came as a surprise to them. N-iX explains that they had previously tried to resolve the situation by signing an agreement on brand coexistence, but such attempts were either ignored or did not yield results. The company believes that the pressure from competitors began due to trademarks, and the term nix is generally used in the technical environment. There is also a Nix programming language and an abbreviation for Unix/Linux systems. At the same time, the N-iX brand, according to the company, is visually, phonetically and substantively different from the plaintiff’s name. N-iX assures that it will act exclusively within the framework of international legal norms in the field of intellectual property.
Law firms say that due to the lack of a specialized intellectual property court in Ukraine, the outcome of the case is difficult to predict. The final decision often depends on the subjective conclusions of experts who assess the degree of similarity of brands.
We previously wrote about how one of the largest Ukrainian IT companies, NIX, closed its educational initiative for schoolchildren, NIX Academy, which had been operating since 2019 and taught children programming and robotics.
