What They Were Looking For and Who Could Participate
The company's press service described the event as a competition to find, accelerate, and integrate technologies in telecom. An accelerator is a program that helps young teams bring a product to market over several months: they receive mentors, expertise, and access to a large customer. For the operator, such a scheme is doubly beneficial. The company gets ideas it wouldn't have come up with on its own and can quickly test them in its infrastructure.
The list of areas included B2C and B2B, the Internet of Things, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), mobile advertising, mobile economy, cloud and voice services, content, mobile finance, and mobile internet services. Adult entrepreneurs, startups, and small and medium-sized businesses were eligible to participate. The format was open to teams already working in the market and to those just planning to launch.
Timeline and Key Figures
Applications were accepted from April 20 to June 20, 2016. The ten finalists were to be announced on July 2, and the program itself started on July 8. This schedule gave teams about two months to submit applications and prepare presentations, a typical timeframe for an industry competition.
The launch was presented by the company's advisor on digital and information technology, Oleksii Mas. According to him, this was a platform where young companies would receive feedback from market professionals. He said:
“We are creating a platform where startups will hear advice from the best specialists in business and telecom.”
Mas was known in the Ukrainian internet community long before working at the operator. He was born in Kyiv in 1974, graduated from Physics and Mathematics School No. 145 and the Radio Physics Faculty of Kyiv University. In the 1990s, he worked at the Research Institute of Applied Information Technologies and the Ukrainian Capital bank, then handled payment processing at the National Bank of Ukraine. In 1999, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he created the Ukrainian Banner Network, and in 2000 he participated in the launch of UAportal and the first social network on the Ukrainian portal “Tree of Friends.”
Scale of the Company
To understand the stakes, Prompolitinform cited the operator's financial indicators. Kyivstar's net revenue for 2015 was UAH 13.475 billion, 10 percent more than the previous year. The company had money for such projects, and the accelerator's task was to turn part of that budget into new services that generate revenue beyond voice communication and mobile internet.
Mas himself had worked at the company since 2015. He was first IT&Digital Advisor to Kyivstar President Peter Chernyshov, then headed the Innovation Lab. At the same time, he remained co-organizer of iForum, a conference whose first edition was held in 2009. Alexander Olshansky headed the conference's organizing committee, and Mas led the “Internet Business” track.
What Happened Next
The program's results were summarized in December 2016: four accelerator startups were brought to production, meaning they moved from prototypes to working products. In July 2019, Oleksii Mas left Kyivstar.
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