How Ksenia Iliuk and Andriy Kusyy Built LetsData Against AI-Powered Disinformation

Ksenia Iliuk and Andriy Kusyy turned years of experience in information warfare and artificial intelligence into LetsData, a startup designed to help organizations identify coordinated information operations before they escalate.

Before Ksenia Iliuk and Andriy Kusyy built LetsData, their careers had already placed them on opposite but complementary sides of a problem that was becoming increasingly difficult for governments and businesses to ignore.

Iliuk had worked on information operations and monitoring, while Kusyy brought experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Together, the Ukrainian founders saw an opportunity to combine those disciplines: use AI to identify coordinated manipulation across the enormous volume of information published online.

That idea became LetsData, founded in 2022. What began with research into information warfare has developed into a technology company serving organizations seeking earlier warnings of disinformation, synthetic identities and other information operations.

Their founder story also reflects a wider transformation in cybersecurity. Generative AI is making sophisticated content easier to produce at scale, while companies such as LetsData are using the same broad technological shift to develop tools for identifying potential threats.

Ksenia Iliuk Brought Experience in Information Operations

Iliuk’s path to entrepreneurship developed through her work on disinformation and information security.

Before LetsData, she researched information operations at Ukrainian media organization Detector Media and worked with governments on developing monitoring capabilities, according to profiles of the company.

Her experience provided firsthand exposure to a fundamental problem: organizations could collect enormous amounts of public information, but determining what represented a coordinated campaign—and identifying it early enough to respond—was considerably harder.

Iliuk and Kusyy’s eventual path toward LetsData was influenced by an information-warfare event at Chatham House, according to their account to Google for Startups.

Their early efforts were research-oriented. They worked on projects and produced data intended to help think tanks understand information environments and support policymaking.

But research presented a scalability problem.

The founders realized that repeatedly conducting individual research projects would limit how widely their methodology could be used. Turning the process into software offered another possibility: organizations could continuously monitor information environments rather than commissioning analysis after a problem had already emerged.

That realization helped shift their work from research toward entrepreneurship.

Andriy Kusyy Combined the Idea With Machine-Learning Experience

Kusyy brought a different technical background to the partnership.

His previous experience included artificial intelligence and machine learning, including work leading a machine-learning platform at Grammarly.

That expertise became particularly relevant to the challenge Iliuk had encountered in information monitoring. The amount of content generated across websites and social platforms was too large for analysts to evaluate manually at the speed required for early threat detection.

Machine learning offered a way to automate parts of that process.

The founders’ complementary backgrounds became central to LetsData’s development: Iliuk brought experience understanding information operations and how organizations respond to them, while Kusyy brought the technical expertise needed to translate those methods into a scalable software product.

Rather than simply building another social-listening service, they set out to develop technology capable of identifying patterns that could indicate organized information activity.

Russia’s Invasion Gave Their Work New Urgency

LetsData’s Ukrainian origins are significant to understanding why its founders pursued the problem.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 intensified not only conventional military conflict but also the information environment surrounding it. Disinformation, influence campaigns and competing narratives became highly visible elements of the wider conflict.

For Iliuk and Kusyy, information warfare was therefore not an abstract technology problem.

The founders saw increasing demand from governments and businesses for systems capable of identifying sophisticated information operations, according to LetsData’s account of its development.

The environment also demonstrated how quickly narratives could move across digital platforms and how difficult manual monitoring became when analysts were dealing with enormous volumes of content in multiple languages.

LetsData was founded that year.

Their goal was to apply artificial intelligence to the early detection of information operations, converting experience developed through research into a product that could potentially work across countries, languages and industries.

The Founders Turned Research Into a Security Platform

The company that emerged from Iliuk and Kusyy’s work sits between several established technology categories.

LetsData uses artificial intelligence to analyze open-source information from websites and social-media platforms. The company says its systems cover more than 100 million online sources across more than 50 languages and regions.

Instead of simply identifying when a brand, organization or subject is mentioned, the platform is intended to detect patterns that could indicate coordinated activity.

That distinction reflects the founders’ original research background.

Information operations can involve networks of accounts, repeated narratives, synthetic identities and coordinated distribution rather than one obviously false post. Detecting them consequently requires examining relationships between pieces of information rather than assessing content entirely in isolation.

The company applies machine learning and large language models to that process.

Its founders have also argued that artificial intelligence is changing both sides of the equation. Generative AI makes it easier for malicious actors to produce content and synthetic personas, but AI also gives defenders the ability to process information at a scale that human analyst teams cannot easily match.

Bootstrapping LetsData Before Raising Venture Capital

Iliuk and Kusyy initially built LetsData without relying on a large institutional funding round.

Investor 1991 Ventures said the company reached approximately $1 million in annual recurring revenue after two years of bootstrapping. That figure was reported by the investor and has not been independently audited.

The company subsequently raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round in January 2025.

Investors included SMOK Ventures, Wayra, Tilia Impact Ventures, 1991 Ventures, Google’s Ukraine Support Fund and Startup Wise Guys. Pavla Bobosikova and Marty Krátký-Katz participated as angel investors.

The financing gave the founders additional resources to develop the technology and pursue expansion in the United States and Europe.

For their founder journey, the sequence is notable: rather than raising substantial venture capital before establishing commercial demand, Iliuk and Kusyy spent the company’s first years developing the product and customer base before bringing in institutional investors.

Google Programs Helped the Founders Expand

Google became another part of LetsData’s development.

The company was selected for the Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund, which has provided Ukrainian technology companies with equity-free financial assistance, mentorship and Google Cloud support.

LetsData later participated in the Google for Startups Growth Academy: AI for Cybersecurity, joining a cohort of cybersecurity startups from Europe and North America.

The founders told Google that the program helped them work through issues associated with scaling the business and technology. LetsData reported doubling both its team and revenue during its participation, although those are company-reported performance figures rather than independently audited results.

The relationship also gave the founders access to infrastructure relevant to a computationally demanding product. LetsData has used technologies including Google Cloud, GPU computing, Pub/Sub and Gemini as part of its development.

For Iliuk and Kusyy, those programs represented a transition from building a startup around specialist expertise to developing an organization intended to operate internationally.

Building a Company Around a Changing Definition of Cybersecurity

The larger challenge for LetsData’s founders is convincing organizations to treat information operations as a security problem requiring dedicated infrastructure.

Traditional cybersecurity has largely focused on protecting systems, networks, identities and data. Iliuk and Kusyy are building around the proposition that the information environment surrounding an organization can represent another attack surface.

A coordinated campaign could involve impersonation, synthetic accounts, scams or narratives intended to damage an organization or influence its stakeholders.

Generative AI potentially increases that risk because producing convincing content and online personas no longer requires the resources it once did.

LetsData’s founders therefore find themselves building for a market that is still developing alongside the underlying threat.

Their backgrounds have shaped how they approach that opportunity. Iliuk came to the problem through the study and monitoring of information operations; Kusyy approached it with experience building machine-learning systems. Their company emerged where those two disciplines met.

What began as research into information warfare has consequently become an attempt to build a scalable technology business around early detection.

For Iliuk and Kusyy, LetsData’s evolution from manually produced analysis to an AI platform is also the central thread of their entrepreneurial journey: taking knowledge developed while studying real-world information threats and converting it into software intended to help organizations recognize those threats before they become crises.