OSINT in one click. How the Ukrainian startup X-Ray Contact works and why it may be of interest to both recruiters and intelligence agencies

During IT Arena 2025, a dev.ua correspondent crossed paths with Senior Partnerships Manager at X-Ray Contact Serhiy Ninichuk during the pitching of Ukrainian startups. He told us how their startup, which started with classic OSINT in the interests of the Ukrainian military, plans to expand into many other areas and is looking for funding to expand its functionality. Also, thanks to the access to the platform provided to us, dev.ua was able to independently check how «OSINT in one click» works using the example of public figures, as well as the author of the article and his wife. By the way, readers can do this too — an open access link is at the end of the article.

Trust, but verify.

According to Serhiy Ninichuk, X-Ray Contact is an OSINT platform that provides a social background check on any person around the world.

«A simple example: you are communicating with someone on WhatsApp, but you don’t know this person. You want to check them, you take their phone number, enter it in the appropriate box in our platform. You wait a few minutes and you have a full background check on this person with emails, phone numbers, names of colleagues, relatives, social networks, cities where the person has been before. This is a kind of preliminary check of the person with whom you will communicate,» the representative of X-Ray Contact explained to us. As for the audience of potential clients, as Ninichuk says, it can be a check of partners for business purposes, it can be a check of candidates by recruiters, it can also be used by law enforcement officers and the military, government agencies, journalists, and for classic OSINT purposes.

As Serhiy Ninichuk said, their startup was fully launched during the full-scale invasion, and the first area in which it found its application was helping Ukrainian military structures find the necessary information about representatives of the enemy army and other citizens of the Russian Federation who were in the field of view of our special services.

«We started by providing intelligence on the Russians and helping our military structures. And only then did we realize that we could monetize. We began to extract OSINT channels through a global search for Europe, the USA, and other countries. Now we have more than 500 OSINT channels and integrations with partners via API. When a user performs a search, we query all these sources. That is, we do not have this data, we are information aggregators,» Ninichuk commented.

According to him, although there are currently solutions that X-Ray Contact considers to be competing, the Ukrainian startup «has focused specifically on AI.»

dev.ua also asked Ninichuk whether such information collection, as proposed by their startup, has any potential conflict points with the legislation of various countries, especially EU countries, which are very sensitive to the collection of personal data.

«All this data that we collect is from open sources. This is all the data that a person has already independently shown about himself at some point. Because of this, we can safely follow the GDPR (the European Union regulation that regulates the collection, processing and protection of personal data of individuals — Ed.), because we propose to delete the user’s data and prohibit collection completely,» the startuper assured.

To date, X-Ray Contact has already received some funding. This year, the startup joined the investment accelerator The UK-Ukraine TechBridge. In addition, X-Ray Contact received a grant from Google as part of the Ukraine Support Fund program for Ukrainian startups.

How it works

A monthly or annual subscription to X-Ray Contact, depending on the tariff, allows you to get a certain number of credits — silver or gold coins, each of which provides a search. Silver — basic, faster, but less thorough, gold — advanced. We didn’t have to pay for the attempt — X-Ray Contact representatives kindly provided a certain number of credits for free.

You can search by:

• by phone;
• by email;
• a link to a social media page;
• by name.

After entering one of the listed identifiers for search, the system pulls up a set of data about the person. In particular, it forms their brief biography, and also provides tags by which the person may be «in the know» somewhere, checks whether their phone is roaming, whether they are prone to frequent job changes, and whether they have any relationship with hostile or unfriendly countries (Russia, China, Iran, Belarus).

In addition, the application pulls up other names or pseudonyms on social networks, relatives, other telephone numbers, addresses to which this person is related, as well as a large number of media links to news in various fields related to the person for whom the query was made.

What the system finds on Fedorov’s social networks (as well as the phones of the author of the article and his wife)

As a small experiment, dev.ua decided to test the work of X-Ray Contact, using links to the social networks of one of the first persons of the state, as well as the phones of the author of the article and his wife, as identifiers for searching.

We typed in Mikhail Fedorov’s LinkedIn link and ended up with a short bio, a list of his employers and positions, an official work email address, and, of course, a bunch of news links. In fact, we hardly expected to find more, realizing that the social networks of politicians of this level would most likely be registered to separate phone numbers or emails, allocated by the press service specifically for this, and would not carry any kind of «digital footprint.»

In the hope of finding something personal or interesting, we also tried to search for data on Mikhail Fedorov using links to his Threads and Instagram (after all, Fedorov declares that Threads is the only social network that he runs independently without the help of a press service). In recent tests, we managed to find even less — only links to news about the deputy prime minister. For the first search for Fedorov, we used the «gold coin», and for the other two — the «silver» one (it’s hard to say whether this affected the results).

Much more interesting was the search for the phones of «mere mortals», the author of the article and his wife Svitlana. True, a «shocking» fact was discovered about her — in fact, her last name is Permyakova Viktoriya Eduardovna, and she turned out to be not at all who she claimed to be. The result of which was such an unrecognizable modification of the name that even the wife herself is difficult to say. In addition, regarding Svitlana, whose biography was still more or less accurately transmitted by the system (except for the fact that she has been working since 1970 in the RIA media holding, when neither the holding itself nor she existed yet), two risk factors were discovered — registration on the Russian «soap» (in the time immemorial when it was still mainstream), as well as on the Russian social network VKontakte (when, again, Facebook was still something incomprehensible, and half of Ukraine was registered on VK). True, the Russian «soap» in question was completely unfamiliar to her (according to her wife).

At the same time, regarding Svitlana, X-Ray Contact pulled up quite a few names of colleagues and acquaintances from the beginning of her media career, as well as a large number of emails (10) and phone numbers (27, private and work), which sometimes relate to her, and sometimes (to a greater extent) — not. In addition, in the section related to places related to Svitlana, it also revealed her former place of residence and another location familiar to her. Interestingly, the search also yielded links to what appeared to be her social networks, but two links led to pages of people with the same name (it’s interesting how this works, considering that the search was conducted by phone number), and two to her sister’s page.

The information on the author’s phone was less interesting — the system almost «felt» his name, calling him «Ivav Vyshevsty», which is not that far from «Ihor Vishnevsky». As well as several work connections with previous employers, which indicates that the author may have been signed in someone’s phones in a specific way. Nevertheless, there are definitely matches. Of the links that were «pulled up» by the author, several were to his articles in various publications, but most were to namesakes and unrelated. The system does not know the author’s more or less high-quality biography (logically, because it is not listed in detail in any of the social networks or on any of the websites, and a number of the author’s accounts have been lost).

Testing, according to the author, showed that X-Ray Contact offers a powerful solution for finding a huge amount of information, moreover, spread out on shelves, in one place and with one request. Such opportunities will be a real find for investigators, journalists, law enforcement officers, the military, as well as recruiters in any fields and representatives of «sensitive» businesses — for example, weapons manufacturers. Also, conducting such a check is appropriate to avoid any reputational risks. At the same time, the current version of X-Ray Contact clearly still has room to grow — after all, it is not worth relying 100% on the correspondence of the retrieved data. But the system already makes it easy to find connections that can be a powerful start for further search. So the matter is — for further improvement and growth.

PS All dev.ua readers can try the OSINT-free trial from X-Ray Contact themselves

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