Our Story
You often read stories of entrepreneurs who came up with their million-dollar idea over a couple beers with friends. Not us. You even hear those feel good stories of college roommates, and best friends who started a company together. Not us either.
We came together because we believed what we could do with Apptopia would represent a shift in how people perceive mobile apps. See, apps are not just products that you buy for $0.99; they are complete businesses with revenues, customers, technology, and partners. A mobile app is an asset.
Apptopia is the marketplace that will broker the sale of these apps. We will manage the entire process through to completion. Starting with recommending app valuation & connecting sellers with buyers. Concluding with escrow services, code review, and interfacing with Apple & Google on your behalf until the deal is done.
Eli drives Apptopia’s overall strategic vision while overseeing all facets of the company’s operations. Eli originally started coding (Visual Basic) at the young age of 12, and his passion quickly grew into starting businesses. His first big success was a mobile app called GPush, which in 2009 was the 17th most paid for iOS app. It was his experience with GPush, and difficulty in selling what was a very profitable business, that led the concept behind Apptopia.
Previously Eli served as the EIR at GreatPoint Ventures. Even before that he was involved in several startups, including: Oasys Water, GreatPoint Energy, and DVTel.
Eli served as a teaching assistant in information systems, while pursuing his B.S. in business administration, with a concentration in finance, at Boston University’s School of Management.
Eli considers himself a “survivor”. He is a strong believer in paying it forward, and will do everything in his power to help the people in his life. In his free time he organizes hackathons. Eli is powered by Whiskey, Chocolate, and Hummus.
Jonathan leads the daily operations and strategic direction at Apptopia. He is the point person for anyone trying to sell their app, buy an app, or become a revitalization partner. Jonathan is extremely passionate about branding and story telling. As someone who believes deeply in the importance of customer engagement, he is constantly striving to find scalable intimacy.
Jonathan originally made a name for himself in the startup community as the Ambassador of Buzz at Grasshopper, a company that provides Virtual Phone Systems for entrepreneurs.
He created their “Buzz Department” from the ground up and was responsible for over 600 press mentions and a handful of big partnerships over his 3 years there. Jonathan is also the author behind Learn2Buzz, and a co-founder of the Barcamp Tour. More than anything, Jonathan loves meeting new entrepreneurs and helping them create what they are passionate about. When he isn’t helping people broker their mobile apps, he is watching sports with friends (Celtics, NY Giants, & Red Sox).
As Product Manager, Sergey is responsible for taking all the amazing ideas around Apptopia and translate them into requirements for our development team. Together with our development team he then implements these requirements and makes them into living, breathing features on the site that all Apptopia users get to enjoy.
Before joining Apptopia, Sergey co-founded iVOCS, a small technology company where he has been leading the development of opensource based VoIP products line.
In addition, they built custom products like auctioning telephony system for Flora Holland and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) - the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.
Sergey has been with Apptopia since day 1, and helped take “Apptopia” from an idea of the founders to a tangible, online marketplace. Sergey loves working with non-trivial issues and finding unusual yet effective solutions for them. Outside of Apptopia he was spotted enjoying virtual piloting and martial arts.
As our Senior Developer, Artem is part of the original Apptopia team, and contributed greatly to their first release of the product. In Kiev, Artem is the organizer of RubyC Conference and is very active in the local developer community. He is also the maintainer of a top used ruby gem called “Acts As Taggable On”. He has over 6 years experience and graduated from National Technical University of Ukraine Kiev Polytechnic Institute with a Master Degree in Computer Science.
Before Apptopia, Artem thought that all startups sucked, and that most founders are guys with a lot of money, and know very little about business. Jonathan & Eli have changed his opinion on this (and startups). He has really enjoyed the adventure thus far. When Artem is not coding he likes traveling, reading books, and going to the gym.
Alex is trying to add value & apply himself to literally every single technical aspect of Apptopia. He's responsible for technology decision making, mentoring, and keeping things as efficient as possible. Alex is motivated each and every morning by the idea of bringing new ideas to life.
He started programming when he was 9 years old and sold his first piece of software at the age of 13!! In Alex’s past life he helped build a 24 hour heart activity monitoring system that is capable of detecting more than 20 different heart diseases.
Once his mission to help some lives was done, he decided to get involved in startups. He quickly realized that building software for money was no fun, and it was more about working with amazing people on a living, breathing product. Alex has been part of many startups, and had his fair share of failures. However, Oscar Wilde once said “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes” – (now Alex’s Life Motto).
When not cranking out amazing code Alex loves riding his GSXR1000, smoking hookah, and snowboarding.
Serge works on a handful of strategic projects within Apptopia. His focus tends to be on backend architecture and infrastructure. He loves finding elegant solutions to interesting problems, as well as just simply making things work. Serge has 10 years of software engineering experience and holds Master Degree in Physics.
Before Apptopia, Serge worked as the Senior Software Engineer at Fiksu. He has also worked on number of projects including: network and systems programming for VoIP, desktop applications, web services for online and mobile marketing. He’s really enjoyed playing an active role in helping scale applications as they grow from initial ideas into successful businesses.
Serge's is very passionate about artificial intelligence, machine learning, functional programming, and analytics. He also shares his son's obsession with cars and robots! They have no choice but to eventually build a self-driven toy car together!
Vitaliy joined Apptopia’s development team with one simple goal in mind: Conquer The World. Vitaliy started coding in high school as he was trying to build his own social web portal. He failed. However this motivated him to learn everything about computer science he possible could. He quickly taught himself how to program for different areas including microcontrollers, embeddable real-time systems, desktop applications and scientific calculations using a wide variety of languages (anything from ASSEMBLER and C to Java and Fortran). In his journey of computer science he got to work with JavaScript and Ruby. He quickly realized that his true passion was in writing Rich Web Applications.
Vitaliy graduated from National Technical University of Ukraine Kiev Polytechnic Institute with a Master Degree in Computer Science and continued his education with a graduate degree. He is working on a PhD thesis about improving the efficiency of GRID systems execution and plans to finish this once Apptopia takes over the world.
Outside of computers Vitaliy is also really interested in modern philosophy and physics. He loves traveling around the world, fishing in the Dnieper river, and snowboarding all across Austria.
Matt joins Apptopia as a Sr. Acquisitions Broker. Along with negotiating high-end app sales, he is responsible for establishing strong relationships with companies currently underutilizing their potential in the mobile space. He also is the go-to person for investors looking to structure a more strategic relationship.
Matt comes to us from the domain name marketplace and monetization platform Sedo.com, where he worked on their brokerage team securing major parking accounts and closing several six-seven-figure domain sales over his tenure. He graduated from Tufts University with concentrations in both Economics and Communications/Media Studies.
Outside of work, Matt enjoys playing soccer and tennis, skiing, cooking and routing for the Boston Red Sox and New York Giants. He considers traveling a passion and hopes to continue to explore the world whenever the opportunity arises.
Tess is Apptopia’s “nuclear reactor”, always on, doing whatever needs to be done. You will find her in the middle of marketing, sales, client experience, purchasing, and everything else. If you are not quite sure who to go to, look for Tess. She gets things done.
Tess comes to Apptopia from academia where she has been involved in the inner workings of the human interaction at Harvard and Brandeis Universities.
When not at Apptopia, Tess loves to network with others and travel. Tess’s network of business partners and friends rivals that of the Clinton’s and she is always looking for new and interesting connections. While in college, Tess, had a personal goal to complete a double major and double minor in 3 ½ years (done). She spent 5 months studying in Scotland and while there had a goal of visiting 10 additional countries, meeting people, learning the culture/customs and networking (done with a total of 12 countries).
Tess runs on caffeine and the synergetic possibilities when people come together.
Advisors
David Hauser
Co-founder of Grasshopper
David is a passionate serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He helped create Chargify, Grasshopper, PackageFox, & PopSurvery.
Avi Goldberg
Partner at GreatPoint Ventures
Avi is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of GreatPoint Energy. Previously, Avi was the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Coatue Corporation.
Investors
Expansion VC
Joseph Melohn
