Kuba Filipowski is co-founder and chief executive of Netguru, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Poznań, Poland, that he started in 2008 with Wiktor Schmidt and Adam Zygadlewicz. He spent most of the company’s history building its sales and business development teams, and he became chief executive in 2023.
A Small Software Shop in Poznań
Netguru began with three young founders who wanted to work on interesting technology projects but had not decided whether to build their own products, run industry events or write software for clients, Forbes Polska reported in 2022. For a while they did all three. They built HumanWay, a recruitment app, and Flaker, a social platform that a Netguru history describes as something between Twitter and Slack. In 2013 they sold HumanWay to Grupa Pracuj and decided to concentrate on building software for other companies, and Zygadlewicz sold his shares and left.
Selling Netguru Abroad
He led business development as Netguru grew and shaped its sales teams. The company looked for clients outside Poland early, and by 2022 Forbes Polska reported that more than 90 percent of its revenue came from abroad, mainly from the United States, Germany and Switzerland. In 2019 he and Schmidt handed day-to-day management to Marek Talarczyk. Filipowski later served as chief strategy officer, and in 2022 he coordinated the deals that led to Netguru’s investments in Pilot44 and mohi.to.
Taking Over as Chief Executive
When Talarczyk stepped down for health reasons in May 2023, Filipowski took over, with a strategy revised around generative AI. “We’ve finally reached a point where AI can solve a significant amount of the cognitive tasks that computers previously weren’t great at,” he said in the announcement, calling it “one of the most exciting technologies of my lifetime.”
Outside Netguru he invests in technology startups as an angel, is part of the team at Supercharge Capital, a private equity fund for European software companies that he and Schmidt started with others, and co-hosts the technology podcast Two White Belts with Jakub Jeziorny.