Mikita Shylai: public profile
Summary
Mikita Shylai is a product engineer and founder who builds mobile and web software and applies AI to practical workflows, with a strong interest in the business and economics behind products.
Background
Mikita Shylai builds software products end to end, from mobile apps to AI-assisted document and knowledge tools, working in TypeScript, React and Next.js, Python and C#.
Alongside engineering, Mikita studies economics and entrepreneurship and treats them as part of the same job: understanding who a product is for, how it reaches them, and why it is worth paying for.
Areas of work
- Engineering: Shipping mobile and web products end to end, with care for the parts users never see: billing, data and reliability.
- Applied AI: Retrieval and document workflows where every answer can be traced back to its source.
- Business: Distribution, pricing and the small decisions that turn a working product into a sustainable one.
- Economics: Incentives, trade-offs and market structure, as a way to reason about products and the markets around them.
Projects
A drive tracker for car enthusiasts: every drive logged automatically with its route and stats, convoy voice with friends, and drives ready to share. Live on iOS and Android, with more than 50,000 drivers.
Role: Technical co-founder. I built the Android app and work across both platforms.
Milestone: More than 50,000 drivers and more than $50,000 in revenue (as of Oct 2026)
Developer-insights software that turns live coding activity into a clear, real-time picture of what a software team is doing, without status meetings or micromanagement. My largest project, and the first I built from the start that reached paying users.
Role: Co-founder and CTO.
Milestone: First paying user after two pivots, on the B2C version (as of 16 Mar 2026)
A fully automated legal news site: a pipeline of five AI agents turns US Tax Court PDF decisions into published articles, with no human in the loop.
Role: Built it end to end, for David Brunk.
A CRM for real estate agencies with a knowledge base: track and close sales more easily, and ask questions about your documents with answers that always cite their source.
Role: Built the product.
A voice receptionist for dental clinics, built on ElevenLabs, with a CRM made for dentistry: calendar, patient records and automated messages.
Role: Built the product, with some help from Radosław Soysal.
Software for paramedics at mass-casualty incidents: record patients quickly, coordinate teams and hand over clean documentation. It started as AI triage for hospital emergency departments.
Role: Co-founder. I built the software.
Milestone: 1st place at TeenCrunch (as of 13 Jun 2025)
A competition concept: AI agents that give small restaurants the kind of data large chains have, from where to open to how to staff and when to order.
Role: Product lead in a team of five. I ran the pitches and made most of the mock-ups.
Secure media sharing for creators: every viewer gets a uniquely, invisibly watermarked copy, so a leak can be traced to the person who shared it. I was the technical person behind its blockchain layer.
Role: Freelance developer: smart contracts and blockchain integration.
Recognition
- XXXIX Olimpiada Wiedzy Ekonomicznej, Polskie Towarzystwo Ekonomiczne, 9 Apr 2026: Laureate, 9th place in PolandEdition summary (PTE)LaureatesStage II resultsFinal written results
- Stypendium Prezesa Rady Ministrów, Prezes Rady Ministrów, 2026 – 2027: Prime Minister's scholarship, 2026/2027 school year (second time)
- TeenCrunch, Fundacja Youth Business Poland, 13 Jun 2025: 1st place (5,000 PLN), with mTriageRzeczpospolita, 23 June 2025
- TeenCrunch Audience Award, Fundacja Youth Business Poland, 13 Jun 2025: Audience Award, with CodaroRzeczpospolita, 23 June 2025
- Google for Startups Campus residency, Google for Startups Campus Warsaw, Jun 2025 – Feb 2026: Resident, with CodaroRzeczpospolita, 23 June 2025
- Econverse V4, Econverse, Mar 2025: Finalist, with Riddep
- Stypendium Prezesa Rady Ministrów, Prezes Rady Ministrów, 2025 – 2026: Prime Minister's scholarship, 2025/2026 school year
- Econverse Cup, Econverse, Dec 2024: Finalist, with mTriage
Chronology
- A month locked in in Warsaw. Rasputin flew in from Seattle and we rented an apartment in Warsaw for a month, living together and working only on OpenRoad. We shipped many new features, and my English got much better.
- Stepping back from Codaro. After more than a year, I stepped back from Codaro to focus on OpenRoad. I stay on as an advisor, and Radek continues as CEO.
- Laureate of the national economics olympiad, first attempt. 9th place in Poland in the central final of the XXXIX Olimpiada Wiedzy Ekonomicznej, after placing 3rd in the country out of 394 participants in stage II. My goal had been to reach the final; I came out a laureate, with admission to SGH.
- OpenRoad launches on Android. Three months after joining, I published the Android app I built as OpenRoad's only Android developer. Since then I work on both platforms.
- Codaro's first paying user. The B2C version of Codaro made its first sale: the first traction for a product I had built from the very beginning.
- Hackathon Codaro. A hackathon at Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw: 16 teams, about 90 participants and over 25,000 PLN in prizes, organised by the Codaro team in one month.
- Codaro's second pivot: testing B2C. For about three months in early 2026 we offered the same plugin directly to individual developers, to see if they would pay faster than companies. It brought our first sale in March 2026.
- Joining OpenRoad as technical co-founder. I joined two days before Rasputin launched the iOS app, and started building Android. It became my first project with large-scale traction.
- Prime Minister's scholarship. Awarded the Prime Minister's scholarship for the 2025/2026 school year, and again for 2026/2027.
- Codaro's first pivot: from freelancers to teams. Few would pay to verify a developer's hours. We moved from time tracking to a live view of progress and blockers for whole teams.
- Starting economics from zero. Wiktor Dźwigałowski told me about the economics olympiad, and on 1 July 2025 I started learning economics with no background at all. I remember not understanding why price and quantity sit on the axes the way they do in a supply-and-demand chart.
- Freezing mTriage. A month after winning TeenCrunch, we froze mTriage and later archived it. My time went to Codaro.
- Google for Startups Campus residency. Codaro moved into Google for Startups Campus in Warsaw, the place it won at TeenCrunch. Coworking, training and a cohort of other founders until February 2026.
- Two projects, one Demo Day. I worked on two projects in the TeenCrunch accelerator at the same time. At the Demo Day, mTriage won first place, and Codaro won the Audience Award and a place at Google for Startups.
- First place at TeenCrunch. At the Demo Day closing the TeenCrunch accelerator, the jury gave mTriage first place. Rzeczpospolita covered the results.
- mTriage pivots to mass-casualty incidents. As we joined the TeenCrunch accelerator, and after meeting the Jarocin County head and the county hospital's emergency department, we moved from AI triage in hospitals to software for paramedics at mass-casualty incidents.
- Codaro starts on a night train. Travelling back to Warsaw from the lost Econverse V4 final in Łódź, Radosław Soysal and I decided to start Codaro together.
- Econverse V4 final with Riddep. Two days of finals, first at Warsaw Tower and then in Łódź. We did not win, but through the team I met Radosław Soysal and Wiktor Dźwigałowski, who told me about the economics olympiad.
- Joining Econverse V4. Right after the Econverse Cup I applied to Econverse V4 and joined a team of five to build Riddep.
- My first startup event. At the Econverse Cup in Poznań I met Mikołaj Mikołajczak, who turned out to be from my town, Jarocin. We started mTriage there and reached the final in December 2024.
- Teaching myself Python. In the summer of 2023 I bought Python courses on Udemy with my own money and worked through them on my own. It was the first time I chose what to learn next by myself.
- Moving to Poland. In April 2022 I moved to Poland.
- First programming classes at IT Club. At eleven I started programming classes at IT Club, because I wanted to solve technical problems and build things of my own. Over four years I went from C to HTML and CSS, then C#, then Unity.
- Where it started: Minsk. I was born in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Looking back, the business side showed up early: as a child I collected stones on the street, opened a shop in our flat and sold them to my family.
Recommendations
- Bruno Machaj, Program Manager, Google for Startups, 3 Apr 2026. Ran the Google for Startups Campus Warsaw residency, where I was the youngest resident in the program's history (June 2025 to February 2026). “It is rare to meet someone at the start of their career who combines technical skill, business thinking and people skills so naturally. The recommendation is simple: this is a talent worth betting on.” (translated from Polish)Full letter
- David N. Brunk, Attorney at Law, 2 Apr 2026. A US client who hired me for software projects for more than a year. “Mikita is the kind of person who rewards investment. He is honest, capable, and motivated. I recommend him without reservation.”Full letter
Links
- Website: https://shyl.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shylai/
- GitHub: https://github.com/MKraKoff