Oleksii Mas was born in Kyiv in 1974. He studied at the Faculty of Radiophysics at Kyiv University, worked at the Research Institute of Applied Information Systems from 1993 to 1997, and then at Ukrainian Capital Bank. From 1997 to 2000, he was a leading specialist at the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled payment processing. This experience later served him well in internet projects: he understood how money and transactions work and could speak to financiers in their language.
In 1999, together with his classmate Ruslan Dmitrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, and in 2000 he participated in the creation of UAportal. Alexander Soroka became the portal's investor. It featured the "Tree of Friends," the first social network on a Ukrainian portal. In 2003–2004, Mas worked on the photo hosting service Infostore, with Alexander Olshansky investing in the project. In 2007, UAportal was sold to the holding.
Servers, iForum, and Mail.ua
Infostore's fate ended abruptly. On December 4, 2008, the police seized the project's servers, and it shut down. As early as 2009, Mas became one of the organizers of the first iForum, which later grew into Ukraine's main conference for internet business. He also worked on other projects. In 2012, the email service Mail.ua, co-founded by Olshansky, was sold to Mail.ru for approximately $0.5 million. In 2013, Digicode and Nebo15 appeared.
An obituary on MC.today described Mas differently from. As MC.today wrote, he was "one of the first Ukrainian IT entrepreneurs, the creator of Infostore, iForum, and Mail.ua." It is important to clarify: Mas did not create. That project appeared in 2009 and was created by Ivan Savchenko, a native of Infostore, as Forbes points out. Some other publications also made the mistake of attributing to him.
Corporation and Departure
In 2015, Mas joined Kyivstar as IT&Digital Advisor to the company's president, Peter Chernyshov. He scouted startups for the operator, and in 2016 he announced the telecom accelerator "VDNH-TECh-Kyivstar." Later he headed the company's Innovation Lab. According to, it was this work that formed the basis of his final years at the corporation, and in 2019 he left Kyivstar to pursue "Craft Social Networks." The goal was ambitious: to grow the first Ukrainian "unicorn," that is, a startup valued at a billion dollars.
The project launched in August 2019, and the syndicate of participants was formed at $100 per person. By November 2019, the syndicate had about 280 members. In March 2020, due to the COVID pandemic, the organizing committee postponed iForum-2020 to the fall. The conference, which Mas had helped create since its early years, once again became an occasion to speak of him as one of the oldest participants in the Ukrainian internet industry.
"a pioneer and the first serial entrepreneur of the Uanet"
The last public episode was a dispute in August 2021. On August 7, a piece titled "Cringe of the Week" appeared, and on August 9, Mas responded to the criticism. His response cited 411 investors, about $58,000 in funds raised, and prototype 77. These were the figures with which he substantiated the project's right to exist.
The project that Mas started was continued. It was carried on by Bohdan Hnatiuk, owner of Maralles and Chakloon, and the project ultimately became Chakloon.
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