Since 2016, the Ukrainian company Opendatabot has been providing Ukrainians with access to government data from the main public registers. It was founded in Dnipro by Oleksii Ivankin and Andrii Khorsiev. Using Opendatabot, Ukrainians can receive court and debt notifications; verify data to protect themselves from fraudsters and raiders; check vehicles, real estate, and much more. The service also provides up-to-date information about companies, entrepreneurs, passport data, and allows individual entrepreneurs to submit reports to the tax authorities and pay taxes. The company also analyzes open data on a weekly basis, providing up-to-date statistics that are useful for both citizens and businesses.
But on December 19, 2024, hackers launched the largest external cyberattack on Ukraine's state registries. The work of the Unified and State Registries under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice was suspended. These are the Unified State Register of Court Decisions; the State Register of Real Property Rights; the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Individual Entrepreneurs and Public Organizations; and the Automated System of Enforcement Proceedings. The attack also paralyzed the work of the Civil Registry Offices.
We spoke with Oleksiy Ivankin, CEO and founder of Openatabot, about open data, the consequences of a cyberattack on state registries, his company's work during the war, artificial intelligence, raiding, and plans for 2025.
Cyberattack on state registries
According to Oleksiy Ivankin, the cyberattack caused some state registries to stop working on the morning of December 19, 2024. "In Ukraine, there is a cohort of people who believe that the worse the better: they have long said that everything is being done wrong. My information bubble is full of these people. We all understand that registries are important. Opendatabot works with these registries. We see what it means to work without registries and what it means to work with registries. For example, in 2017, we found that it was possible to remove a company from the Unified State Register (USR). This was later banned by a presidential decree. And now, when we are without registers, we have once again realized how important it is that the state pays maximum attention to both the data and how this data is updated, stored, and protected," said the CEO and founder of the Opendatabot service.
In 2018, the Opendatabot team, together with Mykyta Pidhainyi (legal engineer of Opendatabot, CEO of Bot&Partners), came up with the idea of creating distributed registries in the state: it meant the existence of several nodes in the Unified State Register (in telecommunications and software engineering, a "node" means a broader interconnected network component). "It is clear that this registry (USR) is the main one. Notaries and the registration service can write there, and it can be stored anywhere. Therefore, it is quite possible to create several nodes for both government agencies and commercial entities. Now we would turn off one node, and everyone would work with the others. The maximum inconvenience that would have been caused would have been the lack of updates. But the state did not go into infrastructure things, but into an application for the end user. No one will say that it is bad when you have your passport, driver's license and other documents in your phone," explained Oleksiy Ivankin.
In his opinion, the Diia concept is a good one, but from the point of view of state-building, the state should build roads, and gas stations should build businesses. "And then everyone wins. The state is engaged in infrastructure, and business also pays taxes that are used to create this infrastructure. I don't want to say anything bad about the Ministry of Justice and the people who work there. They work hard. However, in terms of public policy, the focus on the end-user application rather than the infrastructure has played a cruel joke. But war is war. We will be without registries for several weeks," the expert commented on the attack on the registries.
Opendatabot's work during the war
The company's founder told us that historically, Opendatabot employed 3 or 4 people for the first two years, and resources were often limited. After the outbreak of the great war, the company had to cut costs for 2-3 months to break even in August-September 2022. According to Oleksiy Ivankin, the automation market does not always feel companies cutting costs, because automation is usually about cutting costs. "Our CRM (customer relationship management) system has a dozen APIs (application programming interfaces) integrated into it, and we hardly feel it, everything works like clockwork, and there is a lot of stuff connected. We don't see companies cutting costs too much, but they are choosing only key business areas now," explained the IT expert.
Opendatabot's CEO believes that the company's main achievement in 2024 will be the creation of an infrastructure solution, which is essentially a USR service better adapted to users. "We spend a lot of money on data. We pay about UAH 8 million a year to the state. This allowed us to create a solution that recreated the USR in our country. As of December 20, 2024, the entire country was working with this USR. And last year, our clients, in the form of large banks, were able to track significant changes in their clients. This is also an interesting story. The NBU, as a regulator, sets very high standards for banks, which must be met not only before inspections. There are many banks with accounts for individual entrepreneurs that do not regularly check whether you are still an individual entrepreneur or not. That's why we have the USR, the state has it, and our large clients have it. This allows them to work steadily even now," Alexey Ivankin told us.
According to him, in 2022, the company almost completely renewed its team and currently employs 30 people at Opendatabot. "I believe that the company does not develop without layoffs. In the first year of the great war, we almost completely renewed the team. In 2024, we worked a lot on our website. We also launched a lot of services for both end users (for example, obtaining some kind of certificate or checking a landlord) and corporate users. Creating an alternative USR was an important investment. The team worked on the project for 3-4 months, but it was worth it," the expert said.
One of Opendatabot's products is a product for journalists: it consists of all the data that the company has. Journalists can use this data to make many different stories. Recently, the company conducted a survey on the closure of individual entrepreneurs and saw a certain anomaly.
"On November 28, 2024, entrepreneurs accepted and closed more than 2,300 sole proprietorships per day. We sent a push survey in which about 100,000 people took part. 31,000 said they were sole proprietors, and 27% of them plan to close in 2024 or 2025. Usually in Ukraine, 100,000 sole proprietorships were closed in a year, but this is 5% of two million. Therefore, 27% is a large share. The main reason for the closure was the increase in taxes, which was a significant factor for many. There were several options for raising them, but in my opinion, they chose not the most logical one. Obviously, taxes need to be increased, because there is a feeling that there will be less aid, and more needs to be given to the frontline. It is clear to any responsible business that the difficulties are just beginning," the expert explained.
When we asked whether any registers should be completely closed during the war, Oleksiy Ivankin answered as follows: "We had a discussion with representatives of defense companies. You have to understand that all the data you give to the state will be published somewhere. It can be either public or not public. That's why we need to rebuild companies in terms of information security. If you report to the tax authorities that you are renting an office somewhere, everyone will know about it. Although this is not public data. And when we start deleting something from the registers, you will see which companies are deleted or what information is deleted. These companies will attract attention. I believe that in Ukraine, a normal, competent lawyer can organize the work of a plant, factory or startup in such a way that the main addresses, production, people, their names will not be contained anywhere. If no one knows how to do this, they can contact me."
We also found out the latest data on the monthly audience of Opendatabot: it reaches 200,000 active users in chatbots and 2.2 million on the website. "We definitely have a million unique users. Someone first sees something in the chatbot and then looks it up on the website. This is a large audience. We have 5 million registered users in our chatbots. And if we do a mass push campaign, we see almost three million in chatbots. People use us when they need us, but there is also a permanent core audience. Our services cost from 400 UAH per month for an individual client, an entrepreneur. But it can also be hundreds of thousands of hryvnias for a large corporate client. For now, we decided to focus on the web as the simplest tool for delivering information, so we've been working on the site a lot lately," said the service's founder.
According to him, artificial intelligence has long been a working tool for the company. Each Opendatabot developer or employee has a free Copilot and ChatGPT for code development and work. AI is also used by employees to analyze texts.
"For example, we analyzed 44,000 corruption convictions and got a share of fines, a share of suspended sentences and real terms. Approximately 3% of those convicted of corruption will receive a real sentence. But we also found a life sentence for corruption. This is where things got interesting. It turned out that the person who was serving a life sentence had bribed the guards. That's why they wrote that the sentence was for life. Such data goes into our registry. AI also greatly accelerates development. Compared to 5-10 years ago, we are working 20%-30% better thanks to artificial intelligence. In the future, AI will be even more expensive. If the corporate one costs $30 per month, I think we will reach $200. And then there will be inequality between those who can use it and those who can't," the expert said.
About competition, problems and LegalTech
The goal of Opendatabot, which Oleksiy Ivankin co-founded with his partner Andriy Khorsev, is to open up data and rebuild an open state: "We make open data available to everyone. This is the principle of the company. For citizens, there is open data in chatbots and apps. For business, these are APIs and websites. Now we are making an Excel solution available to everyone. You can now work with OpenDataBot right in Excel. The idea is that when open data is used by several million people, closing it is already an electoral issue. I don't see any competitors in this area. There is a market for business intelligence. It is clear that some companies want to know more about other companies. Any data is needed. If it's free, so much the better. It's all about open data. That's why companies are lobbying for open data, and it's normal."
Opendatabot also has experience in connecting several foreign companies to work with data from Ukrainian registries. But most of the clients are Ukrainian companies. Currently, 1200 domestic companies have active connections. As for the problems with open data, Oleksiy Ivankin believes that this is due to the lack of political support.
"I don't see the president talking about open data very often over the past five years. But I understand that the last three years were not about that. Some people think that data should be closed during the war. Only the tax authorities have closed their data. And here is the question: how can the VAT status help anyone in the war? Moreover, at the same time, the State Statistics Service continues to publish financial statements. When a company's financial statements are published, it is clear what is happening to it. And each ministry has its own view on the development of open data, on the format of open data, on the transportation of open data. I think that 2025 will not start well for open data in Ukraine. Half of the information will not be published because there are no registers. This will be the most difficult year since 2016," said the CEO of Openatabot.
Read more about Ukrainian Legal Tech: successful cases and the impact of artificial intelligence here.
As for the cash turnover of the Ukrainian LegalTech market, the IT expert says that everything is not very clear. "We work more in the data market, in the open data market. In 2024, we created a section with the legal positions of the Supreme Court and added a review of decisions. If you add up the CIBs (credit history bureaus), this is a market worth more than a billion hryvnias a year. And I think this market will grow. There is also another market for legal services, for example, the work of companies in courts on typical cases: typical divorces, typical foreclosures. I know companies that handle 10,000 court cases and do not employ 500 lawyers. They work systematically in a market where there is a lot of the same type of work. And here I see interesting innovations and approaches," Alexey Ivankin told us.
On raiding and Russians
According to the Opendatabot, the number of criminal cases related to raider attacks in Ukraine is gradually decreasing, but the war did affect this statistic, as criminal cases were not registered for some time after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thus, in 2024, there were 313 criminal proceedings related to raiding, which is 50 proceedings less than a year earlier. But it is important to remember that we are talking about registered cases.
"The reduction started in 2020. We see the number of such cases. In 2016 and 2017, we had people come to us who had suffered from raider attacks. Then we gave them contacts of journalists and law firms that specialize in countering raiding. But most people did not want to go public at the time. In 2020, we already had 4 times more such cases than in 2015. Since the beginning of the great war, this figure has decreased only because there was no one to register these criminal cases. Then the statistics tripled in 2023. This is a complex problem. Corporate rights are not the most popular asset for raiders. Real estate comes first. The Anti-Raider Commission has been working a lot with notaries in this area," the expert said.
| Note from Opendatabot: most often, the court considers cases of raiding related to Article 205 of the Criminal Code - forgery of documents submitted for state registration of legal entities and individual entrepreneurs. Out of 635 open proceedings, 381 cases have reached the court. This is 60%. Cases related to Article 206 of the Criminal Code - counteracting economic activity and unlawful seizure of property - hardly ever reach the court. |
As for Russians, according to Oleksiy Ivankin, they currently cannot register companies in Ukraine. However, if a Russian citizen has a residence permit in our country that was obtained before the war, then he or she can register a company in Ukraine. "We don't see 'new Russians' among the founders of companies; we see Russians becoming Ukrainians - when a person has previously registered a company (when he or she was still a citizen of the Russian Federation) and now has received Ukrainian citizenship and gone to the Ministry of Justice. Also, Russians somehow withdraw from Ukrainian companies. We had a complaint about this to the Ministry of Justice, because the owners from Russia could not perform such registration actions. The Ministry's response was as follows: "Yes, these actions were made with mistakes, with violations, but we can't fix anything because the statute of limitations has already expired," the IT expert said.
Opendatabot also constantly updates the list of software that has ties to Russia. "We believe that Ukrainian business should see this. There should also be a decision at the state level regarding Russian software. The main thing is to make analogs. We had a contract with BAS (this company's product line is under NSDC sanctions as of September 2, 2024). We terminated it on February 24, 2022. But there is one peculiarity here: we cannot analyze those who use our API. People can take our API and place it in any information system," explained Alexey Ivankin.
Read more about business automation and 30+ programs to replace the Russian 1C and BAS, here.
International projects and plans for 2025
As for international projects, Opendatabot is able to connect foreign companies to Ukrainian data. "There are, for example, international charitable foundations that need to systematically check Ukrainian contractors. I think this is a very good decision. There are many companies that are starting to explore the Ukrainian market. One day the war will end and this market will work. Right now, we are focused on Ukraine. It will not be the easiest year with open data. We have many ideas and are preparing them. But it may not be Opendatabot when we enter foreign markets. Any company has a product core that can be touched and changed every day, and we currently face several challenges in terms of revising the product not from the perspective of infrastructure, but from the perspective of the user to help them work better with data," summarized Oleksiy Ivankin, CEO and founder of OpenDataBot.
| The latest statistics from Opendatabot: In 2024, almost 6% fewer companies were registered in Ukraine than in 2023: 35,081 versus 37,412 a year earlier. As for IT companies, last year 1,227 companies were registered in the Computer programming, consulting and related activities quadrant, compared to 887 in 2023, and 413 in the Information services quadrant, compared to 419 a year earlier. |