Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the present
The Ukrainian-American software company MacPaw and the MIT Museum present a day of science, art, and celebration of Ukrainian resilience.
Photo Courtesy of Veronika Moroz
Photo Courtesy of Veronika Moroz
Photo Courtesy of Veronika Moroz
On Saturday, Nov. 17, the MIT Museum partnered with the Ukrainian-American software company MacPaw to host an event celebrating their upcoming book: Innovation in Isolation: The Story of Ukrainian IT from the 1940s to the Present. In addition to being an opportunity for people to peruse the book, the event featured a raffle and remarks from guest speakers including MacPaw leadership and Massachusetts Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development Yvonne Hao.
A Ukrainian Tech Giant
MacPaw is a bootstrapped company started in 2008 by Oleksandr Kosovan, who developed its first software, CleanMyMac, as a college student. Since then, the company has grown to over 500 people and developed applications such as Spybuster and CleanMyPhone, with some estimating that twenty percent of the world’s Mac computers have MacPaw technology installed on them.
Even now, with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of their country, MacPaw is still based in Kyiv, with a new branch opening in Cambridge over the last year. “We have interruptions for the war, I mean, day to day within meetings, but also we’re always conscious of the fact that they’re going through a very difficult time right now,” reflected Ethan Wayne, a Public Relations Specialist at MacPaw’s Boston office. “But it also gives a lot of meaning to the work we do, especially events like this: fundraisers for the MacPaw Foundation where we are able to support our colleagues in Kyiv and the people of Ukraine.”
Kosovan, now the CEO, is remarkably soft-spoken for someone running a tech company amidst a full-scale invasion. “Well this is my profession, this is why I do it, like I really love to create some beautiful stuff for people,” he told The Tech reporters. “It happened to be that I’m really passionate about Apple computers, so I started this software company in Ukraine to create beautiful software for Apple platforms.”
This success is far from atypical, according to Reed Sturvevant, a general partner at the venture capital firm Engine Ventures which was put into business by MIT. Sturvevant, who used to co-run the Techstars startup accelerator in Boston, has already witnessed the journeys of several Ukrainian companies. “Their founders are typically very very technical, and incredibly fast-working software developers, so the challenge is trying to get those companies that are founded in Ukraine to reach bigger markets. That is what brings many of those companies to Boston. Unlike San Francisco, we’re closer in time zone and travel, so it’s a good stepping stone to get into the broader US Market,” Sturvevant said.
In 2018, the company launched its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative, which operates through the MacPaw Foundation. “When the company’s successful you start thinking about okay, what influence, what impact can you have on the environment around you,” Kosovan remarked. Ultimately, they “donated a million dollars to CSR projects, and the team picked out different projects they’d like to work on.”
One of those projects is Innovation in Isolation, which emerged as an idea in 2018 when the company hosted a hackathon at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Ukraine. “We just wanted to spread the word about Ukrainian innovation and tech,” said Sergii Kryvoblotskyi, the head of MacPaw’s technology R&D. “Then, COVID happened, and we kind of postponed this idea for better times. But, better times never happened because the full-scale invasion started and what we observed is that Russia tries to get rid of our presence by vanishing our past. So, we took this idea back to life and we decided that it would be our goal to engrave our history into paper and the internet.”
Kryvoblotskyi has his own theory for why Ukrainian technology is flourishing amidst the invasion: “There is a rule that innovations happen when there is a constraint,” he told the event audience. “Unfortunately, the war is a huge, terrifying, disastrous constraint. People just have to be innovative to survive. That’s why Ukraine is one of the world’s leaders in MilTech, BioTech, Security, AI, you name it. But the price that we pay for that innovation, unfortunately, is very high.”
Telling a Hidden Story
Innovation in Isolation aims to address how and why Ukrainian tech companies – including MacPaw but also Grammarly, GitLab, and People.ai – have been emerging from seemingly nowhere and flourishing on an international scale.
“The history of Ukrainian IT is really rich, and spans decades and decades, and much of this history has been appropriated by Russia, by the Soviet Union,” said Hanna Leliv, one of the people translating Innovation in Isolation into English.
Work on the book involved collaboration both within MacPaw and across the Ukrainian tech industry. “More than 20 people took part in this collective report. We did dozens of interviews with people who are still alive, in order to bring all of this information together,” MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan recalled. “There was a perception that there was a huge USSR that was a powerful industrial machine, but in reality a lot of things especially connected to IT technology were actually being done in Ukraine by Ukrainians.”
To match the content of the book, graphics designer Aliona Solomadina developed two aesthetics, one for the past and one for the present.
“The historical part is more like an encyclopedia, and has style with a minimalist functional aesthetic that emphasizes simplicity, clarity, purpose,” she explained. To develop this design, she spent hours doing research in the City Polytechnic Museum in Kyiv, while also drawing on her own experiences with technology, including the punch cards her aunt used to bring home from her job at a factory in Kharkiv.
For the second part, which focuses on modern Ukrainian technology, she “aimed to capture dynamic movement through the aesthetic nature of print” and sections that “can be viewed as scrolling webpages.” The second part is in color, and focuses on a variety of modern Ukrainian tech companies including MacPaw.
With all of this hard work, it’s no surprise that the book itself drew people to attend the event. “I heard about the book describing the history of Ukrainian IT, and this is a topic that I've been fascinated with for basically my whole life,” said Artem Laptiev, a Ukrainian Course 6 senior at MIT. “I’ve always seen IT in Ukraine as very beautiful, because there are all these companies that started to create their offices built in the ruins of the old post-Soviet Industrial Offices, it’s kind of like this picture of nature breaking through the old stones and regrowing.”
Andrew Rouditchenko, a graduate student at MIT in computer science, agreed. “I think it would be good for people to be aware of some of these innovations that have happened in Ukraine, so that people have a richer understanding of Ukraine, not just that Ukraine is being attacked by Russia but also the kind of contributions that we’ve heard as well.”
Innovation in Isolation is now available for pre-order on Amazon, and is set to be officially released on February 11th, 2025.
Looking Forward: The MacPaw Foundation
Hosting the book event at the MIT Museum was a big step for the MacPaw Foundation, says MacPaw PR Specialist Emma Djordjevic. “Because MIT’s vision and MacPaw’s vision are very related, it really made sense for us to do it here. We also recently had two interns from MIT that interned with us over the summer. We had a wonderful experience, and they worked with our tech and R&D department,” Djordjevic shared.
The event featured a raffle giveaway of items including a Commemorative Coin by the Army Aviation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a piece of metal from a Russian S-300 Missile complex shot down by the armed forces of Ukraine, an autographed copy of Innovation in Isolation, and a tennis ball signed by Elina Svitolina, Olympic bronze winning Ukrainian tennis player.
Oleksandra Lytvynenko, who oversees MacPaw’s philanthropic work through the MacPaw Foundation, stated that these items were given to MacPaw in thanks of their support of Ukraine. In particular, the MacPaw Foundation donates to provide Ukrainian civilians and servicepeople with nonlethal aid such as life-saving equipment, medical equipment, medical evacuation, blood refrigerators, and blood systems.
“I started the MacPaw foundation as my first project,” Lytvenenko recalled. It was initially a private company venture, but when Putin launched his full-scale invasion, “the users of MacPaw products started to ask the company directly how they can support Ukraine. That’s why the MacPaw Foundation became public and we started to receive donations, and we still are receiving donations coming from the users of MacPaw products who are buying our products and supporting Ukraine.”
Lytvynenko’s work, and MacPaw’s work, is made possible by the people keeping Ukraine standing. “I live 100% in Ukraine, I live in Kyiv, I work in Kyiv, and I can live and work just because of the people who protect us,” Lytvynenko shared.
If readers of The Tech are interested in helping Ukraine, Lytvynenko recommends raising money for the MacPaw Foundation through charity events or fundraisers. But even if you can’t do that, “it’s really important to speak up and tell that war in Ukraine is still ongoing and a lot of people are dying every day,” Lytvynenko said.
For Laptiev, MacPaw’s event served as both an inspiration and a reminder of all the work to be done. “It’s just a great example of what all the people in Ukraine are doing right now.” Laptiev said. “They are trying to continue interacting with the rest of the world, raising funds, but they never stopped working for Ukraine and trying to help us finish the war.”