Liki24, a health-tech startup from Kyiv, is quietly becoming one of the sharpest examples of European ambition in action. But don’t be misled by the word “quietly” , their growth is anything but subtle. If you’re navigating the world of startups, especially as a European founder like me, Liki24’s story is a case study in turning challenges into springboards.
From Ukraine to Europe
Founded in 2017 by Anton Avrynskyi, Liki24 solves an everyday headache: finding medications at the best price and quickest delivery. Originally catering to Ukraine, where pharmacy prices and availability vary wildly, the platform now operates across 10 European markets, including Germany, Italy, Spain, and France. They also expand intelligently, tailoring their marketplace to fragmented systems, making pharmacy shopping smarter and cheaper.
Here’s how they work: Liki24 aggregates products from thousands of sellers (approximately 12,000 as of 2025). It offers several delivery options, local, domestic, and cross-border, depending on how quickly or cheaply the customer wants their items. Their AI system optimizes every step of the logistics process, cutting delivery costs on international orders by over five times.
War and Its Role in Scaling
Most startups aim for stability in their home market before thinking of international expansion. For Liki24, geopolitical pressures pushed the clock forward. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced them to reassess everything, from operations to investor relations.
At the time, 97% of Liki24’s revenue came from Ukraine. Investors made it clear: they’d support the company only when more than half of its income came from outside Ukraine. This input shaped their pivot , a rapid pivot, at that , into European markets. By 2025, approximately 70% of their revenue now comes from the EU, demonstrating resilience that is rare in any sector.
Liki24 didn’t only expand. They became a lifeline during the war, ensuring that Ukrainians could still access medications, even when 80% of pharmacies shut down. Beyond commercial operations, they coordinated humanitarian aid, distributing over $5 million worth of medication to people in need. This skillful balancing of profit and purpose is something I admire deeply, as I attempt to replicate that duality in my own ventures.
Why Europe Instead of the U.S.?
It would’ve made sense, wouldn’t it? Go west, target the U.S., draw in volumes of venture capital dollars like so many other startups? But Liki24 stayed in Europe. It’s a smart move. The EU pharmacy market is a €400 billion opportunity, significantly larger than what many believe. While fragmented regulations across countries deter some companies, Liki24 treats it as an advantage, offering cross-border price comparisons that U.S. startups can only dream of needing.
You can read further details about this European-focused scalability approach in this Tech.eu article.
Lessons for Female Founders in Europe
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Resilience Gets You Further Than Strategy Alone: Liki24 navigated not just a challenging market but actual war conditions. Everything I’ve faced, failed product launches, unresponsive partners, feels different when I add perspective.
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Consider Fragmentation as an Opportunity, Not a Barrier: Europe’s regulatory patchwork might repel you at first. But Liki24 proves there’s value in understanding the system deeply enough to leverage it. This mindset has helped me design features in my startup game, Fe/male Switch, that adapt to diverse user needs across countries.
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Listen to Stakeholders Without Losing Your Vision: You might not like what you hear. Liki24’s investors, for example, gave them a hard ultimatum to succeed beyond Ukraine. Yet, they fulfilled it while preserving their mission to serve as an accessible health platform.
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AI Can Be a Startup’s Leverage, Not Its Replacement: Their machine learning helps speed up logistics and refine product offerings, but it doesn’t take over entirely. Understanding AI integration, not blind adoption, has similarly been the approach in my AI projects.
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Expanding Isn’t About Chasing Glamour: Many founders are lured by the appeal of moving to the U.S. for fame, funding, or reach. What Liki24 teaches is to evaluate your market intelligently. Is local dominance or regional depth worth more? Their success has prompted me to reflect on staying strategic about Europe, even as I bootstrap each startup step without external funding.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
- Ignoring Crisis Planning Early: Liki24 benefited from resourceful crisis handling when pharmacy access shut down overnight. Don’t wait for things to crumble before testing scenarios for your business.
- Misjudging Expansion Timing: Expanding prematurely can spell disaster unless it’s done out of necessity or natural readiness. Learn how to test new markets with small pilots.
- Over-focusing on Technology Alone: Liki24 uses AI well, but their victories are rooted in solving genuine human issues first. Balance your tech ambitions with customer-focused outcomes.
Wrapping It All Together
Running a business in Europe as a founder, especially a bootstrapped one, involves deliberate trade-offs and the grit to overcome uncertainty. Liki24 didn’t shy away from their challenges, they thrived because of them.
Their meticulously planned European expansion reminds me of the opportunities we often fail to seize. We undervalue our region’s complexity, the niches it creates, and the solidarity we can show under pressure. Entrepreneurs, especially women, have the potential to take fragmented ideas and connect them creatively across multiple sectors.
For more inspiring reads on European startups like this, check out the full article here.
Now, here’s a question to leave you with: How could you use adversity as a springboard instead of a stopping point? Maybe your answer lies in one small step toward rethinking scale, strategy, and smart teamwork.
FAQ
1. What is Liki24 and when was it founded?
Liki24 is a health-tech startup founded in 2017 in Kyiv, Ukraine. It aggregates pharmacy products like medicines, supplements, and medical cosmetics to help customers find the best prices and quickest delivery options across borders. Learn more about Liki24
2. How does Liki24 optimize deliveries across borders?
Liki24 uses AI-powered logistics to optimize delivery times and costs by splitting shipments into local legs. This system has reduced cross-border delivery costs by over five times and significantly improved speed. Find out about Liki24's AI logistics
3. What was Liki24’s response to the war in Ukraine?
During the 2022 war in Ukraine, Liki24 created a pharmacy map to track which pharmacies remained open and facilitated humanitarian aid efforts, delivering $5 million worth of medicine to over 500,000 Ukrainians. Learn about Liki24’s wartime efforts
4. How has Liki24 expanded internationally post-war?
After the invasion of Ukraine, Liki24 shifted its focus to expand in European markets, such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and France. By 2025, 70% of its revenue came from the EU. Explore Liki24’s expansion journey
5. Why didn’t Liki24 expand to the U.S.?
Liki24 chose Europe over the U.S. due to the lucrative €400 billion EU pharmacy market. By leveraging Europe’s fragmentation, they offer cross-border price comparisons and better service options. Learn why Liki24 stayed in Europe
6. What challenges did Liki24 face from its investors?
Post-2022, investors required Liki24 to generate more than half its revenue outside Ukraine. This prompted the company’s rapid European expansion and diversification of revenue streams by 2025.
7. What are Liki24’s core technological advancements?
Liki24 employs machine learning to match products across languages and improve logistics. AI-driven customer support and targeted advertising further enhance their platform capabilities. Discover Liki24’s use of AI
8. How does Liki24 balance technology with customer needs?
While AI optimizes logistics and operations, Liki24’s strategy starts with solving real customer problems, emphasizing usability and affordability over purely technological solutions.
9. What makes Liki24 unique in the health-tech industry?
Liki24 capitalizes on Europe’s fragmented pharmacy markets, offering cross-border delivery, localized pricing, and humanitarian contributions in times of crisis, setting it apart from U.S.-centric approaches. Read Liki24’s strategic insights
10. How can startups learn from Liki24’s resilience?
Startups can learn the importance of viewing fragmentation as opportunity, adapting quickly to crises, and balancing stakeholder needs while maintaining vision. Learn from Liki24’s adaptability
About the Author
Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as MeanCEO, is an experienced startup founder with an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 5 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely.
Violetta Bonenkamp's expertise in CAD sector, IP protection and blockchain
Violetta Bonenkamp is recognized as a multidisciplinary expert with significant achievements in the CAD sector, intellectual property (IP) protection, and blockchain technology.
CAD Sector:
- Violetta is the CEO and co-founder of CADChain, a deep tech startup focused on developing IP management software specifically for CAD (Computer-Aided Design) data. CADChain addresses the lack of industry standards for CAD data protection and sharing, using innovative technology to secure and manage design data.
- She has led the company since its inception in 2018, overseeing R&D, PR, and business development, and driving the creation of products for platforms such as Autodesk Inventor, Blender, and SolidWorks.
- Her leadership has been instrumental in scaling CADChain from a small team to a significant player in the deeptech space, with a diverse, international team.
IP Protection:
- Violetta has built deep expertise in intellectual property, combining academic training with practical startup experience. She has taken specialized courses in IP from institutions like WIPO and the EU IPO.
- She is known for sharing actionable strategies for startup IP protection, leveraging both legal and technological approaches, and has published guides and content on this topic for the entrepreneurial community.
- Her work at CADChain directly addresses the need for robust IP protection in the engineering and design industries, integrating cybersecurity and compliance measures to safeguard digital assets.
Blockchain:
- Violetta’s entry into the blockchain sector began with the founding of CADChain, which uses blockchain as a core technology for securing and managing CAD data.
- She holds several certifications in blockchain and has participated in major hackathons and policy forums, such as the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum.
- Her expertise extends to applying blockchain for IP management, ensuring data integrity, traceability, and secure sharing in the CAD industry.
Violetta is a true multiple specialist who has built expertise in Linguistics, Education, Business Management, Blockchain, Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, Game Design, AI, SEO, Digital Marketing, cyber security and zero code automations. Her extensive educational journey includes a Master of Arts in Linguistics and Education, an Advanced Master in Linguistics from Belgium (2006-2007), an MBA from Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden (2006-2008), and an Erasmus Mundus joint program European Master of Higher Education from universities in Norway, Finland, and Portugal (2009).
She is the founder of Fe/male Switch, a startup game that encourages women to enter STEM fields, and also leads CADChain, and multiple other projects like the Directory of 1,000 Startup Cities with a proprietary MeanCEO Index that ranks cities for female entrepreneurs. Violetta created the "gamepreneurship" methodology, which forms the scientific basis of her startup game. She also builds a lot of SEO tools for startups. Her achievements include being named one of the top 100 women in Europe by EU Startups in 2022 and being nominated for Impact Person of the year at the Dutch Blockchain Week. She is an author with Sifted and a speaker at different Universities. Recently she published a book on Startup Idea Validation the right way: from zero to first customers and beyond, launched a Directory of 1,500+ websites for startups to list themselves in order to gain traction and build backlinks and is building MELA AI to help local restaurants in Malta get more visibility online.
For the past several years Violetta has been living between the Netherlands and Malta, while also regularly traveling to different destinations around the globe, usually due to her entrepreneurial activities. This has led her to start writing about different locations and amenities from the POV of an entrepreneur. Here’s her recent article about the best hotels in Italy to work from.
About the Publication
Fe/male Switch is an innovative startup platform designed to empower women entrepreneurs through an immersive, game-like experience. Founded in 2020 during the pandemic "without any funding and without any code," this non-profit initiative has evolved into a comprehensive educational tool for aspiring female entrepreneurs.The platform was co-founded by Violetta Shishkina-Bonenkamp, who serves as CEO and one of the lead authors of the Startup News branch.
Mission and Purpose
Fe/male Switch Foundation was created to address the gender gap in the tech and entrepreneurship space. The platform aims to skill-up future female tech leaders and empower them to create resilient and innovative tech startups through what they call "gamepreneurship". By putting players in a virtual startup village where they must survive and thrive, the startup game allows women to test their entrepreneurial abilities without financial risk.
Key Features
The platform offers a unique blend of news, resources,learning, networking, and practical application within a supportive, female-focused environment:
- Skill Lab: Micro-modules covering essential startup skills
- Virtual Startup Building: Create or join startups and tackle real-world challenges
- AI Co-founder (PlayPal): Guides users through the startup process
- SANDBOX: A testing environment for idea validation before launch
- Wellness Integration: Virtual activities to balance work and self-care
- Marketplace: Buy or sell expert sessions and tutorials
Impact and Growth
Since its inception, Fe/male Switch has shown impressive growth:
- 5,000+ female entrepreneurs in the community
- 100+ startup tools built
- 5,000+ pieces of articles and news written
- 1,000 unique business ideas for women created
Partnerships
Fe/male Switch has formed strategic partnerships to enhance its offerings. In January 2022, it teamed up with global website builder Tilda to provide free access to website building tools and mentorship services for Fe/male Switch participants.
Recognition
Fe/male Switch has received media attention for its innovative approach to closing the gender gap in tech entrepreneurship. The platform has been featured in various publications highlighting its unique "play to learn and earn" model.
