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Mikita Mikado

Entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of PandaDoc

Original name:

Mikita Mikado

San Francisco, USA

Date of Birth

13.06.1986

Biography

Mikado was born in Minsk. At the age of 19 he went to the USA under the Work and Travel program, where he worked at various jobs and at the same time studied remotely at a Belarusian university. 

Career

In 2011 he returned to Belarus and together with his friend Sergey Borisyuk founded the startup Quote Roller.

By 2013, the startup grew into PandaDoc – a cloud-based document management service with a client base of over 3000 companies.

In 2013, Mikado moved to San Francisco, where he managed to raise $5 million in investment from companies like Kima Ventures, Altair Capital, and Fabrice Grinda. By 2015, PandaDoc had 16 employees working in the Minsk office and 14 in San Francisco.

In 2017, PandaDoc raised $15 million in another round of investment from Rembrandt Ventures Partners, Microsoft Ventures, HubSpot, EBRD and Altos Ventures.

In the same 2017, Mikita’s company became a resident of the Belarusian High Technology Park (HTP). Since then, PandaDoc has achieved unprecedented growth of more than 60 percent per year. Although PandaDoc still has an office and developers in Belarus, the majority of PandaDoc’s operations are now based in San Francisco, USA.

In 2020, Mikado starred in Yuri Dudya’s documentary “How the IT Capital of the World Works.” After its release, Mikado gained popularity among Russian-speaking Internet users and especially young people from the IT sphere. He quickly gained an audience and became a public figure, participating in more and more events and interviews. 

In 2021, PandaDoc raised a new round of funding with a $1 billion valuation.

Personal Life

Married, three children: two daughters and a son.

Social Activities

  • After the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, Mikita and his company publicly questioned the results of the presidential election, thus supporting mass protests.
  • At the same time, Mikado joined the Protect Belarus initiative. The initiative offered law enforcers who had resigned from the authorities in protest against the brutal suppression of peaceful protests any assistance: legal, educational and financial. This had a number of consequences: a search in the company's office, the detention of four employees, one of whom was kept under arrest for more than a year. Due to fears for its employees, Mikado left the project.
  • In 2022, Mikado invested in the start-up "Mesto" - a platform that helps Russian-speaking workers in the creative and IT sector with relocation to Cyprus and Bali, providing legal assistance, insurance, co-living and other services to legalize status in the new country.

Publications

Education

2001-2006
Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics
Computer engineering
2007-2009
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Computer Science, English, and Japanese

Interview

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