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WhatsApp, PayPal, Grammarly, GitLab, or Revolut have long been parts of daily life for millions of people. Yet few know that Ukrainians or people from Ukraine were involved in the creation of each of these companies.
Some emigrated as children, others started businesses after Ukraine’s independence, but what unites them is 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. People use it to send messages, make calls, conduct work chats, and family exchanges. 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 an ordinary apartment. At the end of 1980—s the family emigrated to the United States with almost no money.
The first years were not easy: the family received food stamps, and Jan himself worked as a cleaner in a store. It was then that he began to teach himself programming, reading books borrowed from the library.
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Average prices at the Amic Energy gas station network as of
In 1997 Koum took a job as an engineer at Yahoo!, where he worked for nearly nine years. It was there that he met Bryan Acton — the future co-founder of WhatsApp.
After leaving, they even tried to join Facebook, but were rejected. This did not stop the programmers. In 2009 they launched WhatsApp. At first the app only showed the user’s status, but after the introduction of push notifications it became a messenger.
Already after five years Facebook bought the company for about 19 billion dollars — one of the largest deals in Silicon Valley history.
Interestingly, Jan Koum insisted that WhatsApp have no advertising. He repeatedly said that he hates banner ads, since as a child he saw them everywhere but could not afford to buy advertised goods.
Jan Koum / mundomarketing.com
Max Levchin: a Kyiv native who helped transform online payments
The name Max Levchin is known much less than Elon Musk, although he was one of the key people behind PayPal.
Levchin was born in Kyiv into a family of scientists. In childhood he was fond of mathematics, and after the Chernobyl disaster his family decided to emigrate to the United States.
While studying at the University of Chicago, he became passionate about programming and cryptography. It was knowledge of data protection that later became the basis for PayPal.
Levchin developed a fraud prevention system, without which electronic payments would hardly have become so popular.
In 2002 PayPal was acquired by eBay for 1,5 billion dollars. After that Levchin became one of the most famous 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 started not with grammar checking. Maxim Litvin and Oleksii Shevchenko had previously created a system for checking student papers for plagiarism, MyDropBox, used by universities in various countries.
While working on it, they realized people needed a tool that not only finds mistakes but also helps write better.
In 2009, 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 messages, and even offers wording options with the help of artificial intelligence.
Despite global success, the company continues to support Ukrainian developers and repeatedly stated its aid to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion.
Maxim Litvin and Oleksii Shevchenko / Grammarly
GitLab: it all started with a home server in Kharkiv
When Kharkiv programmer Dmytro Zaporozhets was working on his projects, he was annoyed that existing code storage services were inconvenient. Then he wrote his own tool for himself.
Later, Dutch entrepreneur Sid Sijbrandij learned about it and suggested turning the small project into an international business. Thus GitLab appeared — one of the most popular developer platforms in the world.
NASA, Siemens, Goldman Sachs and thousands of other companies use it. A feature of GitLab is that from almost its inception the company operated fully remotely. Today its employees live in dozens of countries, and the company is valued at 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.
