Serhii Kukunin: “In life, you need to strive to outdo not others, but yourself” (Maltbie Davenport Babcock)

Serhii Kukunin is an internationally recognized IT expert in software development and a technical leader of large international IT projects. In his life, he has never chased success. Success just follows him closely. Everything he undertakes, he succeeds in and it leads to victories. The year 2022 was no exception when Serhii received an invitation to participate in the StartupBus championship. He liked the idea so much that he decided to take part in the competition.

This is about StartupBus – one of the most well-known technology startup competitions in the world that has been around for over 10 years. The competition has taken place on four continents, and its participants have included more than 1,800 entrepreneurs from various IT professions who have built amazing startups that have attracted around 1 billion dollars in venture capital. Notably, StartupBus has been sponsored by many large and small companies, including Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, Spotify, Facebook, New York Times, AT&T, SAP, and others.

StartupBus is an educational camp for entrepreneurs that involves software engineers, designers, managers, subject matter experts, and other professionals and innovators from across the country where the championship takes place. Previously unknown contestants form teams while traveling on a bus and develop well thought-out and coded technical presentations, competing against each other.

It was also the case at a competition held in Austin, Texas, USA. Four participants, including Serhii Kukunin, formed a team called Recruitly to create a platform for video interviews based on artificial intelligence. Spoiler alert: the expert jury of the competition recognized Recruitly’s work as the best among the most interesting and promising projects, and the team ultimately won the championship.

Each team had three days in total. Recruitly lucked out a bit with their idea. The source of inspiration for developing the AI-based video interview platform was a bus conductor who was riding with the team. The girl was a recruiter, so the guys set out to build a solution that solves her work problems.

Although all members of the team had technical backgrounds, it was Serhii who took on the technical implementation of the project. One team member prepared the pitch, slides, communicated with potential clients, and put forward ideas. Two more members were engineers and focused on artificial intelligence technologies. Serhii was the most experienced software developer, and therefore took on all the basic development of the application, including the main architecture, infrastructure, server-side, and part of the external interface development. In the competition, he was responsible for writing 80% of the code. And after the championship, he completed it entirely.

Thus, the victory in the StartupBus 2022 provided an opportunity to launch a potential startup in the field of personnel management. After the event, Serhii and another team member continued to work on the project, renaming Recruitly to eClare. Soon they plan to launch the first version, so to this day they are working on the project.

Returning to the competition, it is worth noting the colossal work of the professional jury. For many years, StartupBus has had many prominent names in technology from different countries around the world serve as judges. They were chosen for their contributions to startups, technical knowledge, and years of experience. We are confident that this year, as well, StartupBus will organize another spectacular event in the history of technology, aiming to arm a new generation of technology leaders and challenge the existing order. It is quite possible that at this championship, Serhii Kukunin will participate not as a contestant but as a full-fledged member of the jury.

Given his expertise and professionalism in software development, leading roles in launching and developing such massive startups as EasyHealth Inc., Spotlight Media Labs Inc., and Matic Insurance Services Inc., as well as experience judging well-known IT competitions like DevChallenge XVII and the European Digital Blockchain Hackathon “UtonHack,” the StartupBus 2023 competition will be able to add another well-known name in the IT technology field to its history – the name of Serhii Kukunin, which will increasingly resonate in the wider circles of American business each year.

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