Bogdan Nesvit

The format is one minute long, shot for a phone held upright, and unembarrassed about cliffhangers. It is called the microdrama, and Bogdan Nesvit runs one of the largest platforms making it. His company, Holywater, ships romance, thrillers and AI-built worlds through apps named My Drama, My Passion and My Muse - a content ecosystem that has reached tens of millions of viewers across more than 190 countries.

He is the co-founder and co-CEO, a title he shares with Anatolii Kasianov. Two people in the top seat is unusual. So is the route here. Nesvit did not come up through Hollywood or through a film school. He studied political science at the University of Oxford, then took a master's in economics at University College London. His first paying job was as a research-analysis intern at the United Nations headquarters in New York - a long way from vertical cliffhangers.

The first product he built was a live wallpaper app for the iPhone. It did not work. What followed was a stretch of fast, slightly chaotic experimenting - new products, new business models, new priorities, discarded almost as quickly as they were tried. That habit of rapid iteration is the through-line. Holywater is what happened when the experiments finally caught.

Built in Kyiv, scaled through a war

Holywater was founded in Kyiv in March 2020. The timing was already strange - a global pandemic was starting. Then came the war in Ukraine. Most companies would have stalled. Holywater kept hiring and kept shipping, growing from a seven-person team into a global operation of more than 200 employees. The growth chart bends in exactly the years you would expect it to flatten.

By 2024, the company was reporting roughly $90 million in annual recurring revenue, a figure that has since pushed toward $100 million. The engine was My Drama: serialized, vertical, mobile-first storytelling that treats a phone screen as a stage rather than a compromise.

The format gets serious

For a while, vertical microdramas were dismissed as disposable. Nesvit's pitch was the opposite: that shortform could be studio-quality and durable. The market started to agree. In October 2025, Fox Entertainment made a strategic investment in Holywater and signed on as a content partner, with Fox and Dhar Mann Studios lining up slates of vertical titles for My Drama. In February 2026, My Drama premiered "Wild Silence" with Maksim Chmerkovskiy - billed as the first established TV celebrity to headline a vertical series.

Then the money followed. In January 2026, Holywater raised a $22 million Series A led by Horizon Capital, with Endeavor Capital and Wheelhouse joining - reported as the largest microdrama funding round outside Asia. Nesvit and Kasianov have framed the company as more than a microdrama app: an AI-powered IP incubation engine meant to spin up the next generation of global hits across genres.

That ambition has a creative side too. Nesvit co-produced "Distance Between Two Points Of Me," a short that became a 2025 Runway AI Film Festival honoree - proof the AI talk is not only a pitch-deck line.