Vladimir Yakimenko

Vladimir Yakimenko (born September 1970, British national) is a London/Dartford–based software entrepreneur who has spent more than two decades building web and SaaS products. He is the co-founder, CEO and director of Magic Web Solutions Limited, a boutique software and database development studio he has led since its incorporation on 22 March 2000 (Companies House no. 03777400). The firm positions itself as a senior-engineer-only shop — "no salespeople, no project managers, no account managers" — delivering custom web, SaaS, back-office automation and legacy-modernization work across Java, PHP, .NET, Node.js, Ruby on Rails and Python. By his own account the business reached roughly $1.2M in annual revenue over its long operating history.

His best-known product is Kanbanchi, a project- and task-management application (Kanban boards, Gantt charts and time tracking) built as an add-on for Google Workspace. He founded it in 2013, and it grew into one of the fastest-growing G Suite/Workspace add-ons with a reported 80,000+ active users; the operating entity Kanbanchi Ltd (Companies House no. 10478311) was incorporated on 15 November 2016, with Yakimenko as director. More recently, on 19 March 2024, he launched LangMagic, a language-learning platform that pairs native content and teachers with an AI toolset.

Yakimenko was educated at the University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool, where he completed postgraduate study in software development (listed circa 1998–1999). Earlier in his career he served as Associate Technical Director at Solvassure. He is bilingual in Russian and English, with elementary German and French, and is an active commentator online — writing on Datafloq and posting frequently on LinkedIn about software development practices, developer hiring, productivity tooling and the practical limits of AI in coding.

Beyond his own companies, he is listed as an advisor/investor to Content Calendr, and Crunchbase records him as an angel investor. His investing activity appears to be that of an operator-angel — a hands-on technical founder backing and advising early-stage software startups rather than a full-time or institutional investor.

• Invests at the seed stage as an individual angel, consistent with an operator/founder writing personal checks rather than deploying a fund.
• Gravitates toward software and SaaS — the domains he has built in himself: productivity and collaboration tools, web/database applications, and AI-augmented consumer products (e.g., his own LangMagic).
• Brings deep technical and product operating experience (25+ years running a dev studio, plus scaling Kanbanchi to 80k+ users) — likely a value-add investor on engineering, product and go-to-market for developer/SaaS tools.
• Publicly skeptical of hype: he argues "AI removes friction from writing code" but does not replace leadership, judgment and strategic planning — a lens he likely applies when evaluating AI-centric pitches.
• Note: No publicly disclosed check size, fund, or formal portfolio thesis was found; his investing is best understood through his advisory/investor role at Content Calendr and his own founded ventures.