Yury Melnichek

Yury graduated with a degree in applied mathematics and informatics from the Belarusian State University in 2005[2]

Yury is a long-time partner of Social Weekend[3] – a social project competition and the Open Data Science Belarus community.[4] He also takes part in hackathons as a mentor and speaks at tech conferences.

He has been recognised as a prominent figure in the IT sphere by various publications:

• IT-entrepreneur of 2017 according to dev.by[5]
• Number 6 in "Top-50 persons in Belarusian IT 2017"[6]
• Included in "Top-200 successful and influential Belarusian businessman 2018"[7]
• Number 7 in "Top-40 Belarusian entrepreneurs under 40"[8]

In March 2018, Yury, together with his business partner Andrei Avsievich, founded Belarus-based startup investment company Bulba Ventures.[9] Bulba Ventures focuses on machine learning startups and is interested in startups at the intersection of real economy & IT, life & health sciences.

At the moment Yury invested in six startups: OneSoil[10] (Minsk, Belarus) – a precision farming platform; WANNABY[11] (Minsk, Belarus) – a computer vision and e-commerce startup; Daedalean[12] (Zurich, Switzerland) – a startup focused on building autonomous flight control for the electric personal aircraft; FriendlyData[13] (San Francisco, USA) – an enterprise data startup that is working to fundamentally change the way people interact with data; RocketBody[14] (Minsk, Belarus) – a startup which is building a personal trainer for professional athletes and healthy lifestyle followers; VOIR[15] (Dover, USA) – a mobile app which helps users to experiment with their style and appearance.

In October 2018 FriendlyData, a startup backed by Bulba Ventures was acquired by ServiceNow.[16] This deal became the first exit for Bulba Ventures during the first 8 months of its existence.[17]

AIMATTER was founded in April 2016 and in autumn 2016[18] launched a neural network-based AI platform and SDK to detect and process images quickly on mobile devices. This was the world's first technology working on mobile devices and in streaming video. The photo and video app Fabby served as a proof-of-concept of the tech. Fabby became popular among users and was highly reviewed by experts (the app twice became №1 in its category on ProductHunt[19]). AIMATTER also developed hair segmentation technology during live streaming video that was later introduced in the Fabby Look app.

In August 2017 TechCrunch[20] announced news about Google acquiring AIMATTER. The deal became historic for the Belarusian IT industry. It was the first time that an international company bought Belarusian legal entity. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. Some members of the AIMATTER team relocated to the Google offices in San Francisco and Zurich, while others remained in Minsk.

Today Maps.me is a free cartographic service available on iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. The company, initially called MapsWithMe, was founded in 2010 with the head office in Zurich and the R&D center in Minsk. Yuri launched the project together with Alexander Zolotarev, Victor Govako and Sergey Retchiskiy. Before founding MapsWithMe Yuri worked at Google[21] (cartographic service), eBay, include7 and Qnective.[22]

MapsWithMe was first released on iOS in April, 2011. In 2012, the service team won first prize at the StartupMonthly competition in Vilnius and won an internship in Silicon Valley. In February 2012, a new update of MapsWithMe was released for Android and in July 2014 the company was renamed to MAPS.ME.

In November 2014 MAPS.ME was acquired by Mail.ru Group[23] who were interested in preserving product independence within its structure and further development of MAPS.ME. Along with Mail.ru Group, MAPS.ME received acquisition offers from Yandex and Google.

Yuri Gurski, MAPS.ME mentor comments:

“MAPS.ME is the coolest Open Street Map project in the world, that’s my personal opinion. Together with Mail.Ru it will do a lot to improve open geographical data, will become global and big 100%. There are the skills, the knowledge and the money to make it happen”[24]

MAPS.ME acquisition garnered a lot of media attention and was featured among the most significant deals of Runet[25] (Lenta.ru, the Runet, VC.ru[26]). "Thanks to this deal the popular cartographic service is now available for free".[27] At the moment of the deal "the app was downloaded more than 7 million times and it was one of the most popular in the “Travel" section in more than 100 countries".[28]

• Yury Melnichek on Facebook
• Yury Melnichek on Twitter