What’s your work from home situation like these days? For Andriy Klen, co-founder and CFO of smart device startup Petcube, it is not only email notifications popping up on his laptop screen, but also incoming missile alerts.
He pauses our conversation to follow the rocket’s calculated trajectory, before being notified that it has disappeared from the radar. We continue our call, he from Kyiv, and I from our office in Amsterdam, where the biggest conflict of the year broke out a couple of weeks ago over a change in catering.
Klen’s laughter at the absurdity of it all as he continues to answer my questions is emblematic of the resilience of Ukrainians living under constant threat and still managing to work, volunteer, care for kids — and pets — and come up with novel ways of supporting the defence and economy of their country.
Supporting the Ukrainian defence and economy
As Ukraine celebrates its Independence Day today, August 24, we spoke to some of the tech sector doing their utmost to retain that hard-won freedom.
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Klen is one of the initiators behind Spend with Ukraine, a non-profit organisation running a web platform with a directory of over 240 Ukrainian-rooted businesses. Acknowledging that people may be hesitant to provide direct aid to military efforts, its originators wanted to find other ways in which to support Ukraine and its economy.
“This is really important, because we still need this place to be productive and to flourish — to function at the core,” Klen says. “We thought that we could still bring up Ukraine’s name in a positive context, and advertise and promote Ukrainian products and services.”
One such company is Klen’s own Petcube — a startup that sells interactive pet monitoring devices including a vet chat feature. The company manufactures in China and has an international market, which has allowed it to keep growing despite domestic hardships.
It has also kept developing its products, recently adding a GPS tracker to its offerings. Furthermore, Petcube is using all the data it collects to train a neural network to better understand pet behaviour.
“There are things that the camera can notice over time or in the moment that humans can’t, so we are trying to leverage that monitoring and provide sort of smart alerts and let [pet parents] know that something’s going on with their pets that is out of the norm.”
The voice of the (Jedi) rebellion
Klen is far from alone in managing the new reality of living under continuous threat while running a growing business. Many Ukrainian entrepreneurs are managing to thrive, care for their families and employees, serve their communities — and even take Hollywood by storm.
As a Star Wars fan since long before JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson decided to stab us all in the back (ok, JJ is potentially forgiven because The Force Awakens was a fun exercise in fan service), I am almost starstruck when speaking to Alex Serdiuk, CEO of Respeecher.
The Emmy-award winning voice cloning startup from Kyiv recreated Mark Hamill’s voice for a young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian, as well as that of James Earl Jones’s iconic Darth Vader for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. The company has completed over 160 projects for movies, music, and AAA video games to date.
Conscious of the controversy surrounding synthetic voice and media, Respeecher has rooted its business practices in ethics and transparency.
“We’ve been extremely selective about the projects we are a part of,” Serdiuk says, adding that they have declined plenty of projects that could cast a shadow on the technology in general, not only on the company itself.
Both Petcube and Respeecher had contingency plans in place before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion which began on February 24, 2022. (Respeecher delivered the audio files for Obi-Wan Kenobi to Skywalker Sound on the same day.)
In the case of Respeecher, those were put in place about three months prior, and included offering employees relocation to the western regions of Ukraine or abroad, with accommodation paid for by the company. There were also plans for those who did not want to leave Kyiv, but might need to relocate urgently.
Both Klen and Serdiuk highlight that the main priority when the war broke out was to get people to safety. “We had this whole framework in place, knowing where all the people are and how they need to be evacuated or moved to be safe. So we executed on that,” Klen says. “We also had some people joining the defenders.”
The two companies also contribute financially to Ukraine’s defence and those displaced by the war, including animals, through donations. Others have the means to help through hardware.
Replacing lost limbs with bionic hands
Human augmentation startup Esper Bionics currently makes prosthetic hands. But its bionic product is a distant relation to the prosthetics of old. Rather, it invokes something Neuromancer-esque.
Sensors located on the skin’s surface, near the muscle, catch a signal from the brain, and send it to the robotic hand. This then executes the function in the place of a human limb.
“We wanted to focus on control and usability and create something very human-like,” says the company’s co-founder and COO Anna Believantseva. “We also wanted to be able to collect data from our users to create an IoT prosthetic device, to connect it to different other devices in your home.”
Believantseva is currently in New York, as the company’s main market is in the US. However, Esper Bionics manufactures its hardware in Kyiv. When the full-blown war started, the majority of the team in Ukraine decided to stay in the country.
At first, Esper Bionics moved manufacturing to the western regions. However, after it became clear the company could not hire more engineers in those locations, they decided to come back to Kyiv, growing from 14 employees to 25 people from the start to the end of 2022 (now they are a team of 60).
“We received a lot of requests from people, businesses, and government organisations about our product,” Believantseva says. “They expected us to be able to provide our products immediately to the soldiers who lost their hands. We felt this great responsibility, and that’s why we needed to move forward very fast.”
Esper Bionics runs the Esper for Ukraine program, which provides prostheses to those who have lost their limbs in the war at manufacturing costs. The company also runs trainings for doctors in Ukraine on how to fit the devices.
“We connect people who need prosthetic devices with our partner clinics in Ukraine or abroad,” Believansteva says. “We provide the hand and they make these installations for free.”
Many thousands of Ukrainians will require prosthetic limbs before the end of the war. Thus far, the company has fitted 100 of its bionic hands through the project, and is planning to hit 200 before the end of the year.
Right now, the team’s focus lies in scaling its manufacturing facility in Kyiv, while expanding its market in the US and launching in Europe. However, for the future, Esper Bionics wants to move into implants that will allow people to communicate with robotic hands, laptops, lighting systems, etc., without any external sensors at all.
Safeguarding Ukrainian culture and architecture with tech
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not only a war on Ukrainian statehood, but also on Ukrainian identity. As such, cultural preservation takes on an additional dimension of defiance and resistance. Tech is helping with that too.
Balbek Bureau is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning architectural firm from Kyiv. While still working on impossibly industrial-chic spaces in hospitality, retail, and wellness, the company has turned its creative zeal toward supporting displaced Ukrainians and rebuilding efforts — while conserving national traditions.
Its social initiatives go under the project name of Re:Ukraine. Its Housing sub-project is intended to host internally displaced families in units that will serve as both shorter and longer term temporary housing, placing human needs and dignity at its core design focus.
Re:Ukraine Monuments is a technological system of varying sizes authorities are using to protect monuments and sculptures from shelling and bombing.
Re:Ukraine Vision is a project still in the R&D phase. With it, Balbek Bureau wants to understand how to best use AI for architecture in general, and for reconstruction of destroyed buildings in particular.
The company is collaborating with technical universities in Ukraine to develop algorithms that will generate pictures of how to reconstruct destroyed buildings.
“The idea is to develop an app that would allow a person to take a photo of a destroyed building and then, using generative AI, create a new vision of how this house could be rebuilt,” the bureau’s digital architect, Slava Stopul, says. “It will give people an understanding of and start a conversation around how things could be after the victory, what direction we want to move in.”
For its Villages project, the Balbek Bureau team dug deep into history to understand what is intrinsically Ukrainian, as opposed to Soviet or Russian, about the country’s architecture. Seeing the level of destruction after Russian troops left the Kyiv region, the company also realised that people wanted to start rebuilding without waiting for a strategy from the authorities.
“Reconstruction of private houses was pretty much left to the owners themselves. And clearly it takes lots of time, money, decisions, resources, etc.,” Stopul says. But this was not the only issue driving the project.
“We thought it might be a problem that when people want to reconstruct something that it would be done in the most sort of quick and dirty way,” Stopul adds. “And we did not want our villages to look like American Dream villas and houses that have absolutely nothing to do with our context.”
The project is developing a new design for each specific region of Ukraine, and it allows for unique options through different configurations of components (there are 200 million possible variations in the Kyiv region alone).
“We wanted our online tool to be as simple as possible,” Stopul says, explaining that after going through a sequence of 12 steps, users receive a free PDF that consists of 70 pages including custom-made drawings of the building.
While there is no way to track how many buildings have been rebuilt using these drawings, about 9,000 PDFs have been downloaded since the start of the project about a year and a half ago.
Some things are ‘just not going anywhere’
With at least two to three air-raid alarms going off every night, getting enough sleep in Kyiv is hard these days. Electricity and internet connections are also luxuries.
Serdiuk of Respeecher says that the continuous missile alarms are “manageable.” After nearly three years of war, one grows accustomed to the drill.
He acknowledges that “unless there is a miracle,” the war will take time. “It’s a marathon, and our goal is not just to survive through the marathon, but be efficient and be able to contribute.”
He believes this mental change happened somewhere in 2023, after the first hard winter. “We saw the circle of the Sun. We saw all the seasons of the war in our lives,” he says.
“So I would say that the dedication, the passion to work, the efficiency, is there, but it’s fucking hard. You can get used to many things about the war, but some things are just not going anywhere.”
Everyone I speak to feels that the world’s attention has moved on, that a sort of “Ukraine fatigue” has settled in. Perhaps it is understandable that even outrage gives way to numbness in the face of continuous images of suffering and violence.
However, it is also our duty to keep doing our best to bear witness and support those who suffer unjustly — and to celebrate those who do all they can to uplift others while themselves going through extreme hardships.