Sergiy Korniyenko knows what growth asks of a company

A summer company gathering is a delicate occasion for a speech about workflows. The audience has come to meet colleagues, and the weather may be making a persuasive case for abandoning all organized activity. In June 2016, with Agiliway still in its first year, Sergiy Korniyenko chose to talk about processes that a growing team could implement and track. Even at the party, somebody was thinking about Monday.

There is a useful introduction to Agiliway’s co-founder in that small moment. Growth had already become a practical concern. People were joining; they needed to understand the work and one another. The pleasant photograph and the operational problem belonged to the same company. Korniyenko’s remarks placed them together without much ceremony.

His subject was coordination, particularly, as he put it, “especially when faced with rapid growth.” It would remain a useful phrase to keep in mind as the company moved beyond its early Lviv office, developed nonprofit software, and eventually opened a branch in Poland under circumstances no anniversary speech would have wished to anticipate.

The apprenticeship in scale

Korniyenko came to founding with experience of a much larger organization. At SoftServe, his roles moved from VP Solutions / VP Delivery to Software Development Office Director, then Resource Operation Director. Across those positions, the work concerned delivery, engineering practices, skills, and the availability of people to do the next assignment.

There is a particular education in having responsibility for capacity. A customer sees the promised result. Inside the business, someone must work out whether the necessary skills will be available when the promise falls due. Expertise has to meet a calendar. An impressive list of capabilities becomes rather less impressive if everyone who possesses them is already busy.

For someone considering a move from management to founding, this is a demanding inheritance. Experience gives you examples of what a business needs, including the less photogenic parts. It also makes every new procedure a choice. Will this help a colleague make a decision? Will it clarify who is responsible? Can somebody use it without first requesting an explanation from its author? Those questions give the familiar promise of a nimble company some practical meaning.

By 2015, he was taking that experience into Agiliway. Fellow founders included Bohdan Dmytryshyn and Mark Koelsch. Their previous experience gave the new venture a substantial professional past before it had much of a company history. Starting again, in such circumstances, means deciding which habits have earned their place and which can be politely left behind. A new company offers the freedom to make those decisions, along with the obligation to live with their consequences every working day.

The first room was smaller than the ambition

Agiliway’s beginning was decidedly modest: a small room, a little furniture, a couple of computers, and experienced founders looking for work. The first project came through another outsourcing arrangement. PHP was an early technical mainstay. Such beginnings have the advantage of being comprehensible. Before an organization can acquire departments, it needs something useful to deliver.

The early service business also supplied an ordinary but demanding test: would a customer recommend it? At the first anniversary in August 2016, Korniyenko described existing customers arriving through earlier customers’ recommendations. He also discussed consulting and business process outsourcing alongside software development. The offer was widening to include work that helped clients run their businesses.

A recommendation is a curious commercial instrument. It costs the recipient nothing and puts the giver’s judgment at stake. That makes it rather more interesting than a compliment collected for a brochure. For a young services company, somebody else’s willingness to make an introduction can be a meaningful part of the next project’s arrival.

At the following anniversary, Korniyenko spoke of expanding in the United States, Britain, and Europe. The gathering took place at The Vikings Bay near Lviv. Later, colleague Pascoal supplied a freestyle rap performance. A business can have international intentions and still depend on the person willing to rescue the evening’s entertainment.

A database with people in it

Another part of Korniyenko’s public working life involves the records through which nonprofit organizations keep track of their relationships. In 2017, he discussed Agiliway’s partnership with CiviCRM and its Ukrainian localization work. The project included adapting an existing open source platform rather than asking an organization to commission every component from the beginning.

His explanation turned on an unglamorous difficulty: “each organization has its own processes.” A contact database may contain familiar categories, yet the institution using it has its own ways of arranging events, assigning tasks, and deciding who may see a record. The distance between software being installed and software being useful can contain a surprising amount of work.

“Each organization has its own processes.”

Sergiy Korniyenko · discussing CiviCRM, 2017

It is easy to admire a software interface in isolation. Imagine instead the person trying to find a supporter’s details while preparing an event. The useful question becomes whether the record is available, understandable, and appropriate for that person to access. The vocabulary is administrative; the consequences belong to people trying to finish a task.

Agiliway presented CiviMobile, its mobile application for CiviCRM, in May 2018. Later that year, Korniyenko answered users’ questions on CiviCRM Stack Exchange, including login difficulties. The detail is appealingly small. A founder’s title can occupy a line; a user’s problem can occupy the afternoon. Here, both appear in the same professional record.

Those answers give the nonprofit work a practical ending point. Somewhere beyond the partnership announcement was a person trying to get into an application. Technology acquires a different scale when considered from that side of the screen. A working login may have none of the glamour of a launch, but its audience is exceptionally attentive.

The map, and the calendar

A decisive geographical turn in this story requires the dates to stay in order. Agiliway announced its Krakow branch on March 10, 2022. Korniyenko, identified as CEO and co-founder, explained that exploration had begun in autumn 2021. Rising salaries, competition for engineers, capacity, and European clients were among the reasons for looking beyond Ukraine.

Poland’s proximity to Lviv helped determine the choice. Registration work began in early February. Russia’s full-scale invasion then accelerated the opening under the company’s business continuity plan. By the March announcement, more than a dozen Agiliway team members had relocated to Poland. A planned business expansion had acquired an immediate responsibility to keep work going through war.

The distinction matters because preparedness has a history. A pin on a map conceals the decisions made before anyone can put it there: which location, which arrangements, which people, which costs. In an emergency, those previously ordinary questions become urgent. The value of work done earlier can suddenly become very plain.

Korniyenko also acknowledged that operating in Poland would bring higher costs. That candor gives the decision substance. Keeping a service available can require accepting a more expensive way of delivering it. The promise to customers had to be supported by an organization that could continue functioning, with people able to do their jobs.

A longer view from Lviv

His connection to Lviv predates Agiliway. Korniyenko studied applied mathematics at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv from 1992 to 1997. Years later, when Agiliway joined Lviv IT Cluster in 2019, his comments returned to nonprofit work and the possibility of doing more through the city’s technology community.

There is continuity in those subjects: education, organizations, and the tools people use together. It would be extravagant to turn a course of study into a complete explanation of a career. Still, mathematics and software operations share an intolerance for a missing element. A plan remains incomplete when the people required to execute it are absent.

Agiliway’s later educational work gives that concern a local setting. Its 2025 anniversary review described cooperation with Lviv Polytechnic, including student spaces, laboratories, and lecture halls. These were company projects, built through collective effort. They place the business within the institutions that help prepare the engineers an industry will eventually need.

A founder can recruit from a city for years. Helping improve the places where its students learn is a longer commitment to the same relationship. The benefit travels through other people’s careers, often long after the opening photograph has been filed away. Some investments resist being reduced to the next quarter’s staffing requirements.

New tools, familiar questions

By August 2026, Agiliway’s eleventh-anniversary account described an international team working across the United States, Poland, Ukraine, and Argentina. It reported a Buenos Aires office, membership in Anthropic’s Claude Partner Network, and ISO 42001 certification for AI management. The technical agenda had moved a considerable distance from those early PHP assignments.

The management questions remained recognizable. Agiliway describes agreeing AI use with clients and having humans review outputs. New capabilities create new decisions about permission, checking, and responsibility. A useful tool still needs someone to understand the assignment and judge whether the result meets it. Progress has a persistent habit of creating work for the person organizing the work.

That is the thread through Korniyenko’s career: delivery responsibilities, a new company, nonprofit systems, an accelerated office opening. The summer speech about workflows now seems less incongruous. A growing business needs arrangements that allow people to get on with their jobs. Even an enjoyable company party must eventually produce a Monday worth returning to.