Who is the richest in the IT industry

• 8th place in Top 100 richest Ukrainians in 2021 is taken by the co-founder of the UK-based fintech startup Revolut, Vlad Yatsenko. His net worth is estimated by NV at $1.277B. In July of 2021, Revolut raised $800M, and its valuation increased sixfold: from $5.5B in 2020 to $33B.
• 14th spot is occupied by the founder of the aerospace firm Firefly Aerospace, Max Polyakov, with a fortune of about $540M. In May of 2021, Firefly Aerospace raised nearly $200M, and its valuation went way beyond $1B.

According to AIN.UA’s estimates, the ranking takes just one of Polyakov’s assets, Firefly Aerospace, into account. It was valued at more than $1B even before its launch. The worth of his other aerospace companies and all the IT businesses are not factored in.

• 17th place is held by the owner of Rozetka Vladyslav Chechotkin. According to NV, Chechotkin’s net worth is $472M.

The share of Vladyslav Chechotkin is often miscalculated, with the total attributed to Chechotkin alone. But this includes shares of two entrepreneurs, Vladyslav and Iryna Chechotkin, who own the company that the stake in Rozetka belongs to. Thus, according to AIN.UA’s own calculations, the figure of $472M reported by Novoye Vremya is in the range of $359M to $526M but should be attributed to both stakeholders.

• Spots 23, 24, and 25 are taken by Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider, and Max Lytvyn, the co-founders of Grammarly, an online spelling and grammar checker. NV estimates each one’s net worth at $386M.

In calculating the wealth of the co-founders of Grammarly, the valuation of the company at $2.3B should be factored in, as cited by PitchBook and confirmed by the American Forbes magazine. Considering that the latest round took place back in 2019 (the co-founders’ shares have remained the same) and their cumulative share being 76%, the valuation of the fortunes of Alex Shevchenko, Dmytro Lider, and Max Lytvyn, according to AIN.UA, should be about $582M each, which is $196M more than cited by Novoye Vremya.

• The founder and CEO of Ajax Systems, Aleksandr Konotopskyi, is in 26th place, with a net worth of about $380M.
• No. 30 is occupied by one of the co-founders of GitLab company, Dmytro Zaporozhets, with a fortune of approximately $375M. On October 14, 2021, Gitlab went public on Nasdaq. Today its shares are listed on the market at $113.75 per share, and its total capitalization exceeds $15B. Dmytro Zaporozhets owns 2.5% of the firm’s stock, hence his high position in the ranking.
• 37th spot is taken by the founder of People.ai, Oleg Rogynskyy. NV estimates his net worth at $279M. In August of 2021, People.ai raised $100M as part of a new investment round and was valued at $1.1B. As such, the company became a unicorn. Besides, Oleg Rogynskyy has mentioned that, given the current size of the company, it is time to think about an IPO.
• 42nd and 51st positions are held by the co-founders of the IT company SoftServe Taras Kytsmey ($245M) and Yaroslav Lyubinets ($199M). Taras Vervega ($167M), Yuriy Vasylyk ($131M), and Oleh Denys ($130M) are ranked 63rd, 77th, and 78th, respectively.
• 48th place in Top 100 richest Ukrainians in 2021 is taken by the founder and director of Terrasoft company, Katherine Kostereva, with a net worth of $207M, according to NV.

The calculations by AIN.UA show that the value of Katherine Kostereva’s share is significantly lower. At the time of leaving Terrasoft, Alexander Popov owned a 44.75% stake, valued at $51M. Based on the information that he and Kostereva had equal shares, hers should be valued at $51M too, instead of the $207M cited in the NV ranking.

• Oleksandr Kosovan, CEO and founder of MacPaw, is ranked 52nd. His net worth is estimated at $196M.
• Spots 53, 98, 99, and 100 are taken by the co-founders of Fintech Band, the developers of monobank Dmytro Dubilet with $196M, Oleg Gorokhovskyi — $100M, Yevheniya Kryvenko (Yatsenko) — $100M, and Mykhaylo Rogalskiy — $100M.

Who else has made it into the Top 100 richest Ukrainians in 2021

• 22nd place is occupied by the director general and co-owner of Fozzy Group, Volodymyr Kostelman. His fortune is estimated at $388M. Beside him, the ranking also features Roman Chyhir ($175M) and Oleh Sotnykov ($175M), ranked 58th and 59th, respectively. Fozzy Group also has an IT subdivision, and recently, they have tested a service to compete with zakaz.ua.
• The net worth of $346M has earned 32nd place to Stepan Chernovetskyi, head of the investment company Chernovetskyi Investment Group having some IT projects in its portfolio.
• No. 39 and No. 40 are taken by the co-founders of Nova Poshta, Volodymyr Popereshnyuk and Viacheslav Klymov, with a fortune of about $273M each.
• The developer Vasyl Khmelnytsky with a net worth of $223M is ranked 43rd. His main asset is UFuture Investment Group.
• 91st spot is occupied by the owner of the multistore Comfy, Stanislav Ronis. His net worth is estimated at $111M.

The richest five

At the top of the ranking, like in the last year, comes Rinat Akhmetov, whose fortune is valued at $11.5B (to put this into context: last year, Akhmetov’s wealth was estimated at nearly just half as much, $6.6m). The top 5 also include Viktor Pinchuk ($2.6B), Vadym Novynskyi ($2.44B), Petro Poroshenko ($1.52B), and Kostyantyn Zhevago ($1.497B).

During the pandemic, People.ai doubled in headcount and turnover, though back in April 2020, it was making cuts and raising a debt round to secure its future amid global uncertainty.

AIN.UA’s editor had a talk with the founder and CEO of People.ai, Oleg Rogynskyy, about how his technology won such clients like Zoom, its further growth, and plans regarding the initial public offering.

About the new round

This round wasn’t actually on our list of plans because we still have a lot of money in our bank account. Akkadian Ventures came to us with an offer in May. Then, Mubadala Investment came to us in June. So they agreed and performed the round together.

We spent the whole of June legalizing and finishing this round. Now we made an announcement. But in fact, it took us only three weeks.

And likely, it was our last pre-IPO round. Maybe we will organize another one, but there is a chance that we won’t. Thinking about the public offering, you need two things: the CFO who has experience in IPOs and investors who have unlimited funds. People who already purchased our stocks should continue to buy them after our IPO to solidify the share stability in the market. Why did we choose Mubadala?

Mubadala is the largest VC firm in the world. Its venture portfolio is equal to $260 billion what is 2.5 times more than in the case of Soft Bank. Its total investment portfolio hits $2 trillion. Therefore, it is the most desired company to get funding during the initial public offering.

They have purchased a large share of Uber and Tesla. Do you remember as Elon Musk said that he would like to convert the company back into private at $420? The rumors say it was because of Mubadala. They wanted to acquire the whole of Tesla.

What’s most important to us at Akkadian is the man who runs it, Mike Dinsdale. He’s one of the most famous CFOs in the Valley for taking companies public. He brought Docusign to IPO for $60 billion, Doordash — for $32, and now he’s bringing Gusto for $10 billion.

Two perfect investors. So, without thinking long, we agreed.

About development and the IPO

The number of employees is big enough — up to 250 — to think about the IPO. If we continue with the same tempo, it will be up to 1,000 in 2-3 years. And the IPO usually takes two years.

We need not only investors but also results. We need to grow every day. Now we are up to finish this media story and will continue doing business: developing the product, hiring new employees, especially in Ukraine, and cooperating with new clients. And after the end of the pandemic, we’ll continue to expand in Europe.

We are currently working in the US and the European market. But because of the pandemic a year and a half ago, we halted plans to open new offices in Europe. We are now resuming them.

The company has offices in San Francisco, Kyiv, Toronto, and Prague. Also, we are planning to open an office in London. We are not going to open more offices in Ukraine so far. Currently, we have about 40 people in Kyiv and another 20 Ukrainians in San Francisco and Toronto.

About growth during the pandemic and cooperation with Zoom

We are hiring. During the last 12 months, our personnel has doubled from 120 to 240 employees. Because of COVID-19, we did not know what would happen [Editor’s note: in April 2020, People.ai fired 18% of employees to help themselves face challenges they could face in the future]. But after three months, we understood that our clients started to grow very fast. We focused on them and their e-sales — and it worked. Other customers also learned e-commerce until the end of 2020. And our product proved itself as the most effective tool in that situation.

In the past, the employees used to work in the office, and a manager could come to them, explain, and give some advice on how to proceed. But if all work from home, how will you coach your employees then? Our product allows managers to get more information remotely than during office work and explain in real time how to increase their productivity under new circumstances.

It was a great surprise for us that the pandemic could speed up our growth so much. When we’ve got it, we started to invest in specific areas of the product and its proper marketing. That’s how we achieved a growth of 260% for the last 12 months. Now we have over 200 large corporate customers.

We started to work with Zoom before the pandemic exploded and helped them increase the efficiency per seller by 42%. When they saw results, they deployed People.ai for all of their sellers, and during the pandemic, the growth increasingly continued. Thanks to that cooperation, we doubled our revenue just during the last 12 months.

About a free version and the goal of People.ai

We launched a free product called PeopleGlass: anyone who possesses Salesforce can download it, and it’s as easy to work with Salesforce as simple as in an Excel spreadsheet. It is our bestseller. Many free users become then our loyal paid customers. By doing so, we also increase our growth. PeopleGlass is very user-friendly, but it works manually, and People.ai Foundation provides you with a lot of AI-driven analytics.

People.ai allows sales teams to increase their productivity. We have built a Smart Data platform that collects all the data about the sales manager activity from the calendar, email, Zoom, and other tools they used by working. Then we use that data to automate all manual work like data entry into CRM. We also use artificial intelligence to search the data to discover why the best sales managers are the best. We give managers recommendations on how to coach the whole team based on that data. It is depersonalized data, so they don’t violate privacy policy.

We work with sales, marketing, customer success, customer support, and service departments — we can cover all the functions related to customer care. It’s a large market, and People.ai has not covered even 5% yet; there is incredible potential to grow. Our investors assess the Revenue Intelligence market volume as $20 to 40 billion.

About competition and advantages

Yes, some companies are helping increase the sales manager’s productivity. But they do it applying totally different methods. For example, they record phone calls, transcript them, and inform a client what sentences were misspelled by a worker. In general, they compete with budgets, not with different technologies.

If a company with 100 sales managers earns $100 million a year, and we increase the productivity of each worker by 42%, like in the case of Zoom, we increase its revenue by $42 million within only a year! Nobody can do it as we do.

It’s difficult not to find insights — it’s difficult to collect data hidden beyond the client’s firewall and within their services. We needed to create a commercial approach to interest the clients in transferring their data to us for analysis. The AI is cool, but we also require access to the data to collect it from hundreds of sources and convert it into one dataset. And it’s very hard. Data security and connected risks for the companies are barriers to the way of the business we have. We have passed many certifications. Our security team is very strong. We spent years to win the trust of our clients, and now the clients like Zoom can use our product without a doubt.

Our technologies are protected with American patents: 49 patents are already issued, and 42 more are in progress now. They protect us while we collect and merge data, analyze and filter it, and make recommendations to clients. That’s why there is no other company that does what we do — it would be illegal in the US. It is the most important thing for us because 90% of worldwide customers reside in the United States.

The round was co-led by Akkadian Ventures and Mubadala Investment Co., with participation from existing investors including ICONIQ Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

“On rare occasions, we come across a company that will forever change how we work,” said Abdulla AlBanna of Mubadala Capital’s US venture business. “People.ai stands above the competition in its ability to transform people’s processes across an entire organization. By applying breakthrough AI technology to vast data sets, People.ai is significantly improving efficiencies of enterprise processes, increasing productivity and performance across workflows. We’re proud to co-lead this investment in People.ai as they deliver on a vision to fundamentally change the next era of innovation in B2B software.”

“B2B sales is changing, as companies increasingly look to operationalize all revenue-impacting functions and drive customer engagements based on data-driven insights instead of hunches and instinct. Our AI technology harnesses business activity like email, calendar, and video conferencing data, allowing sales managers to become data-driven coaches, and reps to spend more time on the right sales pursuits. This new funding will ensure that People.ai continues to lead the industry with the world’s best account and opportunity management functionality,” commented Oleg Rogynskyy, founder and CEO of People.ai.

About People.ai

People.ai is a product company with offices in Kyiv and San Francisco, working in the ‘AI for sales’ niche – a decision support system based on data from CRM. The investment will help accelerate growth, enter new areas and new markets.

The People.ai software allows to collect and analyze employee calendars, calls, and emails, helping companies improve their performance. For example, it helps to understand the maximum number of clients a sales manager can handle simultaneously. At the same time, employees’ privacy does not suffer, the company says.

Customers, revenue, and ambitions to go IPO

Today People.ai’s clients include AppDynamics, DataRobot, Ivanti, Okta, Zoom, and others. According to the startup, the company’s revenue is growing every year, and its partnership with Zoom has tripled during the pandemic.

Over the past year, People.ai has shown such growth:

• 260% increased customer growth
• obtained 49 patents with 40+ more pending
• acquired several startups, including Closeplan and Hero Research
• Robin Matlock, former VMWare CMO, joined the Board of Directors

In comments to Bloomberg, Rogynskyy said that People.ai generates revenue in the “tens of millions,” but the company is still not profitable. He also said that he hopes to take People.ai to an IPO one day.

People.ai currently has 240 employees. In addition to its headquarters in Redwood City and a development office in Kyiv, the startup also has employees in Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipro, and other cities in Ukraine.

About People.ai

People.ai accelerates enterprise growth through the power of AI. With the industry’s only Revenue Intelligence System, People.ai frees all customer-facing teams, including sales, marketing, and customer success managers, from manual data entry by automatically capturing all contacts and customer activity data, dynamically updating the CRM, and providing actionable intelligence across all management tools, allowing them to realize their full selling capacity.

About ClosePlan

ClosePlan is a revenue optimization application built natively in Salesforce. ClosePlan helps sales teams to execute their path to close with Relationship Maps, Deal Scorecards, and Sales Playbooks. ClosePlan has been recognized as a leader in its category, with a #1 G2 Crowd ranking for Customers Revenue Optimization and a perfect 5 star rating on Salesforce’s AppExchange.

Advantages of the acquisition

By combining the power of People.ai’s patented Revenue Operations and Intelligence (ROI) platform with ClosePlan’s suite of strategic account planning tools, the company will be able to deliver an even more compelling experience for Sales execs, managers, and reps.

With People.ai and ClosePlan solution the customers will be able to:

• Identify the most winnable deals using sales methodologies such as MEDDIC. Use engagement data sourced by People.ai from calendar, email, and collaboration systems to get unprecedented visibility into deal quality and progression.
• Improve revenue predictability by quantifying deal and pipeline health and sharing it with all levels of the organization.
• Automatically generate “smart” relationship maps in Salesforce with auto-populating contact and activity data from People.ai.  
• Accelerate sales cycles by identifying the champions, influencers, and budget owners who can expedite the process.
• Improve the effectiveness of cross-functional account teams by defining relationship owners, coordinating and automatically capturing contact engagement, and capitalizing on existing peer connections.
• Improve win rates with playbooks populated with activity data sourced by People.ai. 
• Consistently and predictably close deals using proven sales motions tailored to various scenarios including enterprise, commercial, new acquisition, and renewals.  

“As a customer of both ClosePlan and People.ai,” said Kishen Mistry, Director, Sales Strategy & Technology at TIBCO, “we immediately recognized that no other company is delivering what People.ai offers. Marrying the two solutions will deliver a lift to sales productivity at a time when macro trends are creating incredible headwinds for sales.”

• While working on the list, Forbes assessed the growth of companies’ revenues, profitability, staff expansion, customer pool, funding, and valuation. Besides, the magazine learned in detail how companies use artificial intelligence in their work.
• People.ai was ranked 18th. Among the leaders are Nuro (delivery of goods by unmanned vehicles), Aurora Innovation (system for self-propelled vehicles), and Uptake (analytical system for production control).
• This May, People.ai raised $60 million at $500 million valuation. The startup is developing an AI platform for employees of companies that interact directly with clients. People.ai now has more than 50 corporate clients and employs 145 people.

According to Rogynskyy, the startup plans to spend part of funds toward staff expansion. In particular, in Kyiv, where People.ai aims to increase the number of employees from 30 people to 100 in the nearest future:

“We also have expanding offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In addition, we began hiring in London and continue opening sales offices around the world.”

Part of the funds People.ai will spend on the development of an affiliate platform. Rogynskyy notes that the company is now partnering with a large number of consulting companies.

How long did it take to prepare the deal

The deal was closed in two weeks. Everything was so fast because so many people wanted to invest. And two weeks is because we stalled for time. Otherwise, it was possible to close it on the very first day.

The founder of People.ai emphasizes that now the company’s investors are the best players on the field: “Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz are top 1 and top 3 investors. We cannot work with Sequoia Capital. Iconiq is the top 4 investor.”

Iconiq is the largest fund for managing the personal money of the largest players, Rogynskyy notes, “They manage the money of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and the likes. It is clear what kind of introductions they can facilitate.”

Only seven months passed between the startup’s rounds B and C. Rogynskyy explains this with demand “If a company grows very quickly, investors realize that they will not be able to enter later. They came to us with their offers – we didn’t go to them, nor did we ask them.”

How is the product developing

Now People.ai continues to expand the work of its platform not only for sales specialists but also for all employees that interact with customers. This includes the departments of marketing and recruiting. In addition, the company is exploring new verticals: financial sector, telecom, real estate, and the oil refining industry.

In addition, People.ai has launched a new tool – The Wire. It is a smart feed for sales professionals, created by analogy with news feeds in social networks. Its algorithms generate a list of the best actions for the seller. Feeds are trained on user activity data — in the mail, calendar, and collaboration tools, such as Zoom and Slack.

Thanks to The Wire, sales teams can be sure that they will be the first to contact their regular customer on the day they join the new company. Or they can make sure that the right managers are getting involved in the right stages of the sales process.

What is the startup’s current performance

Currently, People.ai employs 140-145 employees. 30 of them are based in Kyiv, the rest are in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The clients of the startup include about 50 large companies, including New Relic, Tanium, Lyft, Okta, Red Hat, Zoom and others. According to TechCrunch, the People.ai platform helped conduct 350 million actions for sales reps, establish 40 million contacts and conclude transactions to the tune of $100 billion.

According to Rogynskyy, while the team is not thinking about the next round of investment “We will see if they will offer. It all depends on the demand.”

• Its investors include Iconiq, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital, and Y Combinator. According to Oleg Rogynskyy, founder of People.ai, the startup will spend the funds raised to expand the team. It will use the funds to expand its Kyiv office from 30 people to 100 in the near future.
• In addition, People.ai launches a new product called The Wire. It’s a feed that allows sales specialists to find potential customers, select an approach to them and eventually sell to them.
• ai was founded by Ukrainian entrepreneur Oleg Rogynskyy in 2016. In the span of its existence, it has attracted over $100 million. Currently, People.ai employs about 145 people; its customers include about 50 large companies.

Previously, AIN.UA informed that People.ai was included in the list of 10,000 fastest growing tech companies.

The startup analyzes up to 20 different metrics about the business to display its own index, taking into account funding, recruitment rates, and other indicators. According to the GrowJo algorithm, the higher the final rating is the more chance of successful development the company has.

A list of 10,000 companies is available for free. The list includes only companies with registration in the US and Canada, Western Europe, India, and Australia. The top place was taken by Lime, an American service that provides electric scooters for rent.

AIN.UA editors prepared a list of companies with Ukrainian roots or offices in Ukraine. The list is not exhaustive and is subject to updates:

• Verbit.ai (29^th place), an Israeli company that develops a service for transcribing and creating subtitles. Verbit has an R&D center in Ukraine.
• GitLab (158^th place), a service that hosts git repositories, and the main competitor of GitHub. In October 2018, GitLab raised $100 million and was valued at $1 billion. Dmitry Zaporozhets, co-founder of the project, in the interview to AIN.UA, said that the company “can be called a Ukrainian startup”.
• 3DLook (545^th place), a Ukrainian AR startup that works on the technology of scanning the human body by a photo. Last year 3DLook attracted $1 million from U. Ventures and 500 Startups.
• People.ai (772^nd place), a startup with Ukrainian roots, which develops AI platform for sales departments. In total, it attracted $37 million.
• DreamTeam (1,242^nd place), a platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming, founded by Alexander Kokhanovskyy. In September 2018, DreamTeam received $5 million from Mangrove Capital Partners.
• OSF Global Services (3,457^th place), a system integrator with offices in Lviv, Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Chernivtsi.
• PDFfiller.com (4,112^th place), a service for electronic document management with revenue of $10 million in 2016. Over 500 employees work in the company’s Kyiv office.
• Wirex (4,474^th place), a UK-based company with an R&D office in Kyiv.
• Playwing (4,578^th place), a Game Studio with an office in London and a branch in Kharkiv. The company is owned by Ubisoft, Guillemot Corporation and Longtail Studios.
• Valtech (5,593^rd place), a global digital agency with 5 offices in Ukraine. The offices are located in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chernihiv, and Chernivtsi.
• Digicode (6,116^th place), an American outsourcing developer with offices in Kyiv and Poltava.

Oleg Rogynskyy, a founder of People.ai told the publishing that the startup will spend half of the raised funds on commercial expansion and attracting of new customers. Another half of the funds the company will invest in the development of engineering and data science areas within the business. In addition, People.ai plans to create a technical team in Canada in the nearest future. Under the terms of the deal, the general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Levin, will join the board of directors of the company.

People.ai is developing a machine-based technology that analyzes the performance of a sales department.

“We have expanded so much that now we work not with sellers only. We are now focusing on everyone who deals with customer interaction — including marketers, internal sales engineers, and sales support members.  People.ai not only captures the sales activity but gives companies a complete overview of how teams interact with customers,” Rogynskyy comments.

In May 2017, People.ai raised $7 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and others within round A.