Ken Kopilevich

Ken Kopilevich didn't raise a seed round. He didn't land on a Forbes list. What he did was spend the better part of two decades quietly building one of the most operationally tight software development firms in the US - a company that now employs over 200 engineers across four global offices and turns $15.9 million in annual revenue without a single institutional dollar to its name.

NEKLO LLC traces its origins to 2008-2009, co-founded by Ken alongside Igor Sundukovskiy and Maxim Mironenko. The founding premise was direct: clients needed real software partners, not just code shops. They set up a US legal entity in California and development capacity in Eastern Europe, threading together the business sensibility of Silicon Valley with the engineering depth of Minsk and Kyiv.

Before NEKLO, Ken ran point at companies wrestling with early-internet problems. He was a principal at Connected Life, Inc., worked at AiBUY - an AI-powered commerce platform well ahead of the curve - and put time in at Lirik Systems. Each role added a layer. By the time NEKLO came together, Ken wasn't guessing at what clients needed in enterprise software. He'd watched the breakpoints up close.

His education tracks the same duality as his career. An MS from Riga Technical University in Latvia - Soviet-trained precision - followed by a second MS from UC Berkeley in Computer Systems Technology, completed in the mid-1990s when the web was still figuring itself out. Two schools, two continents, two engineering traditions. It's a combination that shows up in how NEKLO operates: rigorous architecture discipline with California-scale commercial ambition.

When Bluetooth Went Ahead of Schedule

In 2015, NEKLO became one of the first companies to introduce iBeacon technology commercially in Eastern Europe. The Bluetooth proximity standard, which Apple had launched only two years prior, was still a novelty in most markets. NEKLO demonstrated it at the Freaky Summer Party 2015 - not a tech conference, a cultural event. That's a particular kind of confidence: betting on a technology in a room that didn't necessarily know it was watching the future.

The same instinct drove NEKLO into conference organizing. Between 2016 and 2018, the company ran Meet Magento events in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Italy - annual gatherings where the global Magento ecommerce community connects. Organising three international developer conferences while running a software firm is a statement about what kind of company you want to be. NEKLO chose community builder over pure vendor.

What NEKLO Actually Does

NEKLO operates as a full-cycle software partner. That means they're in the room from architecture through deployment and into post-launch maintenance. The verticals are specific by design: FinTech, Healthcare, eCommerce, Construction, Energy, and Marketing Technology. Industries where "close enough" means a compliance failure, a data breach, or a $200K system migration done twice.

The technical stack is broad and deliberately current. Docker and Kubernetes orchestration. AWS infrastructure with GuardDuty, Kinesis, and CloudTrail. Apache Kafka and MSK for event streaming. React and Flutter for interfaces. Elasticsearch and OpenSearch for data retrieval. The stack gets refreshed because Ken's clients need it to be - legacy modernization is one of NEKLO's core service lines, which means they regularly inherit systems that haven't been touched since the mid-2000s.

The 2013 milestone of joining the Belarus High Technologies Park mattered for specific reasons. The park granted preferential tax treatment and positioned NEKLO's Minsk development center alongside the country's top-tier technology companies. That same year, NEKLO launched its own Magento plugins marketplace - showing they could build product alongside services, not just client work.

Today, NEKLO's portfolio includes companies like Salesmsg, Raken, and Complete Solar - clients across construction technology, solar energy management, and SMS marketing. The client list reflects Ken's instinct for verticals that are large, messy, and underserved by enterprise software players: exactly the conditions where a precise, experienced custom development team earns its fees.

The firm is ISO 9001 certified. In practice that means NEKLO's internal processes - how they scope projects, manage quality, and handle delivery - meet a documented international standard. For clients in healthcare or fintech who are managing their own compliance requirements, that certification matters.