16 Years of Brights: CEO Dmytro Umen on Building a Company of People

Sixteen years ago, Brights was a few friends taking freelance gigs in the evenings, after their day jobs. Today, it's a team of 120+ specialists in Kyiv, Warsaw, and other European cities who have launched 300+ projects for clients in 30+ countries, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Dmytro Umen, our CEO and co-founder, has been there every step of the way. For the anniversary, we sat down with him to talk about the first $100 contract, early experiments with computer vision, the decision to put people before margins, and why he started writing code again last year.

Back to 2010: How it all started

Like many businesses, Brights began as a side project. Then software developer and now Brights’ CEO Dmytro Umen, designer Ihor Nosach, and developer Mykhailo Uliutin spent evenings and weekends doing small jobs on a freelance marketplace, often for symbolic money. It gave them a chance to build things their own way.

The orders kept coming, and at some point the side project needed more than spare time. Mykhailo took a job at Skype. Dmytro and Ihor made the riskier call: they quit their jobs and rented a small office to work on Brights full-time.

"Our first client found us on a freelance marketplace. The project took about two months, and the budget was $100. He pushed us to our limits, and we came out of it with a huge amount of experience. Honestly, we'd have kept working on that project even if we weren’t paid at all."

A small team, all hands on deck

A few years later, Brights had become a close-knit team of engineers. The office was now a rented apartment on Mezhyhirska Street in Kyiv's Podil, and the line between work and life outside it was thin.

"A lot of it is a blur now. We worked from morning till night, and when we did take a break, we had pizza and beer in the same apartment. Most of our clients were friends, so they’d often join us. The best part was that everyone worked on everything. There was only a handful of projects, and everyone worked on all of them. We were one team in the truest sense.”

That feeling of one team working on one thing together comes up again and again in our conversation.

How word of mouth led us to Microsoft

For roughly the first half of its history, Brights grew almost entirely through people: friends, former colleagues, and partners who had worked with the team once and wanted to do it again. Surprisingly, that’s also how a small team from Kyiv ended up working for major companies like Mastercard, Microsoft, Pepsi, and Danone.

“Our edge was that we could build anything, whatever the budget. It felt like I had unlimited hours in a day. We cared about building relationships and being someone people could rely on. So when our early clients changed jobs or started their own companies, they took us with them. 

Back then, we could never have sold anything to an enterprise like Microsoft directly. But we became a reliable partner for companies that could.”

Bigger projects came with bigger stakes, and earning a place on them meant stretching past what felt realistic. One of those moments came when Aimbulance, an agency Brights hadn’t worked with yet, needed to do a national promo campaign live in four weeks. Their contractor had turned the job down, and so had every other team they approached. Mutual acquaintances introduced them to Brights. We took it on, delivered in three weeks, and the agency became one of Brights’ biggest partners for years to come.

Say yes to the hard thing, then do exactly what you promised: it’s a pattern that runs through Brights’ entire story.

First steps toward working with AI

In the early years, a lot of Brights’ work was short projects, like promo sites, landing pages, and branded Facebook apps, which later became irrelevant. The team got good at building kits to assemble these fast, but the projects themselves were short-lived, and that needed to change.

Dmytro wanted something harder: the kind of work that would make the team grow as developers and give clients something they couldn’t get anywhere else.

“The opening came from hardware. Laptops started shipping with webcams, and processors got fast enough to run computer vision right in the browser, mostly in Flash. We jumped on it and started building face tracking, gaze tracking, as well as face and image recognition into campaigns — and big brands bought these projects readily.

That gave us a solid foundation in machine learning, which made it much easier to start in AI later."

When AI moved from research labs into everyday products, Brights already had people who understood how models see and learn. Today, AI integration and custom AI agents are a growing part of our work.

A team built on high standards

Choosing people over margins

One of the biggest decisions in Brights’ history was about the team, and it came at a cost. Many young agencies stay profitable by hiring juniors at low rates and keeping the margin. Brights had that model working, but decided to drop it.

“We moved from hiring juniors and enjoying high margins to hiring truly skilled people you can build something big with. That led to about a year without profit and some painful changes. But it’s the reason we’re here today, with the team we have.”

Nata Shved, Brights’ COO, drove much of that change day to day, and for her, the payoff is easy to see.

The result today is a team where 88% of specialists are mid- and senior-level, and a hiring process designed to keep it that way.

Why so few candidates get through

In Dmytro’s experience, only a small share of engineers are truly effective on their own. Many others are decent specialists who do their best work as part of a large corporation, with clear structures around them. But Brights looks for the first kind, and the difference usually shows early. That’s why our interviewing process is short, but few candidates pass.

When it comes to the final call, Dmytro keeps it simple.

“At some point, I promised myself never to compromise on how smart a person is. The second criterion is that they can’t be mean-spirited. Everything else is a matter of the right team composition and the right tasks. Every time we made an exception, we paid for it sooner or later. Now it’s a rule we never break.”

Speaking up is part of the job

Getting through the interview is only the start. At Brights, engineers act as co-creators of the product: if they see a better option or a hidden risk, they say so, even when the task didn’t ask for it.

“As a developer, I know that a manager or a client who doesn’t work with the code rarely sees the missed opportunities, ideas, options, and potential problems. If an engineer keeps quiet about them, it hurts the project. It’s also a waste of the universe’s productivity, like littering on the street or leaving a tap running. That’s the philosophy I pass on to the team.”

Why clients stick around

An average partnership with Brights lasts 36 months, and clients whose products keep growing usually stay. Dmytro's explanation is straightforward: make the work good enough to speak for itself.

“Our strength is delivery, not sales. Companies that sell themselves well get a lot of excitement from clients at the start, but it often fades once the work begins. With us, it’s the other way around: the longer a client works with us, the more they want to continue.”

Brights' 5.0 rating on Clutch tells the same story from the client side.

From a startup to a company of people

Sixteen years is long enough for any founder to have doubts. Dmytro says he never had the biggest one: whether Brights would make it.

"As long as computers exist, so will we. I view Brights as a living thing. It's a club of smart, capable people who build what the world needs at any given moment, and do it better than others. Some days are hard, some are easy. Some are fun, some less so. But it’s a path you can keep following for as long as you have enough desire and passion.”

For Dmytro, Brights stopped feeling like a startup once a strong team came together, and the company kept moving forward without depending on his effort every single day.

“A recent conversation with my daughter took me back to the beginning. Her class had to come up with a business plan for a school project, and she proposed a services marketplace, but her group voted for a lemonade stand instead, calling the idea too complicated.

It reminded me of one of the reasons I started a business: the chance to do things my own way when most people disagree. Once the core team came together, it stopped mattering what the majority thought. What mattered was having people I believe in, enjoy debating with, and learn from listening to. That's when we stopped being a startup and became a company. A company of people."

The biggest difference between Brights in 2026 and Brights in 2010 is how the work gets done. 16 years ago, every project was a heroic feat, with sleepless nights and Dmytro’s personal involvement almost everywhere. Now it’s a system, in the best sense of the word.

Why the CEO is writing code again

A year ago, Dmytro did something unusual for the head of a 120-person company: he went back to programming, hands-on.

“I wanted to lead this change from the inside and see for myself how AI affects an engineer’s daily operations and how the team works together. What’s clear to me now is that it’s a great tool. It takes away a lot of routine work and lets you build systems at a scale that wasn’t possible before. I’m sure it will be a huge catalyst for people who know how to build systems.”

Dmytro is equally clear about the other side: AI will make it harder for engineers who aren’t curious about their craft, don’t dig deeper, and prefer to follow a spec without thinking about the end result. 

That view shapes how Brights uses AI today: as a tool in the hands of engineers who understand the system they’re building and care how it turns out.

What stays the same

After sixteen years, we wondered what still excites our CEO the way it did at the start.

“Programming, definitely. A while ago, I started to wonder if age had dulled the joy I got from work. Those doubts disappeared the moment I started coding again. With AI tools and things moving so fast, it feels like day one. And, of course, the people. I know my strengths and weaknesses, and I love seeing the team do things better than I ever could.”

Brights has reinvented itself more than once along the way. Yet, some approaches have remained the same.

“Change is a major part of our strategy. The one thing I’d keep is how we do business: we don’t sell hot air, and we don’t trade our reputation for quick money. We work hard to win every contract. But if we have to choose between a big, risky short-term deal and a smaller one with room to grow, we’ll take the second every time.”

Over the years, the tools, the markets, and the size of the team have all changed. What drives Brights is the same: people who love to build and a habit of choosing the long game. 

We can’t wait to see what the next sixteen years bring.