Vladimir Knyazhitskiy

Vladimir Knyazhitskiy is a technology entrepreneur and engineer. For more than 25 years he has founded and led companies across IT services, professional education and electronics — from building several of the largest training centers in the region to leading Alpha Bat Pro Oy in Vantaa, Finland, a company that designs battery management systems, custom battery packs and energy controllers, as CEO and co-founder. Alpha Bat Pro is his full-time job and his only business.

As Chairman of the Board of the Fast Lane Russia group of companies (an authorized training partner of AWS, Cisco, Google Cloud, Microsoft and other vendors), he led teams that won a number of international awards, cut global operational costs by more than 30%, and grew the services business by 40% year over year.

As Head of R&D at the LANCK holding, he took hardware products from concept to manufacturing at factories in Taiwan and was granted two US patents.

As Executive Director of a systems integrator, he led the systems-integration business — an authorized partner of Cisco, Juniper, DELL, Acer and other vendors.

As CIO of an international e-payments company, he led several M&A transactions, drove the company's technology strategy and ran management financial accounting.

For more than 15 years Vladimir has supported start-up founders as a mentor and juror — and, in earlier years, as an angel investor: he has reviewed over 10,000 startups and helped many raise capital and enter international markets, including through angel-investor networks such as the Union of Business Angels and the Finnish Business Angels Network (FiBAN). Today he does not invest and holds no stakes in other companies. He co-hosts the Startup Bar community in Helsinki, mentors founders and speaks at start-up events — unpaid, in his spare time, under the name Univerum.

Ventures where he was involved as a co-founder, board member or mentor include:

• Safe School — a child-safety service used by 500+ schools and over 300,000 families.
• One of the country's largest kick-scooter sharing platforms.
• An AI exam-proctoring platform.
• A major web development and digital marketing company.
• An ASIC implementing the SHA-256 algorithm for mining.
• A remote body-temperature screening system integrated with access control systems.
• An intelligent building power-management controller.
• Battery management systems (BMS).
• Custom electronics — from smart power systems to full-cycle platform development.

…and many other projects.

Vladimir holds an MBA with honors from MBS and a Master's degree with honors in computer systems and networks from ITMO University.