Ciklum calls pandemic ‘chief transformation officer,’ helps famous brands adapt

Editor’s Note: This story is part of the Kyiv Post series of profiles of information technology companies that work in Ukraine. Ciklum is a sponsor of IT Fellowship, a program that supports the Kyiv Post’s tech coverage.

Ciklum
Year founded: 2002
CEO: Kulraj Smagh
Number of employees: 3,500+
Motto: “Inspiring businesses to bring innovative ideas to life.”
What separates you from other companies? “Building hi-tech products and platforms in highly complex environments.”

Inspired by famed car manufacturer Henry Ford and Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, late Danish native Torben Majgaard founded a tech company in Ukraine in 2002.

Majgaard called it Ciklum and started with a small team of programmers working in a Kyiv apartment.

Two decades later, despite political and economic turbulence in Ukraine, Ciklum has become one of the largest IT companies in the country with offices also in Belarus, Spain, Britain, Poland and Pakistan.

“No matter what happens around us, IT is free,” Torben told the Kyiv Post in an interview back in 2017.

As a software development and outsourcing company, Ciklum works on creating custom-fit digital solutions, including in such areas like electronic commerce, cybersecurity, automation and data analysis.

In late 2015, George Soros’s fund invested in Ciklum. He bought the major share of the company. Currently, Recognize Partners, a U.S.-based private investment firm, is the majority shareholder after it acquired a controlling stake last year.

Awarded with dozens of international IT prizes, the company has recently added another one from the Global Sourcing Association for Ciklum building an online B2B marketplace for Germany’s biggest retailer Metro in just nine months.

As a result, Metro now offers thousands of non-food products online — kitchen equipment, office supplies, tableware — for hotel, restaurant and catering industries under its own brand and products from around 300 vendors.

In another project, the Ciklum team helped Dacadoo, a Swiss-based company, to grow from a small startup into a global platform. The company developed software for them.

Dacadoo’s app measures health from 0 to 1,000 by tracking activity, sleep, nutrition and bad habits like smoking and drinking alcohol and other parameters. It has 200 million clients in 40 countries.

Moreover, a few years ago, during the Cities Hackathon in the U. S. Santa Clara, Ciklum’s engineers created a smart defibrillator, a device to treat people with sudden cardiac arrest. When someone starts to charge the device, it automatically calls 911 and tracks the closest ambulance.

According to Ciklum CFO Andriy Oksenyuk, nearly 80% of Ciklum’s tech specialists — software developers, designers, product managers, data scientists — work in Ukrainian offices in Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv, Vinnytsia, Odesa, and Kharkiv.

“Ciklum is its people,” said Oksenyuk. “We are religiously focused on high-level professionals, and we need the most talented of them.”

The company has managed not only to save the team and projects amid the pandemic, it actually continues to hire people. In fact, Oksenyuk called the pandemic “chief transformation officer” as it increased the need for tech solutions amid booming e-commerce.

“We are currently looking for over 400 more talented people to enhance our team,” he said.