AB Soft spent more than two decades doing something unfashionably durable: building the engineering bench behind another company's communications platform. Its narrow focus is both the business's advantage and its biggest dependency.

Alex Batyrev is the President and CEO of AB Soft, a roughly 150-person software services firm headquartered in Odesa, Ukraine, with an operating presence in South San Francisco. For more than a decade his Odesa engineers have been a long-running build crew behind RingCentral's cloud communications stack. A mathematician by training, Batyrev has spent his career stitching American product ambitions to Ukrainian engineering bench depth.