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Yuriy Glushakov and Vasyl Korchynskyi spent years building custom B2B portals at Aurocraft — 6 to 9 months for each one, for very different clients with very different requirements. At some point it became clear: the team was solving the same problem over and over again, even though the architectural decisions were, in essence, always the same. That's how the idea of Portality was born — not another custom project, but a reusable constructor.
The company launched in 2023, during the full-scale war. Among its first clients was the international AmCham EU, along with Limagrain Ukraine and Shell Ukraine. The product grew self-funded, and winning Demo Day YEP and a $25,000 grant opened the door to a number of international accelerators — from the Startup Moldova Summit to the AgriTech Accelerator in the US and Tech Bridge in the UK.
As part of our Faces of Impact series, we spoke with Vasyl Korchynskyi, co-founder and CEO of b2beings and Portality — about the name that combines B2B and "human beings," about why the hardest part turned out to be not the product's technology layer but the team's culture itself, and about the goal of 100 major clients and $2M ARR by 2027.

You met Yuriy Glushakov back at Aurocraft, where for years you built custom B2B portals from scratch — 6 to 9 months for each one. At what point did the feeling hit: "Enough doing the same thing by hand — it's time to turn this into a constructor"?
Yuriy and I met about eight years ago, and over that time we managed to build a fair number of custom B2B portals together for very different clients with very different requirements. At some point it became obvious that we were solving the same problem from scratch every time: a different team, a different budget, but the architectural decisions were, in essence, the same. Yuriy proposed going further: instead of selling another custom project, turn the approach we'd developed into a product that could be reused.
The push also came from our first clients — AmCham EU and Limagrain. Their requirements showed us, in practice, what functionality needed to be "out of the box" and what was better left configurable. It was a decision at the intersection of opportunity, time constraints, and simply not wanting to keep building portals from scratch again and again.
On top of that, Yuriy and I share a principled approach: we're interested in attracting foreign investment into the development of the Ukrainian market, so having a European client added confidence early on.
The name b2beings is "B2B + human beings." What does "humanity" personally mean to you in a segment usually associated with dry corporate processes and spreadsheets?
It's great that the idea we built into the name comes through to people outside the team! The name was born during a team brainstorm and vote. That's how we landed on B2Beings: B2B + human beings. To me it's not just a play on words. When you build a B2B portal, it's very easy to slide into designing "for the process": procurement, logistics, reporting. But behind every screen is a specific person in a specific role — a marketing director, a distributor, sometimes even a farmer who has never worked with a CRM in his life. People buy products, and ultimately, we're building our portal for people.
We're not designing a boxed solution that you "implement and forget," but a tool that accounts for the emotional and social needs of the people who will use it every day. If a portal is inconvenient or confusing, no amount of process logic will make the client's team actually use it.
People buy products, and ultimately, we're building our portal for people.

You decided not to postpone the idea and took the leap in 2023 — during the full-scale war. What gave you the confidence to launch a product company specifically then?
The logic was simple: if not now, then when? The future was unpredictable anyway, and we didn't have time to "wait for a good moment." Compared to the risks the country as a whole and each of us personally were already facing, the risk of launching a product company seemed entirely manageable.
Added confidence came from the fact that we already had our first clients, including an international one — AmCham — which in effect meant income diversification and bringing money into Ukraine from abroad. For us, that was strategically important, not just commercially.
Portality consists of three layers — interface construction, external integrations, and business processes. Which of these layers turned out to be the hardest to engineer — and why?
The hardest layer turned out to be business processes, and the reason isn't the technical complexity of any single process, but the enormous variability between companies. At every client, the procurement or order-approval process lives a little differently, and these processes keep evolving over time. We're pursuing unification wherever possible, while moving logic that's genuinely unique to a client into separate integrations and process-specific components. It's a constant balancing act: unify enough that you're not building everything from scratch each time, while keeping enough flexibility that you don't force the client's business logic into our template.
You've spoken openly about the "one-time job" trap — when a widget built for one client can't be reused. How did you rebuild the team's engineering culture to think in terms of product rather than a one-off order?
We deliberately changed the team's culture… Every new component gets validated across several clients — three is our benchmark. Only then do we consider it "productized," fit for reuse. If a component doesn't fit another client, that's fine too, and we're honest about that.

This requires more effort upfront — roughly 30-40% more time to make a component configurable. We even created a separate configurator role dedicated specifically to setup, so we don't pull developers off to do it. As a result, the next task now takes hours instead of days. Today, roughly 20% of our work is still unique, one-off solutions; the rest is reusable components, and that share keeps growing steadily.

Your key differentiator from Softr, Bubble.io, or Noloco is ready-made connectors to SAP, Creatio, and Microsoft Dynamics, plus licensing with no limit on the number of users. How hard is it to maintain this technical edge when the no-code market is moving so fast?
Our client is a mid-sized business that needs serious customization but isn't ready — and often doesn't have the resources — to implement an SAP-level solution. Our advantage is a set of ready-made, adaptive modules combined with the ability to fine-tune the system through the interface, JSON, or code, depending on how deeply the client wants to intervene in the system. Maintaining this edge isn't easy precisely because the no-code market moves so fast, which is why we don't try to compete across every segment at once. We've clearly defined our ICP — our ideal customer profile — and we focus on companies that will grow alongside us over the next 5-10 years.
You're betting on on-premise deployment within the client's infrastructure. How is AI changing what a B2B portal needs to be in 2026 — and what are you already building into Portality?
On-premise deployment isn't an exception for us — it's a frequent and entirely deliberate request from clients who want full ownership of their data: digital sovereignty for agribusiness today isn't an abstract concept but a practical requirement. Portality can be deployed on the client's own infrastructure.
As for AI, we see it as a tool for reading documents, analyzing data, and forecasting — one that must fit within the company's security policies. We have two approaches: either anonymize the data and use global cloud models, or deploy local, open models directly on the client's infrastructure, so that data never leaves the company's perimeter at all. Portality can both connect to models already deployed at the client and provide its own local AI services — depending on the client's priorities.

Portality is a self-funded product that grew thanks to first clients like Limagrain Ukraine and Shell Ukraine. What did winning Demo Day YEP and the $25,000 grant actually give you — beyond the money itself?
Winning Demo Day YEP and the $25,000 grant were tangible support for us — we immediately reinvested that money into product, marketing, and sales. But honestly, the money wasn't the most valuable part of what we got. Far more important were visibility, press coverage, credibility, and easier access to other programs. It set off a real chain reaction: participating in one accelerator opened the doors to the Startup Moldova Summit, the AgriTech Accelerator, Lab2Market, programs in the UK, and the EO Business Incubator. Each such win is also validation, which we later use in pitches to investors and potential partners. It genuinely strengthens our negotiating position.
You're focused on agri-retail — an industry where a significant share of product is lost before it ever reaches the store shelf, because of slow manual processes. Why did agriculture become your first market — and how much of a competitive advantage is Ukrainian agri-expertise for export?
Choosing the agri sector wasn't accidental — it's the prior experience and network of contacts Yuriy and I had in agri-retail. Our first clients, Limagrain and Ostchem, confirmed that we'd hit a real pain point in the market.
As for export, we fully understand that the agricultural market in France and the agricultural market in Ukraine are structured very differently. A direct "transplant" of a solution without adaptation simply doesn't work. Our strategy is to take the key insights we've developed here and adapt them to a specific market, relying on local partners who already understand the country's specifics for a faster entry, rather than trying to export the solution ourselves directly from day one.

You're building a network of partners and integrators for Portality. As an engineer-founder, how do you build this partner model, and what can it give to the broader Ukrainian B2B SaaS community?
We're building a network of partner-integrators because we understand that scaling implementation across the entire market on our own is unrealistic. The logic is simple: integrators take on direct implementation for the client, and we give them the tools, documentation, training, and support to do it quickly and well. Right now our priority is building the community: workshops, channels for feature requests, bonuses for the most active partners, and annual events for developers and integrators. For the Ukrainian B2B SaaS community as a whole, this also has value: the more working "product plus integrator network" models we have, the faster shared practices form that help everyone scale.

Your stated goal is around 100 major clients and roughly $2M ARR by 2027. What needs to happen inside the product and the team for that leap to become real, rather than staying just a number in a pitch deck?
Honestly, these aren't such tectonic changes. We need to scale several things at once: expand the integrator network, grow our technical support and onboarding teams, build out the sales department, and — just as important — build processes that can withstand the transition from 10 clients to 50 and beyond. We need to build the company's operational maturity. We understand clearly which structural transitions lie ahead of us, though of course the specific timelines can shift.
You position Portality as a solution "for agri-retail, and not only." What's your five-year vision: does Portality become a horizontal infrastructure layer for any B2B industry, or do you consciously remain a vertical leader specifically in agriculture?
Right now, we're deliberately choosing agribusiness as our priority direction. This is where we have the greatest expertise, the strongest network, and the best product-market fit. But we're building Portality so that its core — the interface, integration, and business-process constructor — remains industry-agnostic. That's exactly what lets us talk about adapting to other countries and industries through partnerships, rather than rewriting the product from scratch every time. So over the next five years, here's how I see it: agriculture remains our strongest vertical, while we realize the platform's horizontal potential by relying on the partner model and expanding our geography, entering new markets.