Nik Shevchenko

In a self-description published on his personal blog in February 2024, he wrote that he was born in Russia: “Born in the middle of nowhere In Russia on an island in the Pacific Ocean.” Inc. Russia in October 2021 described him as an entrepreneur from Sakhalin Island and gave his name in Russian in the full form Nikita Shevchenko; an ifanr article of January 2025 says that he was born on a desolate small island near Japan and that from childhood he looked up to and admired well-known figures of the technology world.⁠[1][2][3][4]

In the same self-description he wrote that he started to mine crypto at 14 and sold 40 GPUs to his teacher at 16, and that he started his first company, fundplatform.io, at 16 and sold it by 18. In a blog post of September 2023 he likewise described himself as the founder of fundplatform.io (sold) and welovenocode.com.⁠[1][5]

In a question-and-answer thread on Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry he wrote that some years earlier he had lost $300,000 on a product that was never released, a platform for managing crypto assets: “Several years ago I lost $300K on building a product that never has been released (a platform for managing crypto assets).” In replies in the same thread he said that he had started his first company five years earlier; that he had spent about $300,000 and three years on that product, switching constantly from one development team to another, and that it never went live; and that he later learned about no-code and felt able to build products fast.⁠[6]

The company description that WeLoveNoCode issued with its April 2022 funding announcement says that he went through the 500 Startups accelerator in 2019 and had built more than 15 no-code apps himself. He wrote in his Product Hunt question-and-answer thread: “Before WeLoveNoCode, I built 15+ no-code apps myself and went via 500 Startups with another company.” In a reply in the same thread he added that he later sold that company.⁠[7][8][6]

His own February 2024 self-description puts the period this way: “at 19 joined 500 startups and started 2nd company welovenocode.com which I sold to toptal.com.” ITKeyMedia wrote in July 2022 that he was a serial entrepreneur who had earlier relocated from Russia to Silicon Valley, that he had launched several startups before joining 500 Startups, and that a mentor there introduced him to no-code development.⁠[1][9]

WeLoveNoCode (WLNC), the marketplace for no-code developers that he founded, launched on December 20, 2020; the company’s 2022 description says that on its first day on Product Hunt it received offers totaling $10,000. Inc. Russia wrote that he founded the marketplace at the end of 2020 and that companies used it to test hypotheses and build products for a fixed monthly fee. The SaaS News in April 2022 gave the company’s legal name as WELOVENOCODE Inc. and its headquarters as San Francisco.⁠[7][2][8]

In May 2021 WeLoveNoCode raised a $100,000 pre-seed from Nikolai Davydov and the brothers Daniil and David Liberman.⁠[2]

In his Product Hunt question-and-answer thread he wrote that after six months of round-the-clock work WeLoveNoCode had reached $80,000 in monthly recurring revenue and 30% month-over-month growth and had been #1 on Product Hunt; he also wrote that he had recently closed a seed round. In a reply he said that WeLoveNoCode had an academy with about 200 hours of recorded courses on four no-code platforms.⁠[6]

Inc. Russia wrote on October 27, 2021 that WeLoveNoCode had raised $1 million from investors including Nikolai Davydov and Marina Davydova, the Liberman brothers, Cindy Bi, general partner of the fund CapitalX, and the venture investor club Angelsdeck; the article notes that the information comes from his own statements as carried by ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry.⁠[2][9]

The same article gives these figures: more than 3,800 developers on the platform and more than 1,300 projects completed for clients; monthly revenue of about $125,000, by his account, with a goal of $1 million a month within a year; the new money going to expand the team, with plans to hire eight more people, including a product director, recruiters and marketers; and clients including inDriver, Invoice Hero and Yandex.⁠[2]

On April 8, 2022 Financial IT carried the news that WeLoveNoCode had raised $3 million in a round led by Mantis Venture Capital with K5 Global, Liquid2 (Liquid 2 Ventures), CapitalX, Gaingels and Abe Burns participating; he is named as founder and chief executive. The company described itself as the largest no-code marketplace, connecting 5,000 companies and 36,000 no-code developers, with offices in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and the United Kingdom, a subscription model and an expectation of $24 million in annual recurring revenue within a year; 90% of employers on the marketplace were from the United States and 60% of developers from Europe. The SaaS News wrote that its fixed monthly fee started at $2,500.⁠[7][8]

The company announced at the same time that it would donate 10% of its margin income in March to Ukrainians in need and had launched an app connecting people in need with people who can help in communities around the world; he said, “It is also our responsibility to support all Ukrainians.” ITKeyMedia, in an article of July 27, 2022, describes the pledge as 10% of margin income for one year and writes that the seed round closed in spring 2022, that the money was for hiring, onboarding more no-code developers, developing the platform and increasing marketing, and that a seven-day trial of the platform cost $9.⁠[7][9]

On May 11, 2022 he posted on Indie Hackers as founder and chief executive of welovenocode.com, writing that the company had reached $4 million in annual recurring revenue, ten times the $420,000 of his previous post more than a year earlier, that it had raised $4.5 million and that headcount had almost tripled. The post presented a new program for e-commerce founders that matched them with vetted ShopifyShopifyShopify is a commerce software company that originated in Ottawa, Canada, providing merchants with tools for online stores, physical retail, payments, orders and inventory management. The business began with Snowdevil, an online snowboard store founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke and others, and the standalone e-commerce platform launched in 2006. The company went public in 2015 and now trades under the ticker SHOP on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange.Open the full entry experts familiar with no-code apps; the program launched on Product Hunt the same day.⁠[10]

On February 8, 2023 the Thiel Foundation named the next class of 20 Thiel Fellows, of whom he was one. The list of fellows gives his location as San Francisco, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, and describes his project this way: WeLoveNoCode is a no-code marketplace connecting more than 50,000 freelancers with full-time, long-term remote jobs at the most successful and fastest-growing companies. The announcement says that the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, launched in 2011, encourages young people with big ideas to start companies rather than attend college.⁠[11]

In his February 2024 self-description he wrote: “at 23 became Thiel Fellow.” TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry in January 2025 called him “a Thiel fellow with a history of eye-grabbing stunts.”⁠[1][12]

His Product Hunt profile lists several WeLoveNoCode products that he launched as a maker in 2023: “Prime: All-in-one NoCode Subscription” in July, with the tagline “Work with 300+ no-code experts for $2,999/month”; “No-Code Certification” in August, with the tagline “Get certified in 40+ no-code tools on one platform”; and, in the same month, “0% commissions on WLNC,” with the tagline “Get No-Code Jobs with 0 commission.”⁠[13]

On September 22, 2023 he published a post on Hustle, his personal blog on Substack, describing himself as a Thiel Fellow and two-time founder and writing that he believed three things, the VR/AR metaverse, robots and longer human lifespans, would transform life within about 20 years. He agreed with Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry that people likely live in a simulation, favored neural chips and a shared human network he called the “brainternet,” but doubted that it would arrive within 20 years because of hurdles from governments and activism; the order he proposed was the metaverse first, then robots, then longevity.⁠[5]

On October 25 of the same year he published a guide to moving a company into the metaverse, covering virtual office apps, VR hardware, platforms for hiring VR talent and platforms for moving a physical store into VR; he wrote that he had tried more than 30 metaverse products, that the Meta Quest 3 was his personal pick of headset, and that he would create a freelance marketplace for VR/AR talent if readers commented that they wanted one.⁠[14]

Pulse 2.0 wrote on October 21, 2023 that the freelance talent platform Toptal had acquired WeLoveNoCode. The article records his statement: “Toptal, the top platform for on-demand talent, has acquired us.” He said that WeLoveNoCode had raised $3 million before the acquisition, that its customers would move smoothly to Toptal’s platform and that some team members would join Toptal while others took other paths; he himself planned to start a new company in areas such as VR/AR and robotics.⁠[15]

His own later summary of the company reads: “Scaled welovenocode.com to $52m valuation, raised $3m, generated $4m+ revenue and sold to toptal.com.”⁠[1]

On January 9, 2024 he announced Sama AI on his blog in a post whose subtitle reads: “The world's first proactive AI mentor that is ready to use on your iPhone or as a wearable!” The post says that it records the user’s daily conversations and gives feedback, giving the user a complete memory and proactive suggestions on communication, diet, work and other areas. He wrote that the team had worked for months, through Christmas and New Year, to reach the launch; the post also gives a pre-order page for an “Ai Pin.” His Product Hunt profile lists Sama AI as a January 2024 launch with the tagline “Wearable AI mentor that proactively helps you become better.”⁠[16][13]

On February 10, 2024 he published on his blog a document for finding a co-founder and suggested that readers use it as a template. In it he gives his age as 24 and says that he has sold two startups; the strengths he lists are raising money, managing people, building web and mobile products quickly, and selling and marketing, and the weaknesses are that he is technical enough to build minimum viable products (MVPs) very fast but has not architected very large-scale systems, and that he is straightforward; the values he names are hustle, always learning and being passionate.⁠[1]

The interests listed in the document are VR/AR, robotics and longevity, with openness to other areas such as HR, no-code and AI, and the goals read: “Let's make sure everyone lives in Metaverse by 2026,” “Let's make sure that robots are in every apartment by 2028” and “Let's make sure that humans live 200 years on average.” He was looking for a technical co-founder who enjoys building, while he would handle selling, fundraising, hiring and marketing; the process he proposed was a 30-minute chat, then a one-day collaboration, then a one-week sprint of customer interviews, prototypes, and vision and strategy.⁠[1]

On April 28, 2024 he published, under the name Nikita Shevchenko, the project “Opensource AI Wearable Recording Device” on Hackster.io: the device, “Friend,” is an open-source wearable that records conversations, transcribes them and produces summaries, key highlights, mind maps and to-do lists, and can also give proactive feedback. It uses OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s Whisper and Deepgram for transcription and ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry for summaries, and the hardware consists of a Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense board, a 250 mAh battery, a slider switch and a 3D-printed case. The project was released under the MIT license with its code in the GitHub repository BasedHardware/Friend, and he is the only person credited on the page.⁠[3]

On June 24, 2024 he announced on his blog, under a title ending “My new company just launched,” the new product “FRIEND,” a necklace that transcribes conversations and provides summaries and proactive insights; he wrote that the product had only just launched and was already in Forbes, and listed launch posts on X, TikTok, Instagram and LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, those on X and TikTok coming from the based_hardware accounts, with basedhardware.com as the product site. TechCrunch wrote that he first marketed the device on Kickstarter under the name “Friend.”⁠[17][12]

TechCrunch wrote that another San Francisco hardware maker launched its own Friend device and bought the corresponding domain name for $1.8 million, after which he renamed the product Omi, and that when Avi Schiffmann launched Friend in the summer of 2024 he released a diss track on X claiming that his device was “the original Friend.” ifanr wrote that in 2024 he strongly accused Friend of copying his product’s idea and name. His Product Hunt profile lists the launches “Omi (formerly Friend)” in July 2024 and “Omi AI” in August 2024.⁠[12][4][13]

Pulse 2.0 published an interview with Omi co-founder Joan Cabezas on October 16, 2024. Joan Cabezas said that the idea came to him while he was trying to modify MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry’s Ray-Ban glasses, that he then learned that “Nik” was already developing similar components, and that the two joined forces to build a privacy-focused, open-source AI wearable; the figures given in the interview are 4,000 units of the first device sold and a developer community of 3,000 members, and the company had raised seed funding of an undisclosed amount from unnamed venture capital firms.⁠[18]

On January 8, 2025 TechCrunch wrote that the San Francisco startup Based Hardware had launched the AI wearable Omi at CES in Las Vegas, with him as the company’s founder; YugaTech calls him founder and chief executive of Based Hardware. Omi can be worn as a necklace and woken by saying “Hey Omi”; the company also claimed that it could be attached to the side of the head with medical tape and use a “brain interface” to tell when the user was speaking to it, a claim that TechCrunch wrote it could not test, adding that it was unclear whether the feature worked. The consumer version cost $89 and was due to ship in the second quarter of 2025, and a developer version at about $70 was available for delivery at once.⁠[12][19]

TechCrunch wrote that the device listens constantly and processes conversations with GPT-4o, and can answer questions, summarize conversations, create to-do lists and schedule meetings; that it is built on an open-source platform, so that users can see where their data goes or store it locally; and that developers had created more than 250 apps for its app store. He said that Based Hardware had raised roughly $700,000, of which he spent $150,000 on promotional videos for Omi shot in Los Angeles, and that the company was in talks to raise more. He acknowledged that a device that is always listening may raise privacy concerns. He positioned Omi as a complement to the phone, not a replacement for it, and said that Omi and Friend were different products, with an app on Omi’s store that does what Friend does.⁠[12]

YugaTech records his statement that the team wanted to make a hands-free device so that people could have real conversations without typing notes on their phones. ifanr, in an article of January 13, 2025, wrote that for years he had been sending emails to Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry, Elon Musk and others in the hope of advice and guidance on technology entrepreneurship, had seldom received a response, and so set out to build a mentor for himself; the article adds that 5,000 early users were helping to improve Omi, that the goal of fully reading thoughts might take two years or more to reach, and that the company would spend $150,000 on marketing Omi.⁠[19][4]

In a blog post of January 9 he wrote that Omi is a device worn on the head, neck or chest that listens to conversations and proactively helps, and that “Longterm, our goal is to build a device that can fully read the mind.” designboom on January 10 called him “the mastermind behind Omi” and recorded his statement that the team would start with the simplest and most useful use case, activating the device.⁠[20][21]

On January 30, 2025 Omi announced on its website that it had raised $2 million from Tim DraperTim DraperTim Draper (full name Timothy Cook Draper) is an American venture capitalist who founded Draper Associates in 1985 and, after John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson joined, built it into Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). He is also the founder of Draper University and a public advocate of Bitcoin.Open the full entry, with a co-founder of Dropbox (not named in the announcement), 468 Capital, Embedding VC and a number of angel investors also taking part; the announcement carries his photograph with the caption “Nik Shevchenko, founder of omi.” It says that the money would go to hiring engineers, designers and builders, to hackathons, contests and bounties for open-source developers, and to speeding up work on a brain-computer interface (BCI); the company planned to launch a next-generation AI wearable and a BCI developer kit that year, and its Discord community had more than 3,900 members.⁠[22]

Decrypt wrote on April 19, 2025 that he had announced omiGPT on X on March 31: an open-source wireless wearable priced at $89, about the size of a silver dollar, with an aluminum body, wearable on the wrist or as a necklace, with 64GB of storage, connected to OpenAI’s ChatGPT through its API and without a speaker, with pre-orders due to ship in the second quarter of 2025. He said that the team was shipping only developer kits at first so as to confirm that the device was useful before it went to consumers: “We want to confirm the device is genuinely useful before shipping to consumers.” He contrasted this with Rabbit and Humane, which shipped to consumers from the start.⁠[23]

The same article records several other statements of his: that the device can still record without an internet connection or a phone nearby but is of real value only once it reconnects; that the team was not putting mass adoption first, “I started these companies because I genuinely want to use them”; and that the next plan was AI glasses similar to Meta’s AI glasses, with brain-computer interface functionality among Omi’s future plans. His Product Hunt profile lists three later launches, omiGPT in May 2025, Omi Notetaker in June 2025 and Omi in September 2026, with the Omi product’s tagline given as “2nd brain you trust more than your 1st.”⁠[23][13]

Personal blog: https://nikshevchenko.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/kodjima33 (opens in a new window).⁠[20][22]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nik-shevchenko-08565b18b/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1][5]

Based Hardware: Official website: https://www.omi.me/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]