Mathematician by training. Operator by choice. Two decades inside one company. One enduring American client. A ticker, a chart, a timeline, and a story below.
YesPress / Field NotesAlex Batyrev does not run the loudest software business in Odesa. He runs one of the longest-running. Twenty years inside the same firm. Fifteen-plus years shipping for the same American client. A roster that has rotated, regrouped, and rebuilt itself across a stretch of history that turned every five-year plan into a two-week plan, and then a Tuesday-morning plan.
The company is AB Soft. The address is 21/23 Vitse-Admirala Zhukova Street, Odesa - a few blocks from the sea, a few keystrokes from a U.S. cloud-comms giant's release branch. Batyrev sits across the time zone, in South San Francisco, where the rent is higher and the latency is lower. He has been President and CEO since 2011. Director of the Odesa team since 2005. The math, on his career, is unfussy: arrive young, stay.
What does the firm do? It does the unglamorous, durable work of helping a leading American provider of business telecommunications ship its product. RingCentral is the customer of record. AB Soft, in its own words, has been supplying unified services to Ukrainian specialists for more than fifteen years so they can build on the RingCentral stack. That is a sentence that contains, hidden inside it, every conversation a services CEO has ever had: about quality, about retention, about exchange rates, about whether the lights stay on.
Batyrev's training is not the standard founder-CEO arc. He studied applied mathematics and computer science at Taganrog State Radio Technical University from 1982 to 1987 - a different country, a different alphabet on the diploma. He went on to earn a PhD in mathematics from Odessa National University. He also studied at the Odessa National University of Economics. The pattern is consistent: he keeps acquiring credentials and keeps working, in the same city, in the same industry, on the same hard problem of getting good engineers paid on time and shipping good code.
Before AB Soft he was a director at YM Service, beginning in 1995. Before that, the public record goes quiet, which is its own kind of signal. He has held a parallel CEO title at BVG Software Group since 2007. That is the second leg of the operation: an Odesa-rooted, U.S.-facing pair of entities, run by the same hand, pointed at the same kind of work. The story of his career is not a pivot story. It is a compounding story.
To understand what makes that unusual, picture the global services market over the last two decades. Picture the firms that grew to twenty thousand seats and the firms that flamed out at fifty. Picture the founders who took companies public, sold to private equity, then started newsletters. Now picture a 150-person firm, headquartered in a city that has been on the international news cycle for the wrong reasons, still shipping. Still hiring. Still answering email at admin@ab-soft.net. That is a different kind of business - and a different kind of CEO running it.
AB Soft helps Ukrainian engineers build with American product companies. The marquee customer is RingCentral - a U.S. cloud communications provider. The promise is unified services, the kind that read boring on a website and matter when the on-call phone rings.
He keeps adding credentials and keeps shipping. The PhD does not sit in the foyer like a trophy. It sits in the way he runs a tech business - measured, recurrent, with a tolerance for problems that resolve over years rather than quarters.
Three diplomas and three job titles, all stacked, none discarded. Resumes like this tend to belong to people who would rather compound than pivot.
A services CEO who outlasts the contract is more interesting than the consultant who closes it. Batyrev is the former. He is, in a quiet way, the institutional memory of an entire engineering bench.
YesPress / Editor's note