Peech, a startup founded by three people from Belarus, has raised $550,000 from Flyer One Ventures (F1V), the venture capital wing of the tech company Genesis. Part of the startup’s team works in Ukraine, Forbes reports.
- Peech is developing an application that converts scanned or downloaded text into audio.
- The app is available in 60 languages and has been running since fall 2021.
- The lead investor is the Ukrainian venture capital firm Flyer One Ventures. Yury Mazanik, the co-founder of the mobile game developer Belka Games, also joined the financing.
Peech’s co-founders are Andrey Poznyak, Oleksii Gorbal, and Bahram Ismailov. They all moved from Belarus to Ukraine after the mass protests against the proclamation of President Alexander Lukashenko in August 2020.
The Peech team consists of ten people. The founders and top management work from Poland, Portugal, and Estonia. The marketing team is based in Ukraine. Previously all the co-founders worked as developers in international IT companies. Poznyak, the startup’s CEO, worked for the US outsourcing company Coherent Solutions and online casino game developer Skywind Group. Gorbal developed products for EPAM and the Belarusian company Lightpoint.
Peech’s primary audience is highly specialized professionals, such as medics or financiers, who consume a lot of field information. The app is also popular among students and fans of anime and fantasy. The most users are from Italy, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the United States. The co-founders of Peech plan to use the investment to scale up in America and Western Europe.
Previously one of the founders of Flyer One Ventures, Vital Laptenok, invested in another startup developing an app for real-time recording videos of users and their interaction with any content in a smartphone, Yope (Salo).
“We only had one 45-minute meeting, and as a result of that meeting, we got an offer,” Ismailov says. He is not involved in the operational management of Peech, but he supports his business partners with advice and contacts.
