Ukrainian students are developing an app to rival Google Maps that will create a personalized route through Kyiv so you don't miss a single important place. Here's what we know about it

From science to business

Mykola graduated with honors with a bachelor’s degree in systems analysis from IPSA, NTUU KPI named after Igor Sikorsky and is currently studying for a master’s degree in computer science at the Department of Mathematics of Kyiv Academic University and works as a software engineer at the V. M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the NAS of Ukraine.

The startup for him began in the fall of 2023 with a research task from the scientific supervisor Stetsyuk Petro Ivanovych, head of the department of non-smooth optimization methods at the V. M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the NAS of Ukraine. He suggested that Mykola work on the development of mathematical models for special routing problems. The student accepted the proposal.

To find more people who would also be interested in doing mathematical modeling tasks, Petro Ivanovich, together with Mykola, went to the program «Ideathon „TRUE Science: Introduction and Research Practice“», which was organized by Kyiv Academic University together with Noosphere Engineering School.

During the two months of the Ideathon, the team was supplemented by two more students and together they worked on the development and theoretical substantiation of mathematical models that allow finding the shortest routes for visiting a given number of locations of different types. In parallel, the team explored various possible areas for the application of the developed models. As Mykola noted, this could be anything: from logistics transportation to planning the sequence of actions in multi-stage production.

The startuper said that when the team began preparing for the final report on the program, inspired by a scientific article they read, they chose the field of hiking tourism to illustrate the developed models.

In the process, the participants quickly synchronized the general vision of the first version of the application prototype. And already at the final report of the Ideathon, the students were offered to continue their work within the framework of the «Support Program for Student Academic Scientific and Innovative Projects and Startups» from Kyiv Academic University and Noosphere Engineering School. It was during participation in this program that the team was supplemented by another participant and, under the guidance of a business mentor, focused on the possibility of transforming a scientific result into a startup.

About the product

The goal of the ExactOptiRoute web application is to help people build optimal personalized tourist routes through the center of Kyiv. It can be useful for users who are visiting the capital for the first time and/or do not want to manually compile a list of places of interest to them. Thus, using its own mathematical models, the application allows you to take into account users' preferences and wishes directly when building a route with automatic selection of locations — combining the stages of planning a trip together instead of separating them. This is how the name of the application came about, as an abbreviation for the main task that the team set itself: building exact personalized optimal routes (exactly optimal routes).

How the service works

In the application, the user is greeted by a map of Kyiv, which displays a certain fixed set of locations and two menus with fields for entering information. At the moment, the location database contains 30 different places of four different types: 14 restaurants, 10 museums, 5 parks and 1 metro station. According to the developers, this number of locations was enough for testing the application, and they plan to expand the database in the future.

The current version of the web application is shown in the image below.

The menu on the right is mandatory for the user. This is where the main wishes for the route are entered:

• the starting and ending locations are determined,
• It indicates how many locations of a certain type will need to be visited.

In the example in the image above, the starting vertex was the restaurant «Puzata Hata”', the ending vertex was the Museum of Outstanding Figures of Ukrainian Culture, and it was specified that during the route it is necessary to visit 2 restaurants, 4 museums, and 2 parks without repetitions. Since the restaurant and the museum have already been selected as, respectively, the starting and ending locations, this is automatically taken into account. Next, the algorithm will need to select 1 restaurant, 3 museums, and 2 parks. If the user had specified the number zero in one of the fields, this type of location would have been automatically excluded from consideration.

In addition, users can impose special restrictions on the route, namely:

• define some locations as mandatory to visit during the route. To do this, you need to click on the icon of the corresponding institution on the map. In the example, the National Museum of History of Ukraine, the Museum of History of Kyiv, and the restaurant «Mushlya» were selected as mandatory to visit.
• determine the order of visiting some of the locations that were selected as mandatory. In the example under consideration, this order is set for visiting two museums: first the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, then the Museum of the History of Kyiv.

On the left, the user has a drop-down menu with three submenus, each of which contains fields for entering their preferences for each type of location (restaurants, parks, and museums). The image shows the submenu for restaurants. Here, the user can indicate their budget constraints, preferences for the atmosphere of the establishment, the need for permission to enter with animals, and preferences for food. These menus are not mandatory: if the user does not want to enter any preferences, they can leave them blank — then the route building procedure will be based only on the data from the menu on the right.

When all the information is entered by the user, all that remains is to click the «Build route» button. After a few seconds of waiting, the optimal walking plan is displayed on the map along with the specified order of visiting locations and the total length of the route.

About the team

The project team, which turned from a scientific work into a startup ExactOptiRoute, was formed as follows. The project was started by the project mentor Petro Ivanovych Stetsyuk, a scientist with more than 40 years of experience in applying mathematical programming methods and numerical optimization methods to solve real-world problems in various industries, and his master’s student Mykola Korablev.

After presenting the idea at the Ideathon, which the researchers were working on, two full stack developers, studying for a master’s degree in computer engineering at the Faculty of Radiophysics, Electronics and Computer Systems of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and earning a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics at the Faculty of Computer Science and Cybernetics, responded to their offer of cooperation: Oleksandr Stoyan and Oleh Gubernator. They became co-founders of the startup, as well as, respectively, the two CTOs of the project.

Also, when the three-day startup camp «Boost-Camp» was held at KAU in the spring of 2024, Mykola met Oleksandra Mykhaylenko, who at that time was a bachelor’s student in Software Engineering at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and is now studying for a master’s degree in Computer Science at the National University of Odesa Polytechnic. She became interested in the student project and joined the team to do marketing and business analysis.

The student team, as Mykola emphasizes, will be greatly assisted by Vadym Volodymyrovych Gorenko, a mentor and business coach with over 12 years of experience in helping startup/company owners and managers launch and develop their businesses. He began working with the team as a business mentor from KAU and continues to work with the team now and advises them on business development issues.

So, as Mykola explains, all team members are students who work on ExactOptiRoute in their free time from studies and main work. According to him, there is no talk of increasing the team yet, the current tasks of expanding the application’s functionality and user research (customer development) are handled by four people, with the support of scientific and business mentors.

Waiting for ExactOptiRoute

Currently, the startups have already created an MVP of the web application, in particular, they have configured the interaction of all its components: the interface, backend, location database, recommendation system, and mathematical modeling module.

Thanks to the use of precise algorithms by the service, which the developers used, when solving routing problems, they can explicitly take into account the user’s personal priorities when planning a walk. In particular, thanks to the function of marking locations as mandatory for visiting, you can encourage the application to build a route that will not miss a certain landmark or the user’s favorite restaurant.

The developers call the optimal plan for visiting locations, which takes into account the wishes and preferences of the user, the main advantage of ExactOptiRoute among other programs. This is achieved by combining operations research models, artificial intelligence methods and algorithms for accurately solving optimal routing problems, which allows you to integrate the selection of suitable locations to visit directly into the route construction procedure.

The startupers' product is currently at the prototype stage, so according to Mykola, it has no users. They are refining it based on requests and wishes from interested individuals and companies and the specialized department of the Kyiv City State Administration.

About money

At the beginning of the journey, during the «Ideathon» and the Program for Supporting Student Academic Scientific and Innovative Projects and Startups, KAU and Noosphere Engineering School supported the startup with a monthly scholarship of several thousand hryvnias for each participating student. All further work on refining and developing the web application prototype is carried out on the participants' own initiative. According to Mykola, to support the team’s work, the startupers are now looking for grant funding opportunities, foreign or domestic.

But they are also already thinking about different monetization schemes that can be implemented for different users.

Therefore, according to him, for B2C they plan to set a certain fixed price for purchasing the application in PlayMarket and AppStore with the ability to build a fixed number of unique routes. After that, the user will be able to «purchase» the route planning service when needed.

As for B2B and B2G, here, as the startuper says, monetization can be achieved through contracts for implementing the development into their workflows using their existing databases of tourist locations and a monthly payment for supporting the service.

About customers and distribution

During 2024, project participants were selected and participated in the Science2Business practical program from the INNOV8 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, the CityAccelerator acceleration program, which was implemented by ISECorporateAccelerator at the request of the Department of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development of the Executive Body of the Kyiv City Council (Kyiv City State Administration), and the Academ.City acceleration program from Kyiv Academic University. At the final CityAccelerator Demo Day on November 20, they presented the KNP project «Kyiv Tourism Development Center» and received valuable comments and discussed many ideas for the future development of the service.

Currently, the startups are focused on the domestic market and improving the planning of tourist routes through major cities in Ukraine: Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, etc. At the same time, they are also establishing connections with European companies, for example, they are negotiating with a travel agency from Portugal, and continue to actively communicate with potential B2B clients and stakeholders both in Ukraine and abroad.

About plans and scaling

Currently, startups continue to actively communicate with potential B2B clients and stakeholders both in Ukraine and abroad. By communicating with tourism specialists, they seek to learn about pressing problems that need to be solved.

Also, thanks to the surveys conducted, feedback is collected and a list of necessary improvements and functionality extensions is prepared. These are the ones that are planned to be prioritized in the development plans.

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