Igor
Repeta

Igor Repeta became CEO of Empat Tech in February 2026, four years after he arrived as a project manager during the first week of Russia's full-scale invasion. The company he now leads has nearly 200 engineers, offices in San Francisco, London, Warsaw, and Kyiv, and a #5 global ranking on Clutch's list of the fastest-growing IT companies on the planet. The timing of his promotion was deliberate. Founder Nazar Gulyk didn't hand over the keys because things were easy. He handed them over because Repeta had spent four years turning difficult things into repeatable processes.

Empat is a software development and outsourcing firm - the kind of company that builds custom applications, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, and AI-integrated systems for clients ranging from Porsche to Transparency International. It's a wide spread of clients on purpose. Repeta's version of Empat is not a single-vertical shop; it's an engineering capability that moves across fintech, healthtech, e-commerce, aviation, and NGO sectors with equal fluency.

Before Repeta took the helm, Empat's revenue ran roughly 80% domestic Ukrainian clients. After Russia's invasion, that flipped: 80% of revenue now comes from international projects. What looks like a geopolitical accident is, on closer inspection, a strategic re-orientation that Repeta helped engineer from the inside. The company that built war-aid platforms during an invasion is the same company that landed global clients while running development teams under air raid alerts. That's not two different stories. It's one.

In 2023, Repeta completed an MSc in Innovations and Entrepreneurship at UCU Business School - the Lviv Business School of Ukrainian Catholic University, one of Central Europe's respected business programs. His thesis: "Creation and Development of a Startup Studio Based on an Outsourcing IT Company."

Read that again. His graduate research project was a theoretical model for spinning startup ventures out of an existing IT services firm. The year he finished it, Empat launched NovaFlow Studio - a low-code/no-code development shop built on Webflow, FlutterFlow, Bubble, and Figma that operates as an independent brand under the Empat umbrella. He didn't just study startup studios. He wrote the blueprint and then ran the experiment.

NovaFlow represents Repeta's fingerprint on Empat's expansion strategy: find adjacent capability, create a focused brand, and serve a different price point and buyer type without diluting the core. It's the kind of move that looks obvious in hindsight and takes real nerve in execution.

Before Empat, Repeta ran operations at Svidomo as COO - building products across FinTech, AI, LegalTech, and PetCare from 2020 to 2021. Before that, he spent a year at ucode IT Academy (UNIT Factory), Ukraine's well-known peer-to-peer engineering education program, coordinating admissions and technical support.

His earliest GitHub commits trace back to student-era projects in Python and C. One repository is simply labeled "fdf" - "My first project with graphics." The Pull Shark achievement badge on his profile suggests he's still capable of reading and contributing to code when it matters. Repeta is not a pure management archetype. He came up through the technical side before migrating to operations.

When the invasion began, Repeta didn't wait for a strategy memo. Within weeks of joining Empat, he was managing engineering projects that had nothing to do with commercial clients and everything to do with what was happening outside the office windows.

Both platforms came out of Empat's engineering capacity and were delivered while the company was simultaneously migrating its business model toward international revenue. The fact that Repeta was the project manager on HealUA and instrumental in RevengeFor's launch suggests he understood early that Empat's culture wasn't just about delivery metrics. It was about what the company chose to build when nobody was requiring it.

Empat started in 2013 under a different name: Schrödinger's Cat Laboratory. Nazar Gulyk's boutique web studio spent five years evolving through multiple startups before a merger of those companies in 2018 produced the unified brand. The physics joke in the original name - a company that might or might not be great until you observe it closely - turns out to have been accidentally prescient. Empat is built on the premise that quality only materializes under deliberate process.

The service mix is broad by design. Empat builds mobile apps, web applications, SaaS platforms, AI-integrated systems, e-commerce infrastructure, CRM/ERP implementations, and runs dedicated engineering teams for clients who need staff augmentation. Clients include Porsche, Panasonic, Domino's, Transparency International, CBRE, Heinemann (duty-free retail), and the Austrian Embassy. That range is unusual for an outsourcing shop of this size. It reflects a deliberate refusal to be categorized as a single-vertical player.

The tech stack reflects current market reality: React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, TypeScript, Python, Flutter, Kotlin, Swift on the application layer; PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra on data; Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP for infrastructure; LangGraph, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini for AI work. At 147 Clutch reviews averaging 5.0 stars, the company's client retention speaks for itself.

The employer reputation is arguably the harder achievement to replicate. DOU - Ukraine's largest IT community - ranked Empat the #1 Best IT Employer in Ukraine two consecutive years (2024, 2025) for companies under 200 staff. Glassdoor shows a 5.0 rating with 100% CEO approval. These numbers don't happen at a company of 200 people by accident. They happen when operations - Repeta's domain for three years before he became CEO - actually function as designed.

Empat runs a genuinely wide stack - a function of serving dozens of industries simultaneously. Key technologies across the client portfolio: