Age: 27
Education: Master’s in business and financial economics at Kyiv School of Economics
Profession: CEO and co-founder at BetterMe
Did you know? Repa does aerial yoga, a type of yoga that utilizes silk slings suspended from the ceiling to perform traditional yoga exercises. In addition to meditation and breathing exercises, it helps her to run her business.
Victoria Repa leads a 130-person tech firm that develops mobile applications to help people live healthier lives.
Repa’s firm is called BetterMe, and it has developed about 10 apps that help people stay fit and strong: exercise, eat better, drink enough water, meditate, jog and so on.
The apps released by Repa’s company have collectively been downloaded by 80 million people. Over 27 million downloads were registered in 2019 alone, according to U.S. analytical company App Annie, making BetterMe the fastest-growing app developer in the health & fitness category. A monthly subscription costs $10.
Such entrepreneurial success has come less than four years since she started BetterMe in 2016, at age 24.
A graduate of Donetsk National University, Repa moved to Kyiv in 2014 after she received a scholarship at the Kyiv School of Economics. After graduation, she joined U.S. consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble as a finance manager. For a year and a half, she was responsible for the budgeting of logistics in Ukraine.
“In 1.5 years, I understood that career growth in a corporation is slow, while I wanted to progress, go through challenges, adventures,” Repa says. So she started to work in tech.
Repa joined local firm Genesis, which works in media and technology, as an analyst responsible for assessing media content. While doing that, she noticed the rapidly increasing demand for quality content in health and fitness. People googled the topic, looking for ways to get fit.
Repa and her colleague Vital Laptenok started to work on a fitness app to tap into the market that today is estimated at nearly $3 billion. As a result, 11 months after entering IT, Repa co-founded BetterMe.
The company was first developed under Genesis’s umbrella, but soon branched off as a separate company. Over the last three years, BetterMe has achieved a lot, creating something Repa calls an “ecosystem” for health and fitness. Repa won recognition from Forbes. The U.S. business magazine named her one of the 30 brightest entrepreneurs under 30 years old in Europe.
Now her company plans to put all the apps it created together and turn them into a one-stop application and “become No. 1 in health and fitness,” Repa says.
For strength, she turned to Asian culture and took on different types of yoga, breathing techniques and meditation. “I believe that all diets and trends that exist today — they are just ‘retelling’ long-standing Asian philosophy,” she says.
Repa tries to keep calm and maintain harmony while facing myriad business challenges every day. “It is pointless to seek enlightenment in a cave” where nothing happens,” she says.
She generally perceives any negative experience in business as a possibility to find harmful behavioral patterns in herself. “And having worked on them, you can get a little happier and better,” she says.
