Hi, I’m Igor Shatalkin 👋
Co-founder & CEO at BuyPilot, building an AI-native procurement platform. BuyPilot automates the manual purchasing work still done through email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, and supplier calls in SMBs. Our agents not only find suppliers and collect quotes, but also compare offers, place orders, and track deliveries — so buying teams can stop living in chat threads. Currently onboarding design partners. Ready to relocate and build full-time.
BuyPilot
BuyPilot is an AI-native procurement platform that automates the entire purchasing workflow for small and medium businesses — from supplier discovery to shipment delivery.
- SMB procurement still runs through email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, and repeated supplier follow-ups
- LLMs can now handle structured supplier communication: RFQs, quote normalization, follow-ups, and order-status updates
- Procurement is a strong fit for AI agents: it is repetitive, document-heavy, measurable, and constrained by clear business rules
- Recruited technical co-founder
- Built product demo in 1 week
- Shared demo with 12 potential users and received first feedback
- Refined positioning and roadmap based on 6 reviews with founders and mentors
Senior Java developer who designed and built complex backend systems at Modeus, an enterprise EdTech platform for universities.
- Led the technical implementation of a major project involving an optimization algorithm with a large set of constraints
- Improved critical backend processes by 2–17×
- Optimized a PL/pgSQL data migration from 5 hours to 50 seconds
- Upgraded Java/Spring across multiple services and shared libraries
Why Me
In 2014, my PhD thesis — “Transaction Costs of the Firm: The Impact of Information Technologies” — argued that software would eventually eliminate the manual friction baked into business workflows. I've spent the decade since living that thesis from both sides.
On the builder side, I spent 15 years writing enterprise and supply-chain software for some of the largest retailers in the region — where I watched well-built systems quietly automate work that once required hundreds of people. On the operator side, I've spent the last 3 years running my own e-commerce business — where every order means hunting for suppliers, requesting quotes, comparing offers, negotiating terms, and tracking deliveries across dozens of scattered chat threads. The same transaction costs I once studied as theory, I now pay every week as a buyer.
Last year, while leading AI initiatives at a 300-person software company, I architected and deployed an internal LLM platform adopted by 58% of employees. Watching agents reliably handle multi-step workflows convinced me the procurement layer is finally ready to be automated end-to-end.
That's why I co-founded BuyPilot — an AI agent that handles supplier discovery, RFQs, communication, purchasing, and delivery tracking. It's what the 2014 thesis was about, finally buildable with the tools that make it real.
We launched our MVP demo in one week and are onboarding design partners now. If you run procurement at a 10–500-person company, get in touch — I'll trade 30 minutes of your time for early access.
Experience
Employer-backed EdTech product designed to help parents effortlessly verify and review their children's homework.
- Drove 40,000 user sessions in 2 months with nearly zero marketing spend
- Ranked #1 in organic search on Yandex (the primary search engine in Russia) for our top target keywords
- Surveyed 1,000 parents and ran 16 deep customer-development interviews
- Secured $35K internal build budget from employer to launch as a dedicated product venture (not external VC)
- Shut down after clear evidence of insufficient willingness to pay
E-commerce business specializing in consumer electronics on Wildberries, the leading CIS marketplace.
- Built and operated a profitable e-commerce business from scratch
- Spent year one in the red; iterated on pricing, sourcing, and promotion until the business hit profitability
- Grew revenue 4× and net profit 15× YoY (2025 vs. 2024)
- Managed supplier sourcing, inventory planning, pricing, advertising, and logistics
- Built operational systems that reduced founder involvement to ~8 hours/week
Retail electronics business specializing in GPS navigation and multimedia players.
- Launched my first retail business at age 20, scaling to 5 physical shops in my hometown
- Built custom inventory and management systems to run operations 100% remotely, at a time when typical small businesses required daily on-site founder presence
Custis builds enterprise systems across FinTech, EdTech, and Supply Chain Management.
- Architected and deployed an internal LLM platform used by 58% of employees, saving an estimated 13–19% of their working time
- Led a 12-month R&D cycle to deploy the platform under strict compliance constraints (zero cloud data leakage, running entirely on commodity GPUs)
- Optimized a major supply-chain planning algorithm, slashing runtime from 8 hours to 13 minutes and enabling near-real-time inventory planning
- Led 3 engineering teams across AI, supply chain, and EdTech initiatives
13 years building enterprise software and leading engineering teams across retail, FinTech, and EdTech.
- Grew an engineering organization from 3 to 20 engineers
- Contributed to large-scale enterprise systems used by major retailers
- Reduced build times by 6× and automated manual business processes
- Created open-source developer tools and launched dozens of projects
- Mentored engineers and shared knowledge through internal talks and workshops
Speaking & Writing
- In 2021, co-delivered one of just 8 talks selected as the “Most memorable talks of 10 years of DotNext” — the largest .NET conference in the CIS region (~30 talks/year), whose past speakers include Scott Hanselman (Microsoft), Jon Skeet (Google), and Jeffrey Richter (author of CLR via C#)
Contact
- Procurement leaders willing to test BuyPilot
- Entrepreneurs managing purchasing operations
- Investors and accelerators interested in AI infrastructure for procurement