Investor-in-Focus: Rustam Gilfanov

By IndraStra Global Editorial Team

FAMILY

Rustam Gilfanov was born on January 6, 1983, in the small rural locality of Basim, Perm Region (now is the Perm Territory) in Russia. His father is a military officer, his mother is an elementary school teacher. Since childhood, Gilfanov was keen on mathematics and took an interest in sci-fi as well as scientific findings. 

BACKGROUND

Upon graduation, Rustam Gilfanov was admitted to Udmurt State University, the most prestigious center of higher education in the Udmurt Republic. He got a degree in jurisprudence and law in 2005 and decided to go continue his study at the magistracy of the International East European University with a specialization in arbitration management. Rustam Gilfanov led an active student life, enthusiastically taking part in scientific conferences and creative activities. 

CAREER: FROM A STUDENT TO A COFOUNDER OF A RENOWNED INTERNATIONAL COMPANY 

Rustam Gilfanov’s studentship coincided with the grandiose boom of the Internet. While pursuing a degree as a lawyer, the investor to-be began to concern himself with information technologies and software development. It was exactly then when an idea of launching a startup in the IT domain fired the imagination of Rustam Gilfanov. But before getting his own company off the ground, he gained vital experience in the creation and development of multiple international IT-projects. A brilliant legal education helped Rustam Gilfanov feel confident in the field that was completely novel for conventional business. 

Gilfanov Rustam established an international outsourcing IT-company in Kyiv in 2006, together with partners. Now, this corporation is a top-tier provider of software for a variety of sectors including marketing, gaming, and finance. Their business portfolio includes over100 successful gaming apps, and the company’s representative offices are found in all major cities of Ukraine, Cyprus, Malta, and Latvia. 

Notably that from the earliest days of his company’s existence, Rustam Gilfanov regarded it as a brand-new format of the enterprise. The primary focus was laid and is still laid on the support of talented young people and creating favorable conditions to promote the growth of their employees. The company’s staff increased from 30 to 1,000 employees in just 5 years, and it was very important for Rustam Gilfanov to ensure that each team member got all the opportunities to broaden their potential. 

PHILANTHROPY    

                                                 

Rustam Gilfanov is enthusiastically developing charitable initiatives and integrating CSR projects in the IT-company. Gilfanov places a special focus on education projects for kids and teenagers.

LuckyBooks is one of the most remarkable and large-scale charity initiatives sponsored by Rustam Gilfanov in the context of a partnership with the Libraries of the Future foundation. The project was launched to support promising authors and facilitate the distribution of non-fiction for teenagers in the Ukrainian language. Also, the project helps to spread books written by Ukrainian scientists and authors as well as translated sci-fi bestsellers. 

LuckyBooks started its history in 2017 at the International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv. In one year, LuckyBooks became the general partner of the children's program of this festival that is so important for Ukraine. LuckyBooks experts are brilliant scientists and famous public figures of Ukraine such as a researcher at the Space Research Institute National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and State Space Agency of Ukraine Tatyana Kovalchuk-Skorokhod and a musician Oleg Yuryevich Skripka. The project also participated in current book exhibitions in Bologna, Frankfurt, and in different cities of Ukraine.

At the very beginning, the LuckyBooks project partnered only with a few children's libraries in eastern Ukraine, but today it is expanded to 200 libraries across the whole country. In 2018, more than 5,000 copies of popular science books for adolescents were supplied to libraries including Alina Stefan’s book about biotechnology called “Summerlong as DNA” and “A Brief History of Technologies” by a notable programmer Andrei Tuzhikov. First of all, books go to rural libraries in the Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine that suffer from a scarcity of non-fiction compositions in the Ukrainian language. Gilfanov considers this project one of the most significant.

Another essential initiative supported by Gilfanov is the reconstruction of the Kyiv children's library and its transformation into a unique bibliographic hub in conjunction with the project Libraries of the Future. The company helped to equip a modern computer classroom in the library with ongoing programming courses from employees. This pilot project was later expanded throughout the whole territory of the country.

Moreover, for over a decade, Gilfanov Rustam has been cooperating with the “Future of Ukraine” foundation, financing corporate social responsibility initiatives and helping families as well as lone parents who got in a hard life situation.

PRIVATE INVESTMENT ACTIVITIES 

Several years ago, Gilfanov Rustam decided to withdraw from his activities in the IT-company he founded in order to devote more time to international investment in perspective IT-projects in the sphere of financial technology, video streaming, and gaming. 

Gilfanov Rustam is married and raises one daughter. 

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