In early 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, Valentine Hrytsenko was driving his family to Lviv—a city in the westernmost part of the country that became a refuge for Ukrainians in the early days of the war—when he got a call from a software developer named Stepan Tanasiychuk.
Tanasiychuk wondered if Ajax Systems—a Ukrainian company that makes intrusion- and fire-detection technology, and where Hrytsenko works as the chief marketing officer—might be able to build a more efficient system for alerting Ukrainians to incoming air raids.
It had become clear as soon as the Russian shelling started that Ukraine’s archaic system of air-raid sirens was ill-equipped for the task at hand. The sirens are operated by a network of mostly elderly men pushing a physical button when the army detects a bombardment. In some parts of the country, no sirens exist at all. In others, they barely worked.
“It’s a very, very old-school, Soviet-style, shitty product,” Hrytsenko says.
When the war began, local Telegram channels had sprung up, with people reporting when they heard a siren out of their windows. But those alerts could be inconsistent and were hardly immune to abuse or infiltration from Russia.
At the time, Ajax was, like all companies in Ukraine, scrambling to get both its employees and its inventory to safety. “We didn’t have any plan B, because we didn’t believe it would happen,” Hrytsenko says of the invasion. In a matter of days, the company had commandeered more than 30 buses to shuttle employees and their families to the western part of the country, as well as 170 trucks to move valuable equipment away from the Russian border, including its facility in Kharkiv, a northeastern city that has since been decimated by Russian shellings.
But even in the midst of the chaos, Hrytsenko agreed that Ajax was well-positioned to build a modern alert system, and quickly partnered with Stfalcon, Tanasiychuk’s web development firm, to build a minimalist app to do the job. Ajax already had connections at Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, which helped the company secure access to the government’s alerts. By March 1, less than a week after the full-scale invasion began, the app was up and running in five regions. Within a month, it covered the entire country.
More than a year later, Ajax’s Air Alert app has been downloaded more than 15 million times. According to research tracking people’s mobile-phone movement after receiving an alert, it’s had a meaningful impact on saving people’s lives. “We find that public response to the system strongly reduced civilian casualties,” researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and the market research firm Ipsos wrote, estimating that “35% to 45% of observed civilian casualties were avoided” due to the alert system.
“Thanks to Ajax Systems’s direct cooperation with regional administrations and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, new regions and cities were added as quickly as possible,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, told Fast Company in a statement. “The app allows Ukrainians to receive immediate notifications about air alerts, which helps save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.”
For Hrytsenko and others at Ajax, the effort has provided meaning in a chaotic and terrifying time, both personally and professionally. “It’s helped us not to get crazy, and it generated a lot of positive adrenaline to do something in this situation,” Hrytsenko says.
Ajax Systems has been building and operating the Air Alert app as a pro bono project. But as the app has grown, so has Ajax’s business. Since the war began, the company has expanded dramatically, adding 1,000 employees and doubling its R&D team as it moves into dozens of international markets. The war has crushed the Ukrainian economy, but Hrytsenko says layoffs at other companies have provided an opportunity for Ajax to hire. “A lot of good, talented people wanted to work for a Ukrainian company, for a local company, to help the country,” he says.
Along the way, Ajax has had to continually come up with methods to keep its air-raid alerts fresh, as Ukrainians have developed “alert fatigue.” The researchers who studied the Air Alert app found that as the first year of the war dragged on, people traveled shorter and shorter distances in response to alerts, suggesting that 8% to 15% more lives could be saved if people paid closer attention to the alerts.
Earlier this year, the company partnered with actor Mark Hamill on a version of the app in which he delivers the alerts in the voice of his Star Wars character, Luke Skywalker. The goal was not only to grab the attention of people living in Ukraine but also to give English speakers internationally who downloaded the app a tiny glimpse of what life is like for Ukrainians living through the war. Ajax also used its celebrity cameo to raise funds to buy a drone for the Ukrainian military.
Hrytsenko acknowledges that it may seem strange to outsiders to have an actor deliver such a life-or-death message. But he says that as the war continues, giving people a reason to laugh, even in the darkest moments, is an important public service. “Humor is part of our culture,” he says. “It’s like an antidepressant.”
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