Back
Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
WhatsApp, PayPal, Grammarly, GitLab, or Revolut have long been part of the daily lives of millions of people. Yet few know that Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian origin were involved in the creation of each of these companies.
Some emigrated when they were children, some started businesses after Ukraine's independence, but they all share one thing: they created products that changed the world, writes 24 Channel.
From bread queues in Kyiv to a deal worth billions of dollars 19.
Today WhatsApp is installed on almost every smartphone. Through it people send messages, make calls, conduct work chats and family conversations. But few know that its co-founder Jan Koum was born and raised in Kyiv.
The future billionaire lived with his mother and grandmother in a ordinary apartment. At the end of 1980—the early years—his family emigrated to the United States practically with no money.
The first years were not easy: the family received food stamps, and Jan himself cleaned in a store to earn money. It was during this time that he began to study programming on his own, reading books borrowed from the library.
Petrol.
Average prices at the Amic Energy gas station network as of
In 1997 Koum joined Yahoo! as an engineer, where he worked for nearly nine years. It was there that he met Brian Acton—the future co-founder of WhatsApp.
After being fired they even tried to land positions at Facebook, but were rejected. This did not stop the programmers. In 2009 they launched WhatsApp. At first the app only showed the user status, but after push notifications appeared it transformed into a messenger.
Already five years later Facebook bought the company for about 19 billion dollars—a deal one of the largest in Silicon Valley history.
Interestingly, Jan Koum insisted that WhatsApp have no advertising. He repeatedly said he hated banner ads because as a child he saw them everywhere but could not afford to buy advertised goods.
Jan Koum / mundomarketing.com
Max Levchin: a Kyiv resident who helped change online payments.
Max Levchin's name is known far less than Elon Musk's, though he was one of the key people in creating PayPal.
Levchin was born in Kyiv to a family of scientists. In childhood he was fascinated by mathematics, and after the Chernobyl disaster his family decided to emigrate to the United States.
While studying at the University of Chicago, he became fascinated by programming and cryptography. It was the knowledge of data security that later became the foundation of PayPal.
Levchin developed a fraud prevention system without which electronic payments probably would not have become so popular.
In 2002 PayPal was acquired by eBay for 1,5 billion dollars. After that Levchin became one of the most well-known Silicon Valley investors, and later created the financial service Affirm, which today is valued at billions of dollars.
Max Levchin / Forbes
Grammarly: a startup born in Kyiv.
The Grammarly story began not with grammar checking. Maksym Lytvyn and Oleksii Shevchenko initially created a system for checking student papers for plagiarism MyDropBox, used by universities in various countries.
It was while working on it that they realized people needed a tool that not only finds mistakes but helps write better.
In 2009 year together with Dmytro Lider they founded Grammarly. The company started in Kyiv, and today its service is used by more than 40 million people daily.
Grammarly helps not only correct grammar but also analyzes style, tone of the message, and even offers wording options with the help of artificial intelligence.
Despite global success, the company continues to support Ukrainian developers and after the full-scale invasion has repeatedly stated its support for Ukraine.
Maksym Lytvin and Oleksii Shevchenko / Grammarly
GitLab: it all started with a home server in Kharkiv.
When Kharkiv-based programmer Dmytro Zaporozhets was working on his own projects, he was frustrated that existing code storage services were inconvenient. Then he wrote his own tool for himself.
Later, Dutch entrepreneur Sid Sijbrandij learned about it, and proposed turning the small project into an international business. Thus GitLab appeared, one of the most popular platforms for developers worldwide.
NASA, Siemens, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies use it. GitLab's distinctive feature is that from almost its inception the company operated almost entirely remotely. Today its employees live in dozens of countries, and the company is valued in the billions of dollars.
Dmytro Zaporozhets / Forbes
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Точно є у вашому смартфоні: які відомі компанії засновані вихідцями з України". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Channel 24.
