Fifteen years ago, Oleksandr Kosovan founded MacPaw, a software development company that develops and distributes products for macOS and iOS.
The Ukrainian entrepreneur and investor has grown his bootstrapped company to more than 500 people, with products that have more than 30 million users worldwide. Kosovan is also leading MacPaw through a war, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
While the majority of MacPaw’s team is in Ukraine, this fall Kosovan led the company on a journey to expand globally. MacPaw has opened a new office in Cambridge and plans to grow its local team to about 30 employees by 2025.
Wartime operations
While Kosovan said the war was not the impetus for MacPaw’s expansion, it did impact the company and its team.
MacPaw is headquartered in Kyiv, Ukraine, and about 70% of the company’s employees remain in the country, Kosovan told BostInno.
When rumors began to spread about a potential Russian attack, Kosovan said they helped some employees leave the country. They also prepared for the company’s systems to operate largely autonomously in the event they lost electricity and Internet.
“After the first month of the war, we slowly started to recover the business operations. We told our people that it is important to do economic activity as well because if we don’t have enough resources to survive, to pay taxes, to support our country, it means we might fail as a country and Russia may win this way and not directly through the war,” Kosovan said.
The chief executive said the MacPaw team has also donated time, resources and money to different projects to fight the Russian invasion.
Growth in a new market
MacPaw is known for its products such as CleanMyMac X, Setapp and ClearVPN. The company says one in five Macs have at least one MacPaw app.
Kosovan said they’ve had a U.S. customer base for a long time, with about 40% of their users based here. MacPaw is still a Ukrainian company, he said, but he thinks it will help them understand the U.S. market and culture if they have a physical presence in this country.
“This was a strategic decision to expand to where our customers are and to have connections with some technological businesses and communities in Boston,” Kosovan said.
The company’s new office is at 10 Canal Park in Cambridge. Kosovan said they plan to hire locally and relocate some team members from Ukraine. The company is already taking small steps to bring its culture to Cambridge, including naming its meeting rooms in the Cambridge office after Ukrainian cities.
Kosovan said the Boston area was their choice for a new office because it was a place that reminded him of a European city. Being in Boston also means access to new tech talent coming out of local universities, he said.
“Even though we are in a war, we are still trying to think about the future and how we can grow our company,” Kosovan said.
Sign up for The Beat, BostInno’s free daily innovation newsletter from BostInno reporter Hannah Green. See past examples here.
