Startup

Selling an apartment to create your own product is a decision that is difficult to explain in an Excel spreadsheet or a presentation to investors. But that is exactly what Ukrainian IT professionals did when they decided to put all their savings into their own idea. In 2022, the war forced Orest and his fiancée Maria to leave Kharkiv. They first moved to Kyiv, then to Warsaw. To start a new life, the couple sold their apartment in Kharkiv and decided to invest all the proceeds not in new real estate, but in their own IT product. This is how Cibo was born, a food tracking app that the developers created primarily for themselves. Maria, a Java developer, was responsible for the technical part and design, and Orest, with ten years of experience in game development, was responsible for the idea and product development. Today, Cibo has 140 users, 15 paid subscriptions, and is growing exclusively organically so far. The team plans to launch its first paid marketing on September 1st. dev.ua talked to Orest about how to sell an apartment and put everything on their own product, why they decided to create another calorie tracker, and whether it is possible to build a global application, starting virtually from scratch in Warsaw.

A visual social platform, Mimeon, is being launched in Ukraine — a domestic alternative to Pinterest and DeviantArt. Its main uniqueness lies in the complete absence of a language barrier: there are no text captions or hashtags. The platform offers an endless canvas of art, where categorization and search are implemented using artificial intelligence and vector databases, and communication occurs exclusively through images.

Ukrainian engineer Stanislav Cherednychenko created AnyPager himself, an emergency notification service that should wake up developers during critical incidents. The first commit in the repository appeared on May 7, 2026, and on August 9, the application was submitted for review in the App Store. During this time, one developer created the backend, iOS and Android clients, Wear OS support, CLI for five platforms, a web dashboard, billing via Stripe, and documentation. He did a lot of the work with Claude Code and AI agents. He estimates that the direct development costs were about $150. But there is an important caveat: artificial intelligence helped create the product, but the product itself works without AI. «AI built AnyPager, but AI won’t wake you up — that’s what queue, retry, and if do,» explains the founder of dev.ua.