Dmytro Plieshakov, co-founder and CEO of Osavul - an AI powered information security startup, is a tech entrepreneur with more than eight years of experience. He's been building startups with his business partner, Dmytro Bilash, mostly in the field of AI, data, data analytics and data science for quite a while. And he started fairly early - when he was just 18 years old.

They founded their first company because they just didn't come across any companies they wanted to join, and their curiosity led to a successful journey and a long run of several companies, the ambitiousness of which increasing with time. After their previous machine learning company Captain Growth was acquired in 2019, Dmytro was running an AI center and R&D in Kyiv and finally in late 2021 he wanted to take a break, rest, and focus on research aspects of the AI field rather than business. His rest was cut short by Russia’s full-scale invasion, and their new company Osavul was born. They felt the need to dedicate themselves to helping Ukraine to victory.

And I think this new venture we entered is, I would say the most mature, the most difficult in terms of the market specifics. Now we're talking about the security market working with very serious and well known, but also complex organizations such as governments, international organizations such as the EU or NATO. It's not easy, it’s interesting, and of course it's a difficult challenge, for us and for me personally.

And now, based on Ukraine’s in the field experience fighting an information war with Russia, Osavul helps nation states, civil societies and businesses to fight for their truths and reputation with AI capabilities.

Everyone knows about the ground battles or the air battleground, or the sea battleground, but of course this is war that happens in the cyber and the info space as well. And to us it seemed like the most relevant thing, the best fit to our expertise. Indeed this cyber aspect of the war. So we decided to focus our efforts there. And started to build a software which evolved to a platform towards what Osavul is today, which helps defend against information attacks, influence operations, disinformation campaigns and things like that, which are very active these days in the Russia-Ukraine War.

That’s how Osavul was born in March of 2022.

Currently, they have different stakeholders of their solution such as for example nation states, civil societies, and businesses, especially public companies. But what Dmytro is saying is that all of them have pretty similar problems and, in fact, are different actors playing on the same field - because the information space is shared.

We all live in the same internet. So even though they're different, the problems they face are pretty similar. And when we're talking about information security, normally the cycle of things that you do here, on the defense side, it's pretty standard.

In short, Dmytro defines those steps to combat disinformation:

• Identify active threats or threats that are dangerous or likely to be dangerous.
• Assess those threats and understand first, how real they are. Is it big or not? Is it even a real threat or just appears like one? You want to understand who's involved. You want to understand what the possible consequences are, what kind of impact it can have on your assets or on your nation if you're a country, or whatever is your strategic interest.
• Respond: craft and release your response.
• Measure the effectiveness of the response, understand your effectiveness, and adjust.

Osavul helps to identify threats, and helps to assess them so their customers can better craft their response. The response is usually a real-world action that their customers decide on based on their new and improved understanding of their situation, and it can be anything depending on the organization: communication or series of communications, policymaking, legislation etc.

Those types of information threats are one of the vulnerabilities of democratic societies around the globe because what makes democracies strong is an open environment and freedom of speech.

We have a culture of discussion, public pluralism of opinions. Many opinions can coexist, that's what makes us strong. At the same time, it's what makes us vulnerable to information attacks and influence operations, because anyone can enter this environment.

Dmytro shared that we’re basically all competing in the information environment, we’re competing to promote the truth and to promote a healthy narrative.

And the main strategy that is being applied by Russians, but not only, it's generally a very effective strategy, is not to push for a particular narrative or a particular story, but rather push for whatever you can that works to de-unify people. To seed chaos instead of organization, to seed disconnection instead of unity. And that's a strategy that most of the actors stick to.

Osavul as a technology company obviously doesn’t take this responsibility on themselves to decide what the truth is. But what they help their customers to do is find patterns in information sources such as media, social networks, messengers and elsewhere, to tell if something is organic or an artificial disinformation campaign.

People can believe in something and post it but if there is a foreign government that is trying to push some story to achieve a specific goal that’s a different thing; the difference is that in some cases it’s organic but sometimes it’s coordinated and inauthentic.

On a mission to help Ukraine win, Osavul has scaled their company and helps other organizations. But how exactly does it affect the businesses? Dmytro mentioned the case when AI-generated images of explosions next to the Pentagon and the White House became viral and circulated for some time starting on Facebook and spreading quickly to Twitter and being posted from so-called “verified” Twitter accounts. Even though it was quickly debunked it created chaos and the stock market responded quickly.

Interestingly, according to Bloomberg it may have been the first time when an AI-generated image moved markets. Well, it seems like we’re definitely in a new informational age now - where information spreads more rapidly than anyone can keep track of it, and virally as never before.

And the index dropped and many stocks dropped. Some real people had real losses because of this. Someone shorted, someone lost their position, some real money was involved. And that's the case that proves that even small things in an information environment can have huge consequences on financial markets, on stocks, on company valuation, company price.

By helping their customers Osavul is actively growing, and in May 2023 they raised a $1 million dollar investment round from the SMRK fund. They are hiring and currently have several open positions. One of them is a strategic position - a Senior AI Engineer in the field of natural language processing (NLP) that has experience with large language models (LLMs). Everyone is talking about LLMs these days and Osavul as a modern AI company is no exception. So if you are interested, here is their career page or you can contact Dmytro Plieshakov personally.

Apart from building software, Osavul also conducts research in the fields of disinformation and information security, building partnerships with individual researchers and research centers. They are able to support both individual researchers and institutions with their tools to conduct better research.

We see that as our responsibility. We do some research ourselves and it'll be great to collaborate with a bright mind, especially if the person already has the research agenda and we can fit in and help make that research more effective, more loud, more data-driven. That would be awesome.

So don’t hesitate to reach out to them if you share the same values and would like to contribute more to such an important mission as fighting disinformation in the world.

About the name: Osavul was a high military rank in the times of the Ukrainian Cossacks, including in wartime, leading intelligence and reconnaissance, monitoring the progress of battles, sending reserves into battle as needed.

In today’s battle Ukraine is not only recovering its identity but bringing new businesses, cutting-edge research, and technologies to the world to solve problems of global importance.

Please also enjoy our short interview.

References & Mentioned:

• Osavul website
• Osavul Careers page: open positions and contact info for researchers
• Dmytro Plieshakov’s Linkedin
• YouTube Interview Episode
• Audio Podcast Episode
• Osavul profile at kyivlab.com