Igor Martynyuk

Igor didn't appear from nowhere. He started building at 9 — a Counter-Strike trading site — and taught himself to code on a two-hour daily bus commute.

Before TabAI he was a founding engineer on BirdTON, a Telegram mini-app that reached 12M+ players, and ran Traffy, a traffic project that moved ~$300K in GMV. By the time he shipped TabAI he already understood the one thing most first-timers don't: how to put a product where the users already are.

TabAI launched July 2025 as a free Chrome extension that auto-captures tasks from Gmail, Slack and Notion and blocks distractions — built to fix his own burnout from context-switching. ~20,000 users followed.

The credibility stack is documented: #1 winner at nFactorial (Central Asia's largest incubator), a Google infrastructure grant, a seat at YC Startup School '26, and the headline $300K from a16z Scout Fund + Afore Capital — making him the first Kazakhstani founder at Afore's FIR program in San Francisco.

Strip away the age and three loops did the work:

1. The underdog narrative. “Village kid, bus-commute self-taught, ships to Silicon Valley” is inherently shareable. He posted the story, not just the product — and a story travels far beyond a product's own audience.

2. Ship inside existing distribution. Telegram for BirdTON, the Chrome Web Store for TabAI. He never built an audience from scratch — he borrowed channels that already had billions of sessions.

3. The credibility flywheel. nFactorial → Google grant → YC → a16z. Each badge made the next easier to win and became its own piece of content. Social proof compounds.