Dima (Dmytro) Kovalenko is co-founder and chief executive of Uptech, the Kyiv product development firm. He started it with his university friend Andrii Bas in the spring of 2016, during his fourth year of study, and told DOU the company was profitable within months (DOU).
Android in a Kyiv dormitory
Kovalenko studied computer science at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPI), which he called a good school that should not be expected to teach you everything. In his second year he and Bas took up Android development, picked because they owned Android phones and could see results right away. After some freelance work he disliked, he joined a company in his third year.
He later found a diary from his first years at university with the goal of building a company with a team of 15 developers. Uptech’s first team was made up of friends from the dormitory.
No salary in the first year
Although Uptech made money quickly, Kovalenko and Bas paid themselves nothing for the first year. Their biggest early problem was depending on referrals for the next order. They read business books, took courses in financial management and marketing, and repositioned the firm to sell finished products, combining design, engineering, and project management, not just developers. In 2018 and 2019 they added structure and managers to what had been a friends-only, family-style company.
Burnout and Rozmova
In 2020, Kovalenko told DOU, he burned out and stopped enjoying work he loved. He tried meditation, retreats, and yoga, and met his future co-founder Dmytro Marakhovskyi at a yoga class. Together they launched Rozmova, a platform for finding psychotherapists, built on Uptech’s engineering team. It went live two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The invasion forced Uptech to relocate staff out of Kyiv while keeping clients served. By late 2023 he said the firm had to work three times as hard for half the result compared with 2020 and 2021, and was moving into fintech, generative AI, and military technology. Our Uptech review covers its AI work.