Age: 28
Education: Master’s in business and financial economics at Kyiv School of Economics
Profession: CEO and founder of Fuelfinance
Did you know? She has swum across the Bosporus, a 6.5-kilometer natural strait and an internationally significant waterway in Turkey. A few years ago, when she was 26, she couldn’t swim and was afraid of water.
Alyona Mysko has been crunching numbers since her childhood — for school, for university, for auditor PwC and now for Ukrainian business. She’s so skilled at this that some firms turn into profitable enterprises once they let Mysko sort out their finances.
“Through my work, I help entrepreneurs earn more,” she says. And her company Fuelfinance has worked with many entrepreneurs over three years of its existence — at least 120 companies, including Schneider, MacPaw, Petcube, Reface and Saga Development.
By improving their turnover, Mysko believes her 14-member Fuelfinance team has even contributed to Ukraine’s gross domestic product.
“This is difficult to count, of course, but I am sure that there has been an impact,” she says, highlighting the importance of startups, small- and medium-sized business — Fuelfinance’s target audience — for the economy.
But Fuelfinance doesn’t just play the role of an accountant. The company utilizes approaches that are usually attributed to tech firms: Fuelfinance’s programmers automate as many processes as possible to reduce human error, deepen analytics and even make financial reports that are compiled and sent automatically.
“We try to make a system that doesn’t require people to manage it,” Mysko says. “Our mission is to make finance sexy.”
And it seems to be working. Fuelfinance’s revenue has grown fivefold over the last year and the company always has 20 clients it works with at any given time.
One of the recent clients, renowned Ukrainian startup Petcube, which develops gadgets to look after pets, has dubbed Fuelfinance “their financial totem,” Mysko says. After Petcube hired them to sort out its finances, the startup increased its profitability.
Petcube CEO Yaroslav Azhnyuk met Mysko while looking for advice on automating Petcube’s financial processes and quickly understood that their views aligned.
“Completely in the cloud, daily-fast — not monthly-slow, tightly integrated across the organization, and looking and feeling like it’s the 2020s, not like it’s the 1990s,” Azhnyuk says. Fuelfinance is “helping us to see the business with a sharper eye,” he adds.
And this all happened after Mysko quit her job at the Ukrainian branch of one of London-based PwC.
“I like it when it’s chaos, trash, and nobody knows how to fix that,” she says. “And once I clean up the mess, I get bored.”
Mysko has started conquering another market — the United States.
Here mission of popularizing financial literacy, however, goes beyond running a business — she delivers lectures, teaches, consults, holds events. One of her lectures was for TEDx Kyiv.
“There are many things from math, finance and economics which can help ease life and make mundane decisions, planning, goal-setting and communication wiser.”
