Startups from Bulgaria have moved to Ukraine and are developing a platform to help tennis players and coaches around the world. How the development helps them

United by entrepreneurship and aid

In addition to her professional experience at Apple and IBM as a senior customer service consultant and later as a corporate trainer responsible for technical and customer service training, Karina Karaga has also consulted for Toyota, Siemens, VMware and others on corporate innovation, product and service design, and leadership. She recently graduated from the venture capital program at Oxford University, and previously studied product and service design at Stanford University’s d.school.

A few years ago, the expert had the idea to create an AI chatbot for intelligent coaching. According to the expert, she was interested in exploring ways to encourage people to be more self-reflective through engaging and interesting technology, while also relieving them of the discomfort and shame that often comes with sharing their problems with another person.

This is where Karina decided to start her own business. In 2023, she met Radinella Dimitrakova, a certified coach accredited by the International Coaching Federation who worked on Elina Svitolina’s tennis team. After a few months of communication, Karina and Radinella outlined the goal of their movement and decided to focus on creating a platform for coaches that helps them provide psychological coaching specifically to young athletes.

Later, Petko Petkov, a software architect with more than 15 years of experience creating enterprise-level software solutions for multi-million dollar companies, also joined the team, taking the position of CTO at the startup and taking on all development issues.

Karina and Petko, who moved to Ukraine in 2022 and have been involved in volunteer activities here, including creating a uniquely designed bomb shelter, the Hobbit House, in Hostomel, currently live in Kyiv. Radinella is involved in the development of a startup from Bulgaria.

«Magic wand» for coaches

The Vodar mobile app, developed by startups, helps sports coaches without sports psychology experience effectively teach the mental skills of their young athletes.

The app provides a Plug and Play methodology for mental training that coaches can immediately implement into their training programs. The product is currently focused on tennis coaches, but the startup plans to expand the app to coaches in other racket sports, individual sports, and eventually team sports, also engaging players and creating a unified gamified experience between athletes and coaches.

What’s under the hood of Vodar

To ensure rapid expansion into new sports beyond tennis and have the freedom to create and experiment with content without restrictions, the startup team decided to focus on the problem of speed of content creation.

This prompted them to develop their own 3D rendering engine, combined with a content creation studio, that allows them to create animated 3D explainer videos with 2D interactive elements—without the need for video footage or a large team to handle the technical aspects of creating educational content.

In the first version of the app, the startup focused solely on mental training for tennis. Using an in-house web tool called Composer, they pre-programmed real-time animated 3D models that can speak, express emotions, and interact with users in real time in any language. These animations serve as interactive guides for coaches on how to perform each exercise and get the most out of it.

«Achieving this flexibility gives us an advantage over competitors who only offer static images or videos, and also provides a complete platform for partner content creators who are interested in exploring different types of psychological training tactics in different sports around the world,» adds the startup’s co-founder.

About the team

The core Vodar team consists of five people: Radinella, Petko, Nicola, Jeff and Karina:

The founder is responsible for the overall management of the company, as well as brand and marketing.

• Radinella handles partnerships and oversight of the UK market.
• Petko is a software engineer responsible for all technical solutions.
• Nikola is a senior 3D designer from Bulgaria.
• Jeff is an American colleague from San Francisco. He is a clinical and sports psychologist with over 25 years of experience as a psychological coach for elite athletes in a variety of sports.

According to Karina, by the end of the year, the startups also plan to expand the team with at least two engineers and another 3D animation designer.

Steps into the world

The Vodar app became available to iOS and Android users in February. Now, according to Karina, the team is actively promoting it through its partners and already has several hundred users. The solution’s first customers have been mostly progressive-minded coaches from the millennial generation, who, Karina emphasizes, recognize the importance of mental coaching.

«We currently have clients in over 15 countries and we plan to double our UK market with our local sales representative providing high-level sales support to some of our most promising clients in the London area,» she says, adding that the startup is targeting tennis coaches from the US, UK and other English-speaking markets in Europe and beyond, including Canada and Australia. They are focusing on tennis club owners.

Although the startups plan to offer the product primarily to English-speaking markets, they have plans to create a special program for Ukrainian tennis coaches and athletes, providing them with free access to the app as a form of supporting their talent and resilience.

In addition, the startup has secured exclusive partnership support from Tennis Europe, the Novak Djokovic Foundation, Dunlop, and several tennis coaching organizations in the United States. As part of the marketing campaign, the startup is launching a number of initiatives, including a Dunlop-branded podcast series, advertising campaigns, and seminars.

Vodar is also part of the second group of the Mission Possible venture program, which Karina speaks of with great respect and pride, as they are the first international company to join the program. In addition, during the Demo Day, which took place on April 25 at MacPaw Space, the startups shared their progress, talked with like-minded people who could join the team, and even, according to Karina, two of the jury judges expressed interest in continuing the conversation. «We are actively exploring opportunities to receive our next investments from Ukraine,» added the startup co-founder.

About money

Vodar’s business model is subscription-based and offers annual and monthly plans. For detailed information on financial protection and monetization options, the startups suggest that potential partners contact them.

The founder said that Vodar raised €275,000 in a pre-seed round with investors from Bulgaria led by one of the most active venture funds in Bulgaria, New Vision 3 Fund (NV3). «Our angel investors are incredible people — one is Elina Svitolina’s former tennis manager and the other is the VP of Marketing and Development at Rakuten Viber,» she says.

After launching a product that Karina calls «wonderfully crafted» and securing an exclusive marketing partnership, the startups recently opened a €300,000 investment round, of which €60,000 has already been invested by their existing angel investors.

«The funds will help us accelerate sales and develop key features to monitor an athlete’s progress,» says the startup. The team is currently in talks with several Ukrainian venture capital firms and angel investors, as well as sports technology-focused investors in the US.

About plans and the future

The startup is currently focused on developing partnerships and increasing brand and product awareness in key markets — the US, UK, and English-speaking users across Europe. At the same time, they plan to conduct experiments in markets such as Canada and Australia.

«Our goal for 2025 is to achieve product market fit (PMF) for our tennis product and launch our second sport,» adds Karina.

In the future, the developers see Vodar as a platform on which sports coaches will be able to develop their own 3D visualizations of training and create their own modules with limited access for their athletes. «We see this as a separate product line, developed in response to the interest of potential clients such as the Rafa Nadal Academy,» the founder adds.

At Vodar, as Karina emphasizes, startupers adhere to the philosophy that winning in life and sports comes down to three simple steps: game, set, mind.

«We put this philosophy into practice by focusing on the small steps right in front of us, planning different tactics with a healthy dose of flexibility, and maintaining a high level of mental toughness,» she notes.

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