Rustam Gilfanov is the co-founder of an international IT company, partner of the LongeVC venture fund.

FAMILY

Rustam Gilfanov was born on January 6, 1983, in the small village of Basim, Perm Region. His father was a military man, his mother was a primary school teacher. Since childhood, Mr Gilfanov has been interested in mathematics, science fiction and scientific discoveries.

EDUCATION

After school, Rustam Gilfanov entered Udmurt State University. In 2005, he received a diploma in Law and continued his studies at the Master's degree Insolvency Law program of the International Eastern European University.

CAREER: FROM STUDENT TO CO-FOUNDER OF AN INTERNATIONAL COMPANY

Mr Gilfanov's student years coincided with the Internet development boom. While studying to become a lawyer, the future investor began to take an interest in information technologies. He gained valuable experience in creating and developing several international IT projects.

In 2006, Rustam Gilfanov together with his partners opened an international outsourcing IT company in Kyiv. Today, it is a leader in software development, marketing and finance. The company has launched over 100 successful projects and has offices in the largest cities of Ukraine, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta.

The main focus of this company was and still is on supporting talented young people. In just 5 years, its staff increased from 30 to 1,000 employees. Each of these individuals gets the necessary opportunities to develop their potential.

CHARITY WORK

Rustam Gilfanov actively supports charitable initiatives, especially educational projects for children and teenagers.

"ЛакіБукс" (it reads like "LuckyBooks") is one of the most notable and large-scale initiatives. It takes places in the framework of cooperation with the "Я Майбутнє України" ("I Am The Future Of Ukraine") foundation. The project was created to support talented authors and distribute non-fiction for teenagers in the Ukrainian language. The project includes books by Ukrainian scientists and writers as well as translated scientific bestsellers.

The history of "ЛакіБукс" began in 2017 at the international "Book Arsenal" festival in Kyiv. A year later, the project became the general partner of the children's program of the festival. "ЛакіБукс" experts are prominent scientists and public figures of Ukraine, such as Tatiana Kovalchuk-Skorokhod, a researcher at the Space Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and Oleg Skripka, a musician. The project also took part in book exhibitions in Bologna, Frankfurt am Main and in a dozen Ukrainian cities.

At the very beginning, "ЛакіБукс" collaborated with several children's libraries in the East of Ukraine. Today, it has expanded to 200 libraries in all regions of the country. In 2018, over 5,000 copies of popular science books for teenagers were distributed in libraries: from "Summer in the DNA" book about biotechnology by Alina Shtefan to "A Brief History of Technology" by programmer Andrey Tuzhikov. Books are sent primarily to rural libraries in the Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine, where there is a shortage of non-fiction in the Ukrainian language.

PRIVATE INVESTMENT ACTIVITIES

A few years ago, Rustam Gilfanov retired from operational activities in the IT company that he founded to focus on international investment in promising IT projects in the field of financial technology, gaming and video streaming.