AI Startup MyChatBot Raises $500,000 Seed Round from Ukrainian VC Fund SMRK

KYIV, Ukraine — 21 November 2025

Ukrainian AI startup MyChatBot, which develops an AI-powered sales automation platform for online retailers, has raised $500,000 in a seed round from local venture capital fund SMRK, the investment firm founded by MacPaw owner Oleksandr Kosovan. The funding will be directed toward scaling the product and ramping up marketing as the company pushes into new geographies and builds out its partner network.

The deal marks roughly the 24th investment for SMRK and fits within the fund’s strategy of backing Ukraine-linked startups from seed through Series B. Since its launch in 2013, SMRK has invested more than $20 million across just over 20 portfolio companies, including Ajax Systems, Apostera, Competera, Deus Robotics, Preply, and Osavul.

MyChatBot is developing CommerceOS, an omnichannel platform built around AI agents that automate sales and customer communication across digital touchpoints. Retailers and e-commerce businesses can use the system to sell directly inside chats in messengers, social media, websites and mobile apps rather than relying on traditional product catalog pages.

The company says the platform helps merchants achieve higher conversion rates and build more direct, data-rich relationships with end customers. CommerceOS routes conversations through specialized agents that clarify a customer’s request, recommend products, assemble a cart, handle payment and delivery options, and perform context-aware upselling.

According to founder and CEO Denis Kuprash, more than 1,000 companies now use the platform, most of them online stores and retail businesses. The startup also reports more than 3,000 integrations, connecting into systems such as CRM, ERP and CMS tools, marketplaces, payment and logistics providers, and major messaging platforms.

MyChatBot’s monetization model is software-as-a-service. Businesses pay a monthly subscription that starts around $49 and goes up to $2,999 depending on company size, workload and feature needs. The team says the technical side of the product has already reached self-sufficiency, and the new capital will primarily support the commercial organization, including sales, marketing and international expansion.

The startup was founded in 2024 by Kuprash, previously a business consultant, and CTO Yaroslav Bratashchuk, a development engineer. For about a year, CommerceOS operated in closed mode with a limited set of clients while the team refined the product. The company now employs around 14 people and continues to hire frontend and backend engineers.

The startup describes a configuration layer that automatically compiles high-quality training datasets, runs A/B evaluations, flags gaps in product information and monitors for hallucinations. The company says multiple agents are orchestrated in what the team calls an “agentic commerce” protocol that covers search, attribute validation, checkout, delivery, personalization and post-sale interactions for both inbound and outbound scenarios.

SMRK managing partner Andriy Dovzhenko has framed the investment within a broader shift in how people shop online. The fund sees commerce moving away from static catalogs and toward interactive dialogues in channels such as WhatsApp, Instagram direct messages and embedded chat widgets, and argues that only a subset of AI agent projects actually deliver measurable efficiency gains for clients. In MyChatBot’s case, SMRK points to deep integrations, attention to data quality and a clear impact on conversions as key reasons for backing the company.

The round also reflects a wider trend of “commerce in chat” that is reshaping customer journeys globally, as buyers grow more comfortable discovering and buying products inside conversations instead of browsing landing pages. For Ukraine, the deal is another example of local capital reinforcing a homegrown AI product that targets a global market, adding a new commerce-focused platform to a venture portfolio that has already produced several international success stories.