Oleksiy Lubinsky (also known as Alex Lubinsky) is the co-founder and CEO of Rentberry, a San Francisco-based platform that automates the long-term rental process from search and custom-offer negotiation to digital leases, rent payments and maintenance. A Ukrainian native and UC Berkeley economics graduate who came out of investment banking, he sold his first company, the networking app City Hour, in 2015 before launching Rentberry that same year. He has pushed the company through one of crypto's most-talked-about ICOs, an AI rebrand, and serial equity-crowdfunding rounds, framing Rentberry as a bid to strip the friction, fees and middlemen out of renting.
Kirill Kirykov is a General Partner at SID Venture Partners, the first Ukrainian high-tech venture capital firm, and co-founder and CTO of Datrics.ai, a Y Combinator W21 company building low-code AI analytics for enterprises. A mathematician-turned-principal-architect with 13+ years in IT, he spent a decade co-founding and scaling 4IRE Labs in blockchain and fintech before pivoting to venture. He brings rare technical depth to the VC table - fluent in Ethereum, enterprise AI, and production software at scale - making him the partner founders call when the deal hinges on the architecture, not the pitch deck.
Igor Repeta is the CEO of Empat Tech, a Kyiv-based software development and outsourcing firm with nearly 200 engineers serving clients across 17 countries. He rose from Project Manager to Chief Executive Officer in four years, formally taking the helm in February 2026 after co-authoring the company's operational playbook as COO. Empat ranked #5 globally on the Clutch 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list in 2026 and holds back-to-back #1 Best IT Employer rankings in Ukraine (DOU 2024 and 2025). Beyond commercial growth, Repeta launched two civic tech projects during Russia's invasion of Ukraine: RevengeFor, a military fundraising platform channeling funds to ComeBackAlive, and HealUA, a peer-to-peer medical consultation platform for Ukrainian doctors.
Leonard Livschitz is the CEO and Director of Grid Dynamics (NASDAQ: GDYN), a Silicon Valley-based digital engineering company serving Fortune 1000 enterprises. An immigrant from Kharkov, Ukraine with dual master's degrees - one in robotics from Ukraine and one in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University - he spent over two decades at Ford, Visteon, HP, and Philips before co-founding Luxera and ultimately taking the helm at Grid Dynamics in 2014. Under his leadership, Grid Dynamics has grown from a boutique e-commerce consultancy into a publicly traded AI and cloud engineering powerhouse with nearly 5,000 employees and over $350 million in annual revenue, earning a Preferred Vendor designation from AWS in 2025 amid a 30% year-over-year growth in its AI division.
Oleg Lola is the CEO and founder of MobiDev, a custom software development company he built from a startup in 2009 into a 334-person global operation serving clients across healthcare, retail, fintech, and beyond. Based in San Francisco and known for his pragmatic take on AI adoption, Lola is also a Forbes Technology Council member and co-founder of Treegress, an autonomous QA startup launched in 2023. He's the kind of engineer-turned-executive who will tell you straight up that AI is 'heavily overhyped' - and then show you exactly how to use it anyway.
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.
Zain Zaidi is the co-founder and CEO of TransCrypts, a blockchain-powered credential and employment verification platform he started after struggling to access his own college transcript as an SJSU student. Backed by Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, and Techstars, he has grown the company to 450+ enterprise clients and 4 million users across 9 countries, raised $18M+, launched JustScreen (the world's first free background check service), and earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2026 — all before turning 30. His platform has also helped over 4,000 Ukrainian refugees access medical records.
Illia Polosukhin is a Ukrainian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-authored 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017), the paper that introduced the Transformer architecture powering virtually every modern AI system, and co-founded NEAR Protocol, a layer-1 blockchain that raised $500M+ and peaked at a $20B+ market cap. Now CEO of the NEAR Foundation, he is building 'User-Owned AI' - privacy-preserving, decentralized AI infrastructure that puts users in control of their data and models rather than corporations.
Jan Koum is the Ukrainian-born co-founder of WhatsApp who built one of the world's most-used messaging platforms on a foundation of radical privacy and zero advertising — then sold it to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014. A self-taught programmer who arrived in the US at 16 on food stamps, Koum's journey from a Soviet surveillance state to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is one of the most unlikely origin stories in tech. He left WhatsApp in 2018 rather than compromise its privacy principles, and now runs Newlands, a secretive investment firm, while giving billions through the Koum Family Foundation.
Lenny Rachitsky is the author of Lenny's Newsletter, the world's largest product-focused newsletter with 1.2M+ subscribers, host of a top-10 global tech podcast, angel investor in 130+ companies, and former product lead at Airbnb where he helped transform instant booking from 5% to 80%+ of all reservations. Born in Odesa, Ukraine to refusenik parents who emigrated to the US when he was six, Lenny built a lean, high-quality media empire that earns $3M+ annually — all from a home studio in Marin County, with a digital fireplace backdrop and a strict no-meetings-before-3pm rule.
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Ross Haleliuk is a Ukrainian-born, San Francisco-based cybersecurity entrepreneur, author, angel investor, and operator who built one of the industry's most influential newsletters, 'Venture in Security,' with 21,000+ subscribers. He authored the Amazon bestseller 'Cyber for Builders,' co-founded the world's first angel syndicate exclusively for security practitioners, and currently leads a stealth-mode cybersecurity startup as co-founder and CEO. With a background spanning history studies in Ukraine, product leadership in Canada, and a deep pivot into cybersecurity, he has become a leading voice on building, funding, and growing security companies.
Brussels-based startup PR powerhouse and Ukraine's tech ambassador. Inna is a solo adventurer and community builder who founded the UTEW Tech Tribe (3,300+ members). She specializes in bridging ecosystems, government relations, and helping startups navigate European markets with a focus on Web3 and ROI-driven strategy.