Sergey
Tokarev

Born in Moscow on December 29, 1983.

Education:

In 2001-2003, he studied at the University of Malta.

In 2008, Sergey Tokarev graduated from the Moscow University for the Humanities with a degree in management.

He has founded several dozen IT companies around the world. He has invested in Reface, a Ukrainian startup for face replacement in images and videos.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Sergey Tokarev has been working in IT. He has worked as a top manager in a number of international projects.

He specializes in marketing campaigns, project development strategies, promotion of software developments. He has founded several international IT projects in the field of gaming and fintech.

In 2006, he initiated a group of outsourcing programmers to create products for the gaming, marketing, and fintech industries for clients around the world.

The band united several international IT companies, while the offices were located in Ukraine, Cyprus, Malta, and Latvia.

Since the mid-2010s, Sergey Tokarev has focused on investment activities in IT and particularly on projects related to machine learning and video technology.

Today, the investor's portfolio includes several dozen companies and startups from the UK, USA, Cyprus, and Ukraine. One of these startups is the Ukrainian project for swapping faces in photos and videos Reface.

In January 2020, the startup launched the app Reface that allows you to swap faces in GIF images.

In less than a year, the app was downloaded by more than 50 million users, and it burst into the top ratings of GooglePlay and AppStore in the USA, Thailand, Vietnam, Ukraine, and dozens of other countries.

‘While all of Reface's competitors keep on using CGI, a technology that significantly limits user experience and cannot provide a high-quality final image, RefaceAI followed a different path. For three years, the project team was developing its own technology that is based on a self-trained artificial intelligence,’ says Sergey Tokarev. ‘The result has exceeded all our expectations. It takes only a short time to process an image, and you get the final picture as realistic as possible.’

profiles

• Roman Mogylnyi — CEO Reface
• Kyrylo Syhyda — co-founder of Reface
• Roman Vinogradov — CEO Zorachka

STEM is FEM. In the fall of 2019, Sergey Tokarev initiated STEM is FEM.

The goal of the project is to break the stereotype on "non-female" professions and to motivate girls to build a career in IT and other tech areas.

Every two months, the initiative provides a two-day educational module on a predefined STEM topic. High school female students from all over Ukraine are invited to participate in the module.

For a year of activity, STEM is FEM covered several topics: biotechnology, IT, energy and ecology, robotics, 3D modeling, mechanical engineering, architecture and construction.

In addition to the modules, the project provides dozens of joint events with international organizations. The project partners are UNICEF, the UN in Ukraine, the US Embassy in Ukraine, UN Women in Ukraine. Among the speakers of the modules, there were Ukrainian ministers, heads of Ukrainian and foreign embassies, representatives of Google, BMW Ukraine, Global Logic, and many others.

'For an employer, it shouldn't matter whom to hire: a man or a woman. What matters, it is the way of thinking, approach, and creativity. Be creative! In my companies, about 30% of employees are girls. Our goal is to increase the number to 40%,' says Tokarev.

profiles

LuckyBooks. The project focuses on publishing and distributing educational literature for teenagers in Ukrainian for free and supporting Ukrainian authors.

The presentation of LuckyBooks took place at Book Arsenal in 2017. The project's expert council included representatives of charitable organizations, scientists, writers, and even musicians (Oleg Skrypka).

A year later, the project was presented at Arsenal with its own stand and became the general partner of the children's program of the entire exhibition.

During its existence, the project has provided more than 200 libraries with educational and scientific literature for teenagers. In total, representatives of LuckyBooks have distributed more than 10,000 books.

Among them, there are the works of Ukrainian authors ("#WHATISMATH?" by Dmytro Kuzmenko, "DNA-long summer" by Alina Shtefan, "A Short History of Technologies" by Andrii Tuzhikov) and world bestsellers of children's non-fiction ("George and the non-fictional code" by Stephen Hawking, "Divine Word" by the actress of The Big Bang Theory Mayim Bialik).

Library of the future. Sergey Tokarev joined Veronica Selega's project to reform children's libraries in Kyiv and create, on their basis, free space for communication and youth development.

In 2018, there was opened the first biblio-hab based on the children's library in Podil. Tokarev provided the library with a computer lab and organized a series of programming courses for visitors.

HackCorona. In 2020, the businessman increased the prize fund of the hackathon of the Ministry of Digital Transformation by one million hryvnia and entered the jury of the competition.

The goal of the hackathon was to find startups that could be useful in fighting against the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ukraine.

'I learned about the competition when there were 22 teams remained in the final. Many of them offered interesting and relevant ideas worth to be implemented. I offered to help teams with consultations and increase the total prize pool. The Ministry supported this idea,' Tokarev says.

profiles