Our CEO and co-founder, Dmytro Horilyk, was recently featured in Founder Story, sharing an honest look at how DrugCard came to be – and what it actually took to build it.
The story starts back in 2019, when co-founder Artem Horilyk kept running into the same question while working in pharmaceutical regulatory compliance: why was literature monitoring – one of the most critical parts of drug safety – still being done almost entirely by hand? That question, shared with Dmytro and software engineer Myroslav Demchun, became the starting point for DrugCard.
The interview traces the company’s path from an MVP in 2020 and market entry in 2021, through the early – often humbling – process of learning how to sell a technical product without a sales background. Dmytro talks candidly about walking into customer offices, asking basic questions, and letting prospective clients teach him how their PV departments actually worked, rather than pretending to have all the answers upfront.
It also covers some of the harder lessons: hiring mistakes, learning to navigate very different business cultures across Europe, and the ongoing challenge of balancing company-building with family life. On the product side, the piece highlights DrugCard’s early investment in AI – including the AI Case Intake module that cut a 20-minute process down to about 90 seconds – and the company’s first acquisition, SIA OOM in Riga, as a step toward becoming a broader pharmacovigilance infrastructure provider across Europe.
By early 2026, DrugCard had crossed $1 million in ARR, grown to a team of 31, and expanded into 138 countries – a milestone the full interview digs into in more detail.
