Draft:Oleg Rogynskyy

Oleg Rogynskyy (Ukrainian: Олег Рогинський; Russian: Олег Рогинский; born 1986 in what is now Dnipro, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur and investor. He has been the chief executive officer of People.ai since 2016. Prior to People.ai, Rogynskyy was the chief executive officer of Semantria.

Biography
Rogynskyy was born in the town of Dnipro (then Dnepropetrovsk), Ukraine. He attended Boston University. His wife is a physician.

Career
After graduating university, Rogynskyy moved to Canada where he joined Nstein Technologies (now a division of Open Text ). He then founded Semantria, a SaaS sentiment analysis company, which was acquired by Lexalytics in 2014. In an interview, Rogynskyy described how he was involved in an accident one month after launching Semantria, and had to relearn how to walk over the course of 6 months. In 2016, he founded People.ai in San Francisco, a sales artificial intelligence software company. People.ai participated in the YCombinator startup accelerator in 2016. People.ai investors include venture capital firms GGV Capital, Andreesen Horowitz , Lightspeed Venture Partners, and ICONIQ Capital. The Kyiv Post reported that William Griffith, founding partner of ICONIQ Capital, serves on the People.ai board of directors. In 2021 it was valued at $1.1 billion USD. People.ai has offices in San Francisco, Toronto, and prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine. Rogynskyy was involved in a patent dispute with Setsail Technologies on behalf of People.ai. As of 2023 Rogynskyy is the holder of 6 patents. He is also an angel investor.

Other endeavors
The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that, in the months before the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Rogynskyy helped his company's Ukrainian employees relocate to safer areas abroad. In a podcast with The Wall Street Journal, Rogynskyy said People.ai had moved many of its Ukrainian employees to Prague or Toronto. Rogynskyy described the war in Ukraine as "the first open-source war", due to the use of open source tools for communications based on civilian platforms such as smartphones and Starlink terminals. He spoke at a private event hosted by Victor Pinchuk at the World Economic Forum 2022, moderated by Fareed Zakharia on the subject of the war in Ukraine.

In 2022, Rogynskyy was credited by Time Magazine for having "organized the support from the tech world pouring into Ukraine". That year, the Office of the President of Ukraine (at the time, Volodymyr Zelensky) awarded Rogynskyy the Order of Merit (Ukraine), 3rd degree.

Rogynskyy is a Charter Member of The C100, a Canadian network of technology entrepreneurs. The National Foundation for American Policy listed him as a foreign-born artificial intelligence entrepreneur, the only Ukrainian on the list.