mipt
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Ivan Smolnikov
Ivan Smolnikov is the founder and CEO of Smartcat, an AI-powered language and content platform used by more than 1,000 corporate customers, including roughly 20% of the Fortune 500. A physicist by training, he co-founded ABBYY Language Solutions in 2004 and led it for over a decade before spinning out Smartcat as an independent company in 2016 to replace the slow, manual translation-agency model with software. He is building toward a future of work where human experts collaborate with AI teammates to unlock large productivity gains for global enterprises.
Alex Mashrabov
Alex Mashrabov is the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, a $1.3B AI video generation unicorn that went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months. A 2x ACM ICPC World Finals competitive programmer who began coding at 10, he previously co-founded AI Factory — acquired by Snap for $166M in 2020 — and later served as Snap's Head of Generative AI. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and trained at Moscow's elite MIPT, he is now building Higgsfield into the infrastructure layer for AI video creation, targeting the moment when most social media video is AI-generated.