Volodymyr Panchenko is a serial entrepreneur who has built three successful companies and one promising one. What drives him to start from scratch again and again and what helps him reach one?
Volodymyr Panchenko, 40, tells with a smile how he “raised the round” for his first project. It was in 2007, and the “startup” was a trip to the World Rally Championship in Wales. At the time, Panchenko was making a weekly TV program about motorsport “Megadrive” on the Megasport channel and wanted to do a story about Wales. The asking price was $10,000. The potential investor ran every day from the River Station, in the capital’s Podil, to what was then Leo Tolstoy Square. “I ran with him and sweated. It was really bad several times. But I didn’t give up,” recalls Panchenko. He received the money.
Eighteen years later, Panchenko’s business portfolio includes four companies: Suntechsoft, Skins.Cash, DMarket and Portal AI, over $36 million in attracted investments, and one of the most successful “Ukrainian” exits — DMarket. “He is a successful serial entrepreneur with a lot of regalia,” says Hypra general partner Igor Pertsia. But he adds that Panchenko is already at a level where investors are ready to invest money not so much in his business as in his name.
Panchenko grew up in a family that valued good stories: his father was a documentary filmmaker, his mother was a sound engineer. “My father could spend years building the drama of a hero. He wanted to get the story to as many people as possible,” Panchenko says.
The idea of giving every person a “voice” and a tool to convey their story and thoughts to the widest possible audience is at the heart of his new startup Portal AI, which uses AI to create personalized videos from users’ stories.
According to Civitta and u.ventures, there are over 2,600 IT startups in Ukraine. But there are two orders of magnitude fewer Ukrainian founders who can be called serial entrepreneurs, the most famous of which are Vadim Rogovsky, Yegor Anchishkin, Max Polyakov, and Volodymyr Panchenko.
How does Volodymyr Panchenko manage to reinvent a new business time and time again and what is the recipe for a successful startup?
A person who plays games
His mother called Volodymyr a scientist, an academician. “But then I got a computer,” Panchenko jokes. His hobbies after that were video games and fantasy. In his teens, he soldered microcircuits and “overclocked” processors. Then he built four IT companies, which, according to Panchenko, united his vision of the future.
“I see the world where I want to be,” the entrepreneur answers when asked where he gets his ideas for businesses. His youthful passions – gaming and fantasy – give rise to ideas about the future world. “I read the same books as Musk and Bezos,” he says. His favorite author is Neal Stevenson. Panchenko still spends 20 hours a month playing games, playing Counter Strike the most.
The entrepreneur describes his own formula for starting a business as follows: searching for new technologies, analyzing how they can improve people’s lives, and implementing them, driven by the desire to “get to the future faster.” “Most of his ideas have the potential to turn the world upside down,” says Panchenko’s mentor, Unicorn Nest founder Denys Dovgopoly, who has been working with him since 2016. “Each project involves either a new methodology or a solution that is still difficult to imagine,” he adds.
However, the first steps in the business were solving more prosaic issues. In 2008, gamer Panchenko saw an opportunity to make money by reselling activation codes for video games. He bought boxes in Ukraine, where the price was lower, and sold the codes on eBay to American gamers. The business ended in the second week, when eBay blocked resale.
The next attempt was more successful: the entrepreneur found an opportunity to officially resell games. In 2010, Panchenko launched Suntechsoft, a company that bought games directly from distributors and sold keys on online platforms.
Panchenko figured out how to make serious money in virtual worlds in 2015. He was one of the first to notice a new trend: virtual items in online games are ready to be bought for big and real money. Skins in CS:GO were especially popular. The entrepreneur launched Skins.Cash, a platform that allowed gamers to sell skins.
“A player would bring us a skin for $300, we would pay him $250 and sell it on with a markup,” he explains. The development cost $1 million, but in the first year alone, the revenue was $1–2 million per month. “He knows how to quickly grasp and implement opportunities that appear on the market,” says Dovgopoly.
In 2017, Panchenko stepped away from operational activities in early projects. “The first two are my main income (he estimated the combined revenue at €30 million per year. –Forbes), but not my main occupation,” Panchenko said in 2021. “The main project is our non-profit startup.” That’s what he called DMarket at the time, an exchange for trading virtual game items and skins on the blockchain.
Panchenko first “met” cryptocurrency back in 2009. He tried Bitcoin arbitrage, lost money in the collapse of the Mt. Gox platform and temporarily cooled down to cryptocurrencies. But not to the very idea of blockchain. “In 2017, I read a bunch of technical documentation and understood how it could be connected to gaming,” he recalls. This is how DMarket appeared – a blockchain exchange where gamers could transparently sell and buy game items.
Panchenko has raised over $26 million in investments for the project he developed with Tamara Slanova and Oleksandr Kokhanovsky. The lion’s share of the money – $19 million – came from a successful ICO in 2017. Over three years, DMarket was valued at $27.2 million during a round when they raised $7.2 million from Oleksandr Halytsky’s Almaz Capital fund. DMarket earned a commission on each purchase and sale, which ranged from 1% to 10%. The platform’s turnover in 2021 was $60 million, of which approximately $3.6 million was the company’s earnings. Over the next year, the volume of transactions increased 2.9 times, Panchenko told Forbes in previous interviews. At that time, he valued the company at at least $100 million.
In this market, Panchenko had many indirect competitors – WAX, Enjin or GameFlip. “We combined a marketplace, blockchain, complex pricing algorithms and exchange-like mechanisms for setting prices for goods. At the same time, we had our own built-in fintech product with payment services,” Slanova, co-founder of DMarket, lists the competitive advantages of DMarket.
In 2023, DMarket bought the American unicorn Mythical Games, the total revenue this year will reach $1 billion. “I was open to selling the business, saw opportunities and took risks,” Panchenko recalls. He still does not comment on the amount of the deal. After the sale, he said in an interview with Forbes that “everything is fine with multipliers.” According to a conservative estimate of investors surveyed by Forbes Ukraine, the amount of the deal could be $40–45 million. “It would be a shame. Then I would not have sold for that much money,” Panchenko skeptically comments on such an assessment now.
Leap of faith
After the exit, Panchenko “did not leave the game.” He launched the AI startup Portal AI in September 2024. Panchenko, a historian by education, tightened his mathematical base and deeply understood AI technologies. “Just as a normal entrepreneur spends 3–4 hours on English, he crammed higher mathematics into himself,” says Dovgopoly.
The first version of Portal AI developed AI solutions for marketing automation for small and medium-sized businesses. AI could manage a marketing campaign or make recommendations on how to use the advertising budget. Portal AI agents collected and analyzed data about a business client from platforms such as Shopify, Amazon, Google, Meta, Wix, QuickBooks.
The product subscription cost $300 per month. The solution was tested by 500 companies. “The results surpassed the efficiency of traditional advertising agencies,” Panchenko claims.
The startup raised $5 million before its official launch. These were checks of $0.5 million under SAFE deals with a valuation of $50 million, the entrepreneur says. Early investors include Western funds StratMinds VC, AGI House Ventures and Rocky Yu, among others.
In January 2025, the team pivoted its business model: now the main product is an application for creating personalized videos for B2C users. Users can record ideas for which AI will generate videos, publish them and interact with other authors. Panchenko raised another $5 million from a number of angel investors, whose names are not disclosed.
Panchenko admits that the decision to radically change the model was not easy. “It was a product that already worked. But I saw a new world in which billions of people are happy, and we did it,” he says. There may be a more pragmatic reason: the team could see that the B2B niche was small compared to the consumer market, says Hypra general partner Pertsia. “It’s always a business question,” he notes.
The technical basis of Portal AI has not changed: behind the video generation is an orchestrator of 23 AI models: from Google to Runway and Sora. The algorithm itself determines the model that best copes with a specific task.
“Panchenko’s idea looks promising. Everyone needs video: from bloggers and businesses to text creators,” says Horizon Capital investment analyst Andriy Brodetsky. However, this time, Panchenko is joined by a number of visionaries who mastered the technology before him. Brodetsky notes that well-funded competitors have been operating on the market for several years, who have advanced in product development and increased a significant number of users and revenue.
The ideal team member for Volodymyr Panchenko is someone with a big-picture mindset, the ability to say no, the ability to listen and develop. “And a little crazy,” he adds.
Panchenko has a rare combination for entrepreneurs — aggressive in the market, but soft in relationships with people, notes Denys Dovgopoly.
This character helps Panchenko stay with valuable team members “in long and healthy relationships.”
DMarket Panchenko created together with Tamara Slanova and Oleksandr Kokhanovsky. He has known Slanova for over 17 years – she worked with him on the first projects. “We respect each other’s expertise and do not enter into someone else’s zone of responsibility,” she explains the formula for a long-term partnership. “Volodymyr is a visionary who is bursting with ideas, I am a pathfinder,” adds Slanova.
Panchenko believes in the power of proper communication. “Never once has a quarrel brought any results. The problem is not in the people, but in the way of talking to them,” says Panchenko. “My father taught me to love people, to see their stories, their talents.” He sees potential in them and knows how to reveal it, confirms Slanova.
Portal AI’s closest competitors can be seen in the portfolio of the venture fund Andreessen Horowitz — American video generators Captions, Hedra, and Spanish Krea.
One of the directions of development is to build a community on the basis of Portal AI. This could be an additional advantage for the startup, Brodetsky believes. “This motivates people to stay longer and use the service more often,” he adds. Panchenko has experience in this: his previous project DMarket also had an element of community.
“He understands how fan circles and online communities work,” the analyst says. Pertsia agrees that Panchenko is much more comfortable in B2C business because of his previous experience. “Volodymyr is a guru in this niche,” he says.
The founder’s ambitions when it comes to communities are boundless. Panchenko claims that Portal AI can become a new generation social network that will unite users around common ideas. “It will be more than Facebook or Instagram,” he assures. “Volodya has cosmic ideas. If your goal is to colonize Mars, you will probably fly there. And if you dream of a playground, you will build it,” says his DMarket partner Oleksandr Kokhanovsky.
An important question that has not yet been answered is how Portal AI will make money? Panchenko’s general idea is to make money on the success of users. “If their ideas take off, we get a share of the profits,” says the entrepreneur. The team’s plans are to connect users with providers who will help implement the idea, and share the income from the results of cooperation.
Portal AI already has several thousand test users, but they are not yet monetized – this is a conscious choice of the team. “Any monetization will slow down growth,” Panchenko is convinced. A subscription may appear on the service in the near future.
“It will be a symbolic price, conditionally $10 – not so much for earnings, but for the user to feel the value of the product,” explains the founder. Monetization of the audience is a matter of time. “The decision is still at the stage of finding product-market fit, it is logical that they are not in a hurry with monetization,” says the founder of the Toloka syndicate, Alexander Kolb.
“You can create a niche product that a big player will eventually buy,” Pertsia describes another way to make money. And he gives the textbook example of entrepreneur Nikita Bira, who sold the niche social network tbh to Facebook in 2017, and in 2023 the Gas application was acquired by Discord.
Five Forbes interviewees from the venture market believe in Portal AI’s prospects. “Volodymyr has the most important asset - experience,” says Pertsia.
Panchenko is one of the few Ukrainian founders who has gone through the entrepreneurial journey from zero to one again and again. What is the recipe for an endless entrepreneurial journey? “Open to any opportunities,” Panchenko answers.
He says that real business began when he learned not to resist reality, began to let go of control and became open to what was happening. Then his efficiency increased “a hundredfold.” “Now I understand that the main thing is to see opportunities in any meeting, in any situation, even where others see only problems,” the entrepreneur says.
What else is important? Simplicity for the user. “The simpler the product, the more ingenious it is. Buying a toy or creating a video with one click is cool,” says Panchenko.
The material was published in Forbes Ukraine magazine No. 3 [36] for June - July 2025.
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