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Yuri Gurski

Entrepreneur, writer, founder, and CEO of Palta and Flo Health, Inc.

Original name:

Hurski Yury

Limassol, Cyprus

Date of Birth

23.01.1983

Biography

Yuri Gurski is a native of the Republic of Belarus, entrepreneur, owner of Ideanomix publishing house, and head of Palta company.

Career

In 2001, Yuri Gurski’s first book “Photoshop 6.0 Tricks and Effects” was published. In 2004, he was invited by “Piter” publishing house to “produce other books”. 

In 2009, Yuri changed his activity to IT and became the head of Viaden Mobile (a department in Victor Prokopeni’s company Viaden Media). By early 2010, the partners had created several mobile apps and mobile games, including the gym app All-in Fitness, the pedometer All in Pedometer, and the yoga app Yoga.com. In 2012, Viaden Media was acquired by Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi.

In 2013, he started developing menstruation tracker Flo Health Inc. Flo attracted investments from PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Flint Capital and millionaire Dmitry Volkov’s SDVentures venture funds. It is a women’s health platform based on artificial intelligence, with a monthly audience of 27 million active users and top positions in the Health & Fitness category in the App Store and Google Play.

In parallel with the development of Flo, in 2013 Gursky took over as CEO of Sport.com, a company that specialized in fitness apps. The company’s products won the Best of 2013 Apple Editors’ Choice award.

In 2014, Gursky became a mentor for the Maps.Me project, which was soon bought by Mail.ru Group. He later joined Mail.ru’s staff and by 2016 became the corporation’s vice president in charge of new products. On July 29, 2016, he left the company.

He was a mentor and invested in the MSQRD project (an app for video and photo selfies), which was acquired by Facebook on March 9, 2016.

In 2016, Gursky and Gubarev combined their assets in the venture capital firm Haxus. Haxus invested in another project by Yuri Melnicek, founder of Maps.me, related to the computer vision technology Aimatter. In 2017, this project was acquired by Google.

Later, non-core assets in Haxus were sold and the venture company was renamed Palta. Now Palta includes five projects – Flo, Prisma, Voir, fasting (interval fasting) app Simple, sleep app Loona and AR app for virtual sneaker fitting Wannaby. Gursky, Gubarev and Frolov own more than 90% of Palta, with the Palta team owning the rest. 

In 2018 spring, he became part of the management team of Gagarin Capital, a fund specializing in investing in projects related to artificial intelligence.

In 2022, one of Gursky’s apps, photo editor Lensa AI, took the position of the most profitable iOS app in the Western market.

Personal Life

Since 2016, lives in Limassol, Cyprus. Has three children.

Awards

  • "Kozminski Lion Distinguished Alumnus" of Kozminski University.
  • "Entrepreneur of the Year" 2011.
  • "Mentor of the Year" 2014.
  • The ninth place in the ranking "Top 40 Belarusian businessmen under 40" in 2015.
  • First place in the rating "Top 40 Belarusian businessmen under 40" in 2016 and 2017.
  • Third place in the ranking "Top 50 Belarusian IT Persons 2016".
  • Nineteenth place in the ranking "Top 25 outstanding businessmen of modern Belarus (1992-2017)".

Publications

  • The Big Book of Digital Photography - 2011
  • Digital Photography. Tricks and Effects - 2010
  • CorelDRAW X5. Tricks and Effects - 2011
  • Photoshop CS4 - 2009
  • Photo tricks with Photoshop. - 2010, co-author Gennady Kondratyev
  • Photoshop CS4. Tricks and Effects - 2009, co-author Irina Gurskaya
  • CorelDRAW X4. Tricks and Effects - 2008, co-author Irina Gurskaya

Speeches at conferences

  • 2011 International Conference "Business Internet", Minsk
  • 2016 г. AMOCONF Conference, Moscow
  • 2016 Forum "Business of the Future - 2016", Minsk

Education

2001-2006
Belarusian State University
Faculty of Journalism
2008-2010
Business School of the Institute of Privatization and Management under the program of Kozminski University (Warsaw)
Executive MBA diploma

Interview

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