Editor’s Note: This story is part of the Kyiv Post series of profiles of information technology companies that work in Ukraine. Intellias is a sponsor of IT Fellowship, a program that supports the Kyiv Post’s tech coverage.
Intellias
Year founded: 2002
CEO: Vitaly Sedler
Number of employees: over 1,600
Motto: “Engineering by people.”
What separates you from other companies? “The concept of being a deeply human-oriented company.”
A mobile application that can build routes for car drivers, show real-time traffic information and provide voice navigation is a tool that today is deeply rooted in the lives of millions of people.
But not many know that hundreds of engineers from Ukraine have contributed to creating such services, including those who work for Ukraine-founded company Intellias.
Intellias has developed navigation software for Here Technologies, a global firm that provides mapping and location data. And it’s just one of the fields in which the contributions of Ukrainians are seen.
Intellias, like many other local tech firms, works in urban logistics, fintech, real estate, energy efficiency, e-learning and health care.
In all these industries, we are “breathing life into great ideas with the power of digital technologies,” said its CEO Vitaly Sedler. And it seems the company succeeds in it.
Today the company employs nearly 1,600 software developers and keeps growing fast, by an annual 40–50%, even during the pandemic. “We have 300 open vacancies. It’s the company’s record,” Sedler said.
But nearly two decades ago, 25-year-old Sadler and his business partner Michael Puzrakov were two young techies who were only dreaming big. They founded Intellias in 2002 in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. “We weren’t afraid of anything, we were young,” said Sedler.
Now the company has branches in five Ukrainian cities: Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv and Ivano-Frankivsk. It also has offices in Poland, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and the United States.
In January this year, Intellias was named the best employer in the IT industry by Forbes Ukraine.
“We put many years into becoming a really good employer,” Sedler said.
And it’s not only about a comfortable office, coffee and cookies, it’s even more about internal communication and “humane attitude,” when the company can sacrifice extra profits to save a good team.
The Intellias CEO is proud that 60% of the company’s employees are senior developers, twice the proportion of other IT companies in Ukraine, which means that the company has a lot of skilled workers.
“Our business is made by people and for people,” he said. “The processes will not always be perfect, there will always be glitches, but firstly we need to focus on the needs of employees and customers.”
This is how “cool products” and “cool teams” are created, he added.
For example, Intellias engineers developed a bot, a special application, to help a transport company with hundreds of trucks reduce its costs. The app measures speed, location and other parameters of every vehicle. As a result, it shows the driver which road and what speed is best to use to save the fuel.
“It saves tens of millions of hryvnias,” said Sedler.
Nearly all Intellias clients are companies from Western Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., such as London-based Deloitte and German Siemens just to name a few.
In Ukraine, Intellias works with the country’s largest mobile operator Kyivstar, which serves tens of millions of customers. The IT company helps it run its telecom services smoothly and prevent them from collapsing.
In the next 4–5 years, the company plans to file for an initial public offering, most likely on the U.S. stock market.
But today the company’s CEO is full of ideas and plans to keep hiring more engineers as he sees “excellent conditions, market development, plus many talents in Ukraine.”
“Intellias will benefit from (hiring) and build a global company with roots in Ukraine,” said Sedler.
