He quickly based a nonprofit social community for entrepreneurs known as Mesto — the Russian phrase for place — hoping to spice up the start-up market in Russia and different components of the previous Soviet Union. As he launched a brand new start-up of his personal, Duplicat, which aimed to establish fraud available in the market for nonfungible tokens, he contracted with a crew of synthetic intelligence engineers unfold throughout Russia.
He additionally invested in a number of Ukrainian start-ups. One in all them was Reface, an A.I. firm really useful by Mr. Podolyanko. Final summer time, as they met with different corporations and colleagues in Kyiv, the 2 of them attended a ship social gathering whose hosts had been a bunch of Ukrainian technologists and traders. Mr. Podolyanko introduced his girlfriend, a Ukrainian monetary analyst named Stacy Antipova.
Russia-Ukraine Struggle: Key Developments
It was a visit they now look again on with rueful affection. Russia invaded six months later.
After the invasion, Ms. Antipova fled Ukraine and flew to Tijuana, Mexico, the place she might cross into the US as a refugee. She now lives at DobryDom. “Once I went down for breakfast the primary time,” Mr. Doronichev remembered, “I didn’t know what to say.”
Sitting within the yard alongside her new housemates on a latest afternoon, Ms. Antipova was additionally uncertain what to say. “I didn’t plan to maneuver so distant so quickly,” she mentioned. “I’m simply attempting to repair my life, to know what I need to do, as a result of I left the remainder of my life behind.”
Throughout the desk, Dasha Kroshkina, one other Russian-born entrepreneur, defined that she was working to maneuver workers out of each Russia and Ukraine and scrambling to restart her firm’s service, StudyFree, in Africa and India. When the battle started, lots of its prospects — college students on the lookout for scholarships and grants at universities overseas — had been in Russia.
“All of us really feel trauma,” mentioned Mikita Mikado, one other DobryDom housemate, who immigrated from Belarus. “However the trauma is totally different for every certainly one of us.”
Mr. Mikado and Mr. Doronichev are actually working to maneuver their very own workers out of Russia and into European and Asian nations accepting Russian residents with out visas, however not all are keen or in a position to go away. The 2 entrepreneurs will minimize ties with anybody who stays.
