The Apple TV in the corner, reconsidered
Egor Belenkov
He looked at the cheapest box Apple sells and saw an enterprise signage network hiding inside it.
He looked at the cheapest box Apple sells and saw an enterprise signage network hiding inside it.
Walk into a retail floor, a hospital lobby, a campus hallway, and somewhere on the wall a screen is talking at you. Most of the time it is running on a clunky proprietary player that cost more than the television it feeds. Egor Belenkov decided that was absurd. His company, Kitcast, runs that same screen off an Apple TV - the small black puck you can buy at any electronics counter - and turns it into managed, enterprise-grade digital signage.
That is the whole bet, and it is a good one. Belenkov is the founder and CEO of Kitcast, which he established back in 2014 as one of the first digital signage solutions built specifically for Apple's streaming hardware. Today the platform powers displays for the kinds of names that make a procurement department nervous: Disney Studios, American Eagle Outfitters, The New York Times, Delta Dental. The screens span roughly 60 countries.
What he is working on now is not a pivot so much as a deepening. Belenkov keeps pushing Kitcast toward signage that is aware - displays that lean on machine learning and data science to measure how an audience reacts and adjust what they show, while staying simple enough that the person refilling the coffee can also update the menu board. He has been saying a version of this for years, and unlike most founders who talk about AI, he has been shipping product the entire time.
Belenkov did not arrive at signage in a straight line. He grew up in Ukraine and studied law in Kyiv before adding a second degree in management of the entertainment industry. Neither credential screams "software founder," and that is the point - he built the instinct first and the resume came later.
In 2008, barely out of his teens, he started Verniy Vibor, a Ukrainian advertising newspaper. Within months one of the country's largest publishing houses bought it. He kept going: a web-mobile service called On Bubbles, an auction site named EGORKA, a stint running a company called Egozoo. By his early twenties he had the scar tissue most founders spend a decade acquiring.
The hinge year was his time at MacPaw, the Kyiv-born maker of Mac utilities, where he ran business development from 2015. Selling software inside Apple's ecosystem taught him exactly how that ecosystem behaves - its hardware, its customers, its quirks. When he turned that knowledge outward, the result was a signage product that runs on the most Apple of devices and treats the App Store as a distribution channel rather than a wall.
Before MacPaw he had served as chief product officer at Tapru, an enterprise SaaS loyalty platform, and had spent a season studying at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. The pattern across all of it is the same: take something businesses overpay for and overcomplicate, then make it cheap and obvious.
Kitcast runs on Apple TV instead of bespoke signage hardware. The cheapest box Apple makes becomes the player, and the cost of putting a screen on the wall collapses.
Belenkov built Kitcast around AI, machine learning and data science - built-in analytics that measure how audiences react and templates informed by real data.
No technician required. The promise is signage anyone can run, from a school front office to a global retailer's flagship, without an IT ticket.
A signage company is only as credible as the lobbies it lives in. Kitcast's client list reads like a cross-section of American business.
The Kitcast app was developed with the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, smart algorithms, and innovative technologies, which will make business processes smoother, and devices will be simple enough for everyone to use.- Egor Belenkov
For trade outlets Belenkov has published pieces like "Retail digital signage 101" and checklists for outdoor screens. Unglamorous, practical, the kind of thing a founder writes when he actually wants you to succeed with the product.
A Forbes under-30 nod, a spot among InterCon's TOP 50 tech leaders, a nomination for Founder of the Year at the UA Startup Awards. He collected the trophies and went back to shipping.
His formal training was in jurisprudence and managing the entertainment industry - not engineering. The product instinct was self-taught, company by company.
A small tell from a founder who came up through Ukraine's startup scene and never quite shed the operator's habit of doing a little of everything himself.
The stated ambition is a futuristic ecosystem of personalized digital screens - signage that knows, roughly, who is looking and adjusts accordingly, powered by data science but never demanding any of it from the person running it. It is a contradiction Belenkov seems to enjoy: maximum intelligence under the hood, minimum friction on top.
For a founder who started with a paper advertising newspaper in Kyiv, ending up at the front of the AI-signage conversation is a long arc. The through-line is consistency. Same instinct, bigger screens.